Lint Camp @ Kartchner Caverns

Last week I got to participate in "Lint Camp."  This is an annual event where ranger and volunteers go into the cave and clean lint off the formations and curbing.  It is very time consuming.  We each were issued a paint brush and tweezers and we used a black light to see the lint.  My  group worked about 3 hours and covered about 50 or 60 feet.  Afterwards, we sat in cave darkness and talked about the cave.  What a spiritual experience!

I know it sounds crazy, but lint is one of the worst things for caves.  Because the average temperature in the cave is 68 to 70 degrees and the humidity is 99%, it is like a petrie dish and lint becomes a science project growing mold and fungus and killing formations.

Glo picking lint out of cave.

Kartchner Caverns - revisited.

I've had a few calls from friends asking "Is everything ok?"  They had checked this blog and had not seen any updates for awhile and were concerned.  Thank you to those of you who were concerned and called to prod me to get back to it.

We arrived in the Phoenix area around the middle of September and spent a couple of weeks visiting with friends.  Our intent was to stay only a week, but... we had a death in the family, T's sister's husband, Frankie, passed away suddenly and T flew back to Myrtle Beach for a week.

While in the Phoenix area we stayed in Apache Junction.  The first week we were at Usery Pass Regional Park.  Though the area was beautiful, it was quite lonely.  There were only three or four other campers while we were there.  The second week we stayed at Bonita Vista MH/RV Park.  We enjoyed our stay and met many nice people.  We enjoyed it so much that we made reservations to go back there in February and say a couple of months.

We got to Kartchner Caverns Oct 6th and jumped right into following tours.  After a week we had a refresher course on guiding in the cave and Glo was off and running.  T is driving the tram.  We are loving being back at Kartchner.  Our neighbors are people we met here two years ago and we've made lots of new friends. We have our nightly cocktail hour and many of the other volunteers come up to our campsite to sit by the fire and chat about the tours we had that day.

One of the best parts of being here is that we are only thirty minutes from Brian and we get to have Sammy, our granddaughter, come for a sleep over about every other week.  Yesterday we took her to Reid Park Zoo.  We had a great time.  One of the highlights was a  baby elephant.  The baby was only three months old.  We got to watch it stay with it's mom and we got to see the Mom and Dad loving on each other.  So sweet.

Sammy Camel Riding

Mom & Dad loving on each other.  

Sammy the turtle