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James Kartchner may have been the first to notice something a little unusual about the hills containing the cave that now bears his name. Kartchner was an educator and a rancher in St. David, a small town east of the Whetstone Mountains, in southeastern Arizona. Whenever he and his sons would ride the hills to check on their cattle, their horses' hoofs made a peculiar sound on the limestone rock. "You know," Kartchner commented to his sons, "it sounds like these hills are hollow." Kartchner had bought land in the Whetstones, about 40 miles southeast of Tucson, in 1942. It would be another 32 years before he or anyone else would discover just how hollow the hills were. Various spelunkers, amateur cave explorers, had poked around the Whetstones hoping to find a new cave. Cavers look for certain telltale clues. If the area contains limestone, it may also contain caves because limestone dissolves when water seeps through it, forming underground cavities. Sinkholes are another good sign. A sinkhole is a depression in the ground created when these cavities collapse. The Whetstones have the most extensive limestone deposits in southern Arizona and are riddled with sinkholes. But until 1974 no one had ever found a cave worth talking about. Or, as we shall see, worth not talking about.

In 1966 Randy Tufts, a Tucson native with an insatiable curiosity about caves, started making regular trips to the Whetstone Mountains looking, as he put it, "for a cave no one had ever found." At that time one of the few decent roads into the Whetstones went up Middle Canyon, passing the Lone Star fluorite mine, located within the Coronado National Forest directly west of the Kartchners' property. After making about a dozen trips into the range, Tufts had met with little success. Finally, on one trip, out of frustration he stopped at the Lone Star Mine and asked one of the miners if he knew of any caves in the area. To his surprise the miner said yes, there was a cave nearby. "Some high school kids got into it. They had to squeeze through a tight spot to do it," he said. According to the miner, the cave was located somewhere in the limestone knolls that Tufts had been driving by each time he went exploring in the Whetstones. A week later Tufts went back to the area with two friends and his uncle. They spent most of the day hiking around the limestone knolls and eventually located a sinkhole and an opening that led into a small chamber. There was a narrow crack along one wall and they looked to see whether it might lead deeper in. They could determine nothing and, feeling the boulders near the crack were unstable, they decided to leave. The chamber, they concluded, was just another dusty dry hole that wasn't worth pursuing. However, Tufts marked the hole on his topographic map.


For the next seven years, he was too absorbed with his studies at the University of Arizona, where he was a geology student, to do much caving. In 1970 he met Gary Tenen at a political gathering and the two became friends. Tenen was the cook at a popular campus coffeehouse and Tufts became his assistant. A year later, when they were still students, the two moved into an apartment with a mutual friend.

Text provided by Arizona State Parks

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