Our tour guide (Maria) scheduled us a tour at Kartchner Caverns an Arizona State Park today.
All I can say is "Wow". What an amazing site. Most of these pictures are from the Internet as they don't let you take a camera into the cave.
The discovery is an interesting story. Two college buddies who were amateur cavers found the site in the 1960s but didn't tell anyone. They didn't start exploring it for several years and didn't really know what they had found. They finally told the landowner who along with them convinced the State of Arizona to buy the land and make it a state park to preserve it.
Here's a link to the wiki short story: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kartchner_Caverns_State_Park and another link to a longer version: http://caves.org/pub/journal/PDF/V61/v61n2-Tuffs.pdf.
This cave has been forming for millions of years. Most of the stalagmites are hundreds of thousands of years old.
As we walked on the guided tour it made you think how short our time here on earth really is........ This is becoming a theme with me now that I'm getting old.
Please put this park on your bucket list. It's about 45 minutes from Tucson.
You wouldn't regret it.
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