May It Be Forever Untrod

So it’s Adventure Week here at Camp KD. Yesterday was Kitt Peak. Today it was Kartchner Caverns.

These are the Whetstone Mountains outside of Benson, Arizona. In 1974, two dedicated (read “so obsessed they were possibly dangerous to themselves”) cavers revisited a sinkhole one had seen before, and realized the hole was “breathing.” There was a cave down there.

The story is told elsewhere, but I’m going to explain that for fourteen years they kept the cave as secret as they could. They knew many...