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Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.

My name is Robert Lamb.

And I'm Joe McCormick. And today we're back with part two of our series about a cave system in the U.S. state of Arizona, known as Karchner Caverns.

Rob, you wanted to talk about this cave because you just visited in person with your family, though you'd been there once before, at least once before

years ago, right? That's right. Like 14 years ago, my wife and I visited the area and went to

Karchner Caverns and two or two of the rooms. And then in the past couple of months,

we went back with our kiddo and we all experienced the big room,

which we'll come back to here in a bit. So in the last episode, we talked a lot about the

discovery and development history of the caverns, which involve a lot more secrecy,

things like code names and secret messages than you might expect for the discovery of a cave.

Also some harrowing tales of people squeezing their full adult bodies through little melon-sized holes in rock.

And we also talked about a lot of the concerns that go into responsible development of caves that are going to be open to public tours and how

easily cave ecosystems can get thrown out of whack by everything from, you know, the what's on

the bottom of your boots to Cheeto dust to lint to whatever. And we're back today to talk about

more. And I want to mention once more that in addition to visiting the

caves and going on a guided tour and going through the museum and so forth, one of my key

sources here is the book, Cartner Caverns, How Two Caperes Discovered and Saved One of the Wonders

of the Natural World by Neil Miller. I hold it up here for any of you all out there that are using video.

This is a great book, especially if you want a much deeper dive, but a very accessible

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