Colossal Cave

Colossal Cave is a neat place to visit if you happen to be in Tucson, AZ. It is right in the hills outside of the city. The drive is short, and they only nail you for $5 for parking like everywhere else in the state.

The park is open 365 days a year. You can even get a tour on Christmas they tell us. For about $8 we got a 1-hour walking tour of the cave, which covers only about 20% of it. If you're really serious about caving, you can take a longer "wild" cave tour where you get your hard hat and flashlight and get to climb around the cave off the paved trail so to speak.

Colossal Cave is dry, and is home to a variety of bats. Apparently, December is not bat season, so the closest I got to seeing one is on my nifty little bat mood ring that I picked up in the gift shop for $3. Endless entertainment, I tell you. Still, regardless of whether you get to see an actual bat, you get to smell them. Colossal Cave was once a lucrative guano mine and the bats, when in season, are busy replenishing the resource.

On our tour we got to hear about the hard-core cave junkies that spent days on end inside the cave, before lights and pavement, and who even got married inside while making the lights and pavement possible for the rest of us. We learned words like "cave bacon," looked for the obligatory hidden treasure always rumored to be left in these sorts of places, and rubbed the very phallic (see picture) stalagmite that the tour guides refer to as "old baldy" or something to that effect for good luck.

All in all, a visit to Colossal Cave was a good way to spend the last day of the year. It is a unique little experience of the beautiful Sonoran Desert.

Fall Color

It's not really an adventure, but I had to share this tree on campus anyway. Gorgeous!