The Kartchner family agreed to a partnership with Tufts and Tenen.
Tufts and Tenen were worried about what would happen if this cave
was widely discovered.
By that April, Tufts and Tenen had brought Kartchner, as well as five of
his sons, below ground.
Randy Tufts and Gary Tenen traveled about an hour outside of Tucson,
where they were roommates at the University of Arizona.
Some of the rooms were so vast that Tenen and Tufts's lamps,
which threw light for only about 50 feet, couldn't illuminate them.
Tenen and Tufts did extensive research on Kartchner,
and every indication suggested he was a civically minded man, a leader in the local Mormon community.
Tufts, Tenen, and the Kartchners all believed secrecy would be
key to protecting the cave while they tried to figure out how to develop it.
Tufts and Tenen found the spot and lowered themselves into the 15-foot-deep sinkhole,
a dry and dusty space with a skull and crossbones carved in one wall.
Only after the bill had passed was Tenen finally able to tell his children about the cave
he would been working to defend for more than a decade.
They took the secret so seriously that when Gary Tenen met his future wife in 1977, he
made her sign a contract on their second date, promising to keep all information about Xanadu secret.