Moqui Cave

Kanab, Utah

God plants a hole in the ground. But it takes the imagination of Man to create a tourist-friendly cave attraction out of it. And south of Orderville, near Kanab on US Highway 89 stands a tragedy. That tragedy is Moqui Cave, the creation of self-taught artist and self-promoting showman Garth Chamberlain.

Not only did Mr. Chamberlain but a bar and dance hall in the cave, and assemble one of the largest collections of fluorescent and phosphorescent minerals in the USA, and display them in his cave side-by-side with black light paintings, but he built a huge dinosaur head over the cave entrance so that tourists had to walk under the mouth to enter.

In 1988 Chamberlain died and, the story goes, family members who inherited Moqui Cave were embarrassed about the strikingly painted dinosaur. So they ripped it down and refashioned the entrance into a cliff-dwelling replica. Which doesn't look much different than the rest of the rock face. And when asked about the whereabouts of the other dinosaurs Garth had inside the cave, the gift store lady said, "They took all them out, too." As a result, not only is the cave a backslider into boredom, the owners missed the early nineties' Jurassic Park craze, and subsequent Flintstones mania.

By 1994, to expunge any memory, the gift store was giving away its postcards of the late Mr. Chamberlain standing in front of the dinosaur, for free. The fluorescent minerals are still there, but give the new generation time.