Kokopelli's Cave Bed & Breakfast in New Mexico
is advertised as a 'luxury cavedwelling.'[/center]
By Teresa Méndez
FARMINGTON, N.M. – Lindy Poole leads the way down, hefting a colorful backpack. She's made this trip - 75 precipitous steps to get to a short ladder, ending 70 feet below the ground - thousands of times. But she acts as though it's the first, urging her less practiced guests to follow her example and take hold of the intermittent handrail, all the while cracking macabre jokes about going over the edge.
This earthy introduction is not what one might expect from the manager of a vacation destination featured in travel stories that trade in superlatives: Kokopelli's Cave (bbonline.com/nm/kokopelli) appears regularly beneath headlines like "Top 10 Best Extreme Hotels" and "The 10 Most Adventurous Overnight Lodgings." Yet for all the dramatics of a bed-and-breakfast blasted into the face of a sandstone cliff, with a sheer 280-foot drop to the riverbed below, Mrs. Poole is astonishingly low-key.
It's fitting. Kokopelli's Cave, after all, was initially a quirky geological research office - not the brainchild of an exotic hotelier.
Poole, a trace of her Oklahoma accent still audible, is integral to its charm. She's a small woman with short wavy hair and the coloring that comes from spending days in the high desert sun.
Carrying on a familial attitude that began when Bruce Black, the cave's owner, set out to excavate his "office in a rock" 26 years ago, Poole has made its creation myth part of the elaborate introduction she shares with each new visitor.
"I'm a sponge," she says. "And I'm a great storyteller - I improvise a lot."
Colleagues were unwilling to visit Mr. Black, the story goes. So he turned the cave into a guesthouse for family and friends. In 1997, it opened to paying guests - Poole became hostess in 1998.
Today she's acquainting the Hill family - Andrea and Larry and their children, Rachel and Daniel - from nearby Los Alamos, N.M., with their subterranean lodgings. The tour begins at the house that Poole shares with her husband, Mark, then moves over a pitted dirt road that ends above the cave. Pausing to point out rock deposits and petrified trees in the 65-million-year-old sandstone cliff, Poole leads the family into the 1,650-square-foot cave. The temperature hovers between 65 and 75 degrees F. year-round. The walls are rough, unfinished sandstone. But plush carpeting and an eclectic southwestern décor give the cave an unexpected homey feel.
[center]Rest of the article
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0915/p11s01-litr.html[/center]
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