What is Grand Canyon Caverns Campground?
In 1927 a cowboy named Walter Peck nearly fell into a hole on the Coconino Plateau while walking to a poker game. He thought he had found gold, found iron oxide instead, and settled for charging 25 cents to lower people into the dark on a rope. Nearly a century later the hole is Grand Canyon Caverns, a dry limestone cave system reached by an elevator down a 210-foot shaft blasted in 1962, and the property around it is a Route 66 time capsule: a motel, a restaurant, a gift shop with a dinosaur out front, and a campground spread over the juniper hills behind.
The cave is the point. It is one of the largest dry caverns in the country, which means almost no stalactites, very little drip, and rooms big enough that the government stocked one of them as a fallout shelter for 2,000 people during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The water drums and cracker tins are still down there. Tours run from a 25-minute, wheelchair-accessible loop to a three-hour crawl. The property’s website now says the caverns are owned and operated by the Havasupai, and the inn serves as a check-in point for the tribe’s Havasu Falls permit holders.
The campground is simpler: 49 RV sites with water and 30- or 50-amp electric, no sewer, a dump station behind the gas station, and a scatter of tent and dry sites on the hill, some of which need high clearance to reach. Restrooms and showers are at a bathhouse by the older tent sites. It is a utilitarian stop at 5,500 feet, quiet after dark, with a cave under it. What you get is a level, cheap-for-the-area bed on the emptiest stretch of Route 66 and a strange tour. What you do not get is a nice campground, a cell signal, or the Grand Canyon, which is 60 miles away.
How to do the Caverns right
Reserve online or walk in. RV sites are $46.95, tent or dry sites $22 per tent, booked at gccaverns.com or by phone at 928-422-3223; walk-ins register at the restaurant, and RV spots are first come within the park. Tours are separate: $25.95 and $35.95 for adults on the walking tours, with senior and child rates, and $99 and $120 for the Explorer and Wild tours.
Get there. About 3 hours 50 minutes from Old Town. Loop 101 to I-17 north to Flagstaff, I-40 west 75 miles to Seligman, then Historic Route 66 west for 25 miles of empty two-lane to mile marker 115. The entrance is signed and impossible to miss. The alternative, US 60 to Wickenburg and US 93 to Kingman then Route 66 east 60 miles, is about 15 minutes longer and gives you the Hackberry General Store. Everything is paved except the campground roads. Fuel up in Seligman; the station here is small and the next gas west is Peach Springs or Kingman. There is no cell signal at the campground, so download maps before Seligman.
Pick the season. Year-round. The cave holds about 56 degrees whatever the weather. Above ground, April through October is comfortable; winter nights are hard-freezing and windy on an exposed hill.
Water. At the RV sites and the bathhouse only. Bring jugs for the tent hill, where Tent Hill has a porta-potty and nothing else.
Pick your site. Tent campers should look at the older sites near the bathhouse rather than Tent Hill, which has a rough approach, wind and no plumbing; 16 of the newer tent sites need high clearance.
Take the right tour. Book the Standard Tour, not the Short one: the extra 20 minutes and the stairs get you to the big rooms and the fallout-shelter supplies, and the Short Tour is a quarter-mile out-and-back that leaves everyone wanting more.
Dogs. Leashed in the campground, picked up after; not in the cave.
Skip it if you want a nice campground: Hualapai Mountain Park is 90 minutes west in the pines, and Kaibab Lake at Williams is the Forest Service option on the way. If you want to sleep over a Cold War bunker and be an hour and a half from the Havasupai trailhead at dawn, this is it; the South Rim’s Mather Campground is two hours the other way.
A hole in the plateau that kept changing its name
The hilltop above Route 66 was Hualapai country long before it had a highway, and the cave was a grave before it was an attraction. In the winter of 1917–1918 two Hualapai men cutting firewood on the hill were caught by a snowstorm and died of influenza. The ground was frozen, the flu was loose in Peach Springs, the tribe’s headquarters a few miles west on the reservation drawn by executive order on January 4, 1883, and carrying the bodies home risked spreading it; so they were lowered into what everyone took to be a 50-foot hole and left. The Havasupai, the Hualapai’s close relatives whose own canyon lies 60 miles east, have their own name for the cave, Ŧathiil Ñwaʼa.
The road past the hill became U.S. Route 66 in 1926. The next year Walter Peck nearly stepped into the hole on his way to a card game, came back with a rope and a lantern, and found what he thought was gold and what turned out to be calcite stained with iron oxide. He also found the two bodies, which he advertised as a prehistoric caveman. He charged 25 cents to lower tourists in on a rope and called the place Yampai Caverns. In 1935 he signed an agreement with the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration to build a proper entrance, and for the next two decades the place traded as the Coconino Caverns, until 1957, when the fashion for roadside dinosaurs renamed it Dinosaur Caverns.
1962 was the year everything that defines the place happened at once. A 210-foot shaft was blasted into the limestone and an elevator installed, which turned a rope descent into a tourist ride; the natural entrance was sealed at the Hualapai’s request, because the cave was a burial place; the name became Grand Canyon Caverns, a piece of pure marketing for a hole 60 miles from the rim; and during the Cuban Missile Crisis that October the federal government designated the big rooms a fallout shelter and stocked them for 2,000 people. The water drums, crackers and medical kits were never used and never removed, and the tour walks past them. In the 1960s the “caveman” was finally identified as the two men from 1918. A cosmic-ray telescope went in 126 feet underground in 1979.
Then the traffic left. Interstate 40 took the through route south of the hill, and in 1984 US 66 was dropped from the state highway system; the stretch from Seligman to Kingman past the caverns survived as State Route 66, the longest unbroken piece of the old road anywhere, and the caverns survived with it as the one attraction on 90 miles of two-lane. The complex that grew around the elevator building, the motel, the restaurant, the RV park, the tent hill, the airstrip, is what a 1960s Route 66 stop looks like when nothing is torn down. The property’s website now states that the caverns are owned and operated by the Havasupai, and the inn has become a check-in point for the tribe’s Havasu Falls permit holders bound for Hualapai Hilltop; I could not find a published date or account of how the ownership changed, and the site does not give one.
Why it matters
Grand Canyon Caverns is the honest version of Route 66: not a restored diner but a working relic that was built to catch traffic, lost the traffic in the 1970s, and kept going anyway on cave tours and the Havasupai permit trade. It also tells a quieter story about whose hill this is, from two men buried in a hole in 1918 to a sealed entrance in 1962 to a tribal name on the website today. For a Scottsdale traveler the verdict is practical: it is the only bed for 25 miles, the Standard Tour is worth the $35.95, and if you hold a Havasupai permit it is the night-before stop that makes a 4 a.m. start possible.