Colossal Cave (Arizona)

This station was likely of recent construction because it was along a new road from Tucson to Tres Alamos, a farming community in the San Pedro Valley.

Soon after, an exploration team, guided by candles placed in a small board, visited the cave, with the local newspaper reporting what they had discovered: “An arched entrance three feet wide and four feet high…At the mouth of the cave the air was terribly foul…discovered to be from the large deposits of bat excrement all through the cave…The finding of ashes and other indications of fire, evidently very old..(and) no doubt one of the haunts and resting places of the Apaches…Bones of all kinds lay scattered around, no less than 500 deer antlers being seen and other evidences of life destruction and feasting…They brought out with them many beautiful specimens of stalactites and some fine deer antlers which they brought with them to the city.” In 1884, the local paper reported that “The Mountain Springs Cave” was still for the most part unexplored and that the greatest distance that had been explored up to this point was a half a mile.

By 1890, William Shaw had taken over the Mountain Springs Ranch and that year, along with soldiers from Fort Lowell explored the cavern for five hours utilizing candles and magnesium wire to illuminate their path through the underground chambers.

They were awed by the finger-shaped and kidney-shaped stalactites and stalagmites that occurred in large quantities and the holes that were so deep they could barely hear the rock dropped down when it hit the bottom.

The first decade of the new century saw the formation of an enterprise to excavate the bat guano in the cave which led to the boring of an approximately 75-foot tunnel to access this commodity.

In the 1910s, a group proposed significant development of the cavern for tourism and also the construction of a railroad spur from nearby Vail but nothing resulted from this effort.