Pg 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

After the blowhole, the passage became slightly higher. They were able to crawl on hands and knees on a floor carpeted with bat guano and hackberry seeds. There was no sign on the walls or the floor that any human being had ever been there. Some 50 feet ahead of them they could see only darkness. They crawled toward that space and found themselves in a 10-foot-high corridor that took off in two directions. They were able to walk upright for the next 300 feet. Around them, in the jerky light of their headlamps, the chamber glistened with stalactites, soda straws (stalactites the thickness of a drinking straw), and tiny twisted fingers of calcite called helictites. They walked gingerly, taking care not to touch or damage anything. They continued a bit farther on that first trip, but neither knew how far they had gone. What they knew beyond a doubt was that they had violated one of the first rules of caving. They had not informed anyone of their whereabouts. Cavers typically leave information with someone at home, and almost always they travel in fours, so that if someone is in trouble, one can stay with the injured person and two can climb out for help. Tufts and Tenen were on their own. They could have been buried alive and no one would ever know what had become of them.

It was a sobering thought, so they stopped and carefully retraced their steps, giddy with the thrill of the amazing world they had stumbled into. It was every caver's dream: an untouched, living cave, elaborately decorated with formations that were still growing. It was a subterranean jewel box that had taken about a million years to form, and no other humans had ever set foot inside it. Tufts was born in 1948; Tenen in 1951. In 1974 they were still young men, and suddenly they were young men with a problem. They had done enough caving in southern Arizona to know that once word of a new find slipped out, hordes of curious individuals would descend on the cave. Before long, the great untouched gallery would be destroyed by graffiti and litter, desecrated by souvenir hunters taking home bits of stalactites and other formations that had been growing in the darkness for a million years.

They believed that, since they had discovered the cave, it was their responsibility to protect it. Making matters worse, the cave was simply too accessible. It was only a half mile off a paved state route and a mere eight miles south of a major interstate highway.

From the cave's entrance, traffic could be heard clearly. But what were they to do? For safety's sake and to avoid the publicity that would inevitably result if a public rescue were necessary, they had to bring others into the picture. At first these were a few friends who were athletic but not cavers and thus unlikely to return on their own. Among these was their roommate, Steve Northway, who provided the cave's first --but certainly not its last-- name. Northway couldn't fit into the first crack to get into the cave, so he sat outside and waited, and when the others emerged, he suggested they call the place "Xanadu," the terrestrial paradise Samuel Taylor Coleridge invented in his famous poem, Kubla Khan: "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree . . ."

Text provided by Arizona State Parks

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