Cuddly Kokopelli Cave is a Farmington B&B Staple

Caves are usually formed by the weathering of rock. But in the case of Kokopelli Cave Bed and Breakfast in Farmington, it was the use of a ton or so of dynamite. You are watching the Local News Network, brought to you by The Big Idea Makerspace at Sam Juan College and CMIT Solutions. I’m Wendy Graham Settle. Kokopelli Cave was blasted out in the summer of 1978 by a local geologist, Bruce Black Sr.

Dad had blasted it out. He found a couple out of work minors up in Durango. He was up fly fishing and at the end of the day, he stopped into Old Timer’s Cafe and they were sitting at the bar and started chatting ’em up and they said, Hey, well we’ve got some time. And he said, well, I got a place and I got some money to start making a hole. And when they ran out of $20,000 they came up with this 1700 square feet of cave.

Black’s Father originally wanted to use the cave he made as an office, but realized it’d be hard to get clients to descend 100 vertical feet on the side of a craggy desert cliff. After sitting empty for years, Black Jr, just out of the military, threw a sleeping bag on the rock floor and started living there, eventually turning it into the five star B&B that it is today.

We had furnished it with what I called an eclectic mix of early American family castoff and contemporary postgraduate students. So it was everything that was trash in our storage shed. And I’ve slowly started updating everything, and I’ve got one couch left to do. I call it the Brady Bunch couch and it looks like something that you would expect in the Brady Bunch romper room with their bumper pool table. So, but yeah, we’re just slowly making upgrades as we go.

The cave house is built into the vertical cliffs of 60 million year old Ojo Alamo Sandstone. It overlooks the La Plata River Valley 300 feet below. The views are incredible, especially at sunset, but it’s below inside the cave that enchants people from all over the world. The temperature is a constant 68 degrees year round due to its particular geologic gradient.

So everybody’s kind of wowed. It’s, it’s very warm and very comfortable and most people that that stay here are very just wowed by the feel of what the cave feels like to them.

The cave has a full kitchen, jet bath waterfall, and terrace seating. It can house up to eight people. Kokopelli Cave Bed and Breakfast is open from March 1st to December 1st. You can book the cave on a daily or weekly basis at kokoscave.us. Thank you for watching this edition of The Local News Network, I’m Wendy Graham Settle.