Kartchner Caverns: Clean

music
ambience: crowd, oohing and aahing, sweeping the cave

As you walk through a cave, admiring the stalactites and marveling at the eerie darkness deep inside the earth, you may not know it, but you’re leaving little bits of yourself all along the way. I’m Jim Metzner, and this is the Pulse of the Planet. At a cave that’s been recently opened to the public, they’re being careful that the public doesn’t leave anything but footprints behind.

“As people walk down these trails on the tours, there’s all kinds of hair follicles falling out of their hair, there’s dead skin cells falling off, plus we have a huge amount of lint. Every night, I pick up lots of lint.”

Stan Hoefer is a Park Ranger here at Kartchner Caverns in southeastern Arizona, where they’re making an unprecedented effort to preserve a cave. That means limiting the number of visitors to 500 people a day, visitors who enter and exit via airlocks. A misting system keeps the cave damp and environmental stations help monitor the temperature and humidity. The trails were designed with 18-inch curbs to keep clothing lint, and human cells that are loaded with bacteria, from contacting and potentially harming the cave’s formations. And every night, the trails are carefully swept, and rinsed with ground water.

“Our trails were designed with this in mind and all of our trails slope down to one particular spot in the cave, and at that spot we have a sump pump which pumps that effluent out and then we water trees with it and it soaks back into the ground and of course we reuse it.”

Visitors to Kartchner Caverns can travel over a thousand feet of trails and view two large showrooms. A new trail is now being laid to the largest space in the cave.

If you’d like to hear about our new Pulse of the Planet CD, please visit our website at pulseplanet.com. Pulse of the Planet is made possible by the National Science Foundation.

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Kartchner Caverns: Clean

Recently opened, Kartchner Caverns is a place where park officials try their hardest to keep the cave clean, which means that the only thing humans leave behind are footprints.
Air Date:02/01/2001
Scientist:
Transcript:

music
ambience: crowd, oohing and aahing, sweeping the cave

As you walk through a cave, admiring the stalactites and marveling at the eerie darkness deep inside the earth, you may not know it, but you're leaving little bits of yourself all along the way. I'm Jim Metzner, and this is the Pulse of the Planet. At a cave that's been recently opened to the public, they're being careful that the public doesn't leave anything but footprints behind.

"As people walk down these trails on the tours, there's all kinds of hair follicles falling out of their hair, there's dead skin cells falling off, plus we have a huge amount of lint. Every night, I pick up lots of lint."

Stan Hoefer is a Park Ranger here at Kartchner Caverns in southeastern Arizona, where they're making an unprecedented effort to preserve a cave. That means limiting the number of visitors to 500 people a day, visitors who enter and exit via airlocks. A misting system keeps the cave damp and environmental stations help monitor the temperature and humidity. The trails were designed with 18-inch curbs to keep clothing lint, and human cells that are loaded with bacteria, from contacting and potentially harming the cave's formations. And every night, the trails are carefully swept, and rinsed with ground water.

"Our trails were designed with this in mind and all of our trails slope down to one particular spot in the cave, and at that spot we have a sump pump which pumps that effluent out and then we water trees with it and it soaks back into the ground and of course we reuse it."

Visitors to Kartchner Caverns can travel over a thousand feet of trails and view two large showrooms. A new trail is now being laid to the largest space in the cave.

If you'd like to hear about our new Pulse of the Planet CD, please visit our website at pulseplanet.com. Pulse of the Planet is made possible by the National Science Foundation.

music