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It took a full year of exploration before Tufts and Tenen knew the full extent of what they had discovered. What they had crawled into that November day turned out to be the entrance to a cave two-and-a-half miles long, containing two large rooms. If the "breakdown" or fallen rock were removed, each of the rooms would be roughly the size of a football field. Off the two main rooms were 26 smaller ones, almost all of them dripping with rock formations that looked like something created by a Hollywood special effects artist, only all of this was natural. To preserve the cave, they marked their trails and placed many areas off-limits. They took care not to touch anything. If they accidentally broke a formation, they glued it back together with dental cement. Not wanting to leave footprints in some sensitive passages, they removed their shoes and walked in their socks. "We did not treat Xanadu as a recreational cave," Tenen noted. "Once we concluded we had found all of it, we stopped going." A few friends and cavers knew what they had found, though all were sworn to secrecy. Numerous relatives and friends were simply not told. The guiding principle was that only those "who needed to know" for safety's sake, or to continue exploration, would be told. When dealing with strangers, they adopted aliases for themselves and deliberately steered attention away from the Whetstones.

After the initial burst of exhilaration over their find, Tufts and Tenen were in a quandary. How could such an accessible cave be kept a secret and kept in its pristine condition? Inevitably, someone else would discover it, they felt. Who would they be and how would they treat their find? After much thought, they settled on what Tufts called "a paradoxical notion": Why not protect the cave by developing it as a commercial attraction? In 1977 Tufts visited various developed caves to see how Xanadu compared. He returned and told Tenen that Xanadu was as good or better than other tourist caves. "We thought if it had economic value, someone would supervise it and protect it," Tenen said. Briefly, the two considered buying the land and developing the cave themselves, but neither of them had the money. When they first explored the cave, they didn't know it was on private land -- a mistake that's easy to make in Arizona, where hills and mountains are often a patchwork of state, federal, and private land. This land, they soon discovered, was owned by James and Lois Kartchner of St. David. But who were the Kartchners and what were they like? How would they react if they were told about the cave?

In the many years since 1978, when Tufts and Tenen approached James Kartchner in his front yard, they have repeatedly commented on the cave's good fortune. Kartchner, who died in 1986, had been a science teacher and the superintendent of schools in St. David. He and Lois had 10 children of their own and two that they adopted. Six of their children are medical doctors, and one has a Ph.D. Tenen, an avid photographer, had taken numerous slides of the cave's formations. He and Tufts had prepared a script and planned to divulge their find gradually, only after they had gauged the Kartchners' attitude. They quickly realized James Kartchner was at least as interested in geology and related matters as they were, and the script went out the window. Tenen set up his slides, cautioning his host about the need for secrecy. About two months later, when Kartchner was 78, he and five of his sons accompanied Tufts and Tenen on a tour of the cave to determine its potential for development. The discoverers hoped the family would see the need for protection. In this case they needn't have worried.

Text provided by Arizona State Parks

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