27 October 2012 Kartchner Caverns and More

It was a special day. Ali had flown to Arizona so we could take a few days off together and enjoy our anniversary. Today was our anniversary. Ali really wanted to visit Kartchner Caverns. Although I am less of a cave and geology person than her, I have really enjoyed visiting caverns. Kartchner is a bit different since the state of Arizona has made huge efforts to protect the underground caves and seriously limits activities within them. In this case different was awesome. Their protections include no cameras in the caves, so there's no pictures from inside with the blog. This was another stop I would happily revisit on a return trip.

After our fun at Kartchner, we made our way toward Tombstone. We stopped at an Arizona State Land to do some geocaching on the way. It was weird caching with a permanent north of the border Border Patrol inspection point in view. We passed through or by this multiple times and both wondered how this could be effective. If one wanted to bypass the checkpoint, one could merely walk into the desert around the checkpoint and back to the road on the other side. It seemed about as effective as Border Patrol agent sitting at the edge of a New York State Park reading a newspaper as we passed by.

Border Patrol Outpost

Now I'm sure someone's watching us.

We continued our journey with a stop at the ghost town of Fairbanks. The old town was a disappointment, but we did venture out to the old town cemetery perched at the top of a hill.

The view from the cemetery.

Tombstone, the OK Corral, and Boot Hill were the disappointment of the trip. I was expecting a bit of the old west with maybe a shoot-out. Instead there were about six different groups of people re-enacting the shoot-out on various paved streets in the town. The OK Corral is a green park with a gazebo, not a dusty corral. We walked around town then ventured over to boot hill where all the original headstones are long gone and replaced by immaculate reproductions planted for the tourists. Ali is very gracious when I send us on one of these side trips that we should have passed by.

We enjoyed a few more caches in the desert on our way back to Sierra Vista.