Colossal Cave

Guides and visitors at Colossal Cave describe a shadowy figure taken for one of the bandits who once hid here, a woman in white near the entrance, and the smell of pipe smoke associated with Frank Schmidt, the German immigrant who held the mining claim on the cave in the 1920s and developed it. The rancher Solomon Lick found the cave in 1879 looking for stray cattle, though the Hohokam and other peoples had used it for centuries before that. In 1884 four men held up a mail train near Pantano, east of Tucson, and got away with $72,000 in gold and currency; searchers found their camp in the cave but never the money, and it has never been recovered. The Civilian Conservation Corps built the trails and buildings that made it a tourist attraction in the 1930s, and it is now a county park with guided tours.