Beyond the Rincon Mountains section of Saguaro National Park, 14 miles from downtown Tucson via the Old Spanish Trail, Colossal Cave (daily; $7.50, plus $3 per car; 520/647-7275) is another great place to stop. A huge old limestone cavern that offers a cool (in every sense of the word!) escape from the sweltering summer heat, this is one of the state’s most enduring tourist attractions. (Avid cavers will appreciate comparing Colossal Cave, which is a “dry” cave, with the newly opened Kartchner Caverns (see below), a “wet” cave where the humidity will have you dripping with perspiration.) Colossal Cave was used in Wild West times by train robbers who escaped here with $62,000; the money bags were recovered, but not the money. Most of the very limited “development” here (footpaths, the museum and gift shop) was done as a CCC project during the New Deal 1930s.
The surrounding ranch land has been opened as a nature reserve with hiking and mountain-bike trails, and the ranch buildings have been preserved as a museum of early Arizona life.
