I pulled into the famous gift shop and museum housing the tourist attraction, ‘The Thing’ and filled the truck with gas. I considered taking the tour, but I was more interested in getting on the road… or off of it. I did ask the people at the cash register if there had ever been any rumors of Burroughs having visited the area, but they had no idea what I was talking about. This place wasn’t that old. I did buy a few things: a Mexican Poncho, a nice large hunting knife, and a souvenir water bottle.
A few miles down the freeway, I pulled off onto a dirt road that headed straight north. There was no off ramp or exit sign. I just pulled over on the shoulder and then headed up the bare dirt track. From here, navigation was strictly by GPS. I had carefully mapped out a route and entered way points. There were no addresses or street names, but the dirt paths turned out to be more or less where I had expected them to be, based on satellite images.
It was dusty, but the going was smooth. There was a hard dirt path, but there was no sign that any tires had driven this road for a long time. From one track to the next I worked my way along my map. Eventually, I came to the end of the road. Literally.
The road didn’t so much end, as fade away. This was about the point where I’d expected to have to leave the truck behind, but now that I was here, I had second thoughts. I stopped the vehicle and got out to stretch my legs and reconnoiter. The question was, how safe would the truck be here? There had certainly been no one near this spot this season. There were no tire or human tracks, but I didn’t know whose land I was currently on nor what they would do if they found my truck and trailer. I had gone so far as to purchase a desert camouflage net that I could cover the truck with, but I’d rather not take the chance.
Now that I could see the terrain in person, it looked as though I could drive several miles farther off the road than originally anticipated. The ground was hard, not sandy, and it began to rise toward the hills that were my ultimate target. I decided to see how far I could safely go cross-country. I’d have to take it slow because of the trailer, but it didn’t look like it would be too bad of a trek.
Once back behind the wheel, I headed in a straight line toward the point on my GPS. I only made about five miles an hour on average. I crossed several arroyos where water ran down from the hills when it rained, but for the most part, the driving wasn’t difficult. Rainfall in this area was about 12 inches per year. Not enough to grow crops, but enough for some well-water to be available in the right spots… and summer thunderstorms were always possible.
As I drove toward the hills, the scrub brush became more common. I was surprised that I was able to take the truck as far as I did. It started to look like I might even make it all the way to the edge of the property.
The parcel that I had purchased wasn’t square. I’d combined several adjacent pieces in a long rectangle about 450 feet wide and about 2000 feet deep, with the location of the cave, if it existed, roughly in the center of the back, about 200 feet from the ‘back fence’. This left roughly 1800 feet toward the end of the dirt track where the road had disappeared, about a third of a mile between the edge of the property and the site of the cave. The additional land on all sides was for sale as well. Like I’d said, it was essentially worthless in its present condition.
By the time I stopped the truck, I’d reached the edge of the property by driving carefully and slowly, picking my way among the low brush that grew sparsely in the area. I was able to go a full 500 feet or so onto the property before hilly terrain prevented further forward progress. And, here I was, about a quarter of a mile from my destination.
I parked the truck on a flat spot just before the rise of the hill and began to set up camp. I was probably just four hours away from town. Actually, it was probably less, maybe just three hours, because the return trip would be faster if I wasn’t pulling the trailer and since I had an idea of the lay of the land, so to speak.
Setting up camp involved unhooking the trailer, unloading the ATV, setting up the large canopy that I’d brought, putting out a six-foot folding table, setting a second canopy over the top of the truck for shelter, and pulling the desert camo nets over the top. Even though the area was uninhabited, I still wanted to be discreet and not attract any possible visitors in the remote case that I was spotted from the air.
I was excited to move on up to search for the cave, but I was also hesitant to take these final steps. Again, it was that resistance to finding out how it would ultimately turn out. If I didn’t find the cave, would I be done with my quest? Would I pack up and head back home? If the cave was there, what would I do? Would I stay and make plans to build a small remote private retreat? Maybe a dome and a well? I could bring in a small tractor if I wanted to and clear a parking area and a building site. Or, I could pack up and go home. For the moment, I would offload my water supply and secure my food and plan to stay for a few days at least.
When camp was finally up, I decided it was time to start the search. I could have easily walked the quarter mile that I estimated remained, but I might have to walk back and forth several times while searching, and besides, I had this brand-new ATV and I wanted to play with it. I loaded some bottles of water and some snacks, plus the flashlights and electric lanterns and a rope and my new knife and started up the engine.
The ATV was a 4-seat, 4-wheel drive buggy with a soft top and all the bells and whistles, including its own GPS and moving map. From here, I had only a suggestion of where to look for the first marker on the map. I hoped that the cave actually was on my land. The first marker was the entrance to a shallow dry stream bed that came down between two low rises in the terrain about 50 yards from where I sat. I thought that I could see a likely spot ahead of me and I moved the ATV toward the location.
I won’t describe each marker that I searched for here, they’re all recorded in detail in what I now believe to have truly been Carter’s manuscript and also in my own notes. I have updated them and added markers of my own to make it easier for my heirs to locate the spot, but the easiest way is to simply find the GPS coordinate that I finally pinpointed.
It took me about an hour to work through the clues and find each point, but I did just that. Every single marker was there, just as described. Some had been shifted by the hundred years that they’d lain undiscovered, but they were there! The published version of the story had changed the description of the cave to make it seem less accessible than it actually was. When I found the place, it was a small volcanic cave with an entrance about 10 feet down in a depression at the side of a tiny stream bed hidden by low hills on each side. It turned out to be just about 300 yards from my camp, though I traversed the area several times as I searched. I was able to drive the ATV to within about 50 feet of the entrance.
The descriptions in the published story, and the accounts in the manuscript, and the fact that the details were written a hundred years ago, had set my expectations that the cave would be much more difficult to reach than it really was. It wasn’t much past noon and I was essentially ready to ‘see what I could see’. Somehow, this obscure find had led me to exactly what it had promised… to the entrance of a cave at least. I was still a skeptic, but that just meant that I didn’t believe what I was told simply because it was what I was told. It meant that I questioned it, not that I disbelieved it.
So, what did I know? I knew that I had a manuscript that seemed to be a hundred years old. It was written by someone connected to the publication of the John Carter of Mars books by Edgar Rice Burroughs. It had led me to the very area and cave that it described in the Arizona desert.
Now the question was: Just how deep did the rabbit hole go? Was there a hookah smoking caterpillar and a Mad Hatter down there, or not?