Farmington bed and breakfast built inside a man-made cave

FARMINGTON, N.M. — New Mexico is home to some famous and renowned hotels and resorts. There’s a bed and breakfast in Farmington that’s unique – it sits 70 feet underground. 

On your way there, you might feel lost as you hike down the side of a cliff, but just a little further down the trail awaits all the comforts of home. 

 “This is a manmade blasted out cave,” Bruce Black, owner of the Kokopelli’s Cave Bed and Breakfast, said. “We had put in a false floor like you have in a regular house and regular utilities, electricity, water, sewer – the whole 9 yards.”

It all started with a geologist’s vision.

“Originally it was going to be dad’s office and he’s a geologist so it would have been the perfect office,” Black said.

The stone was also a perfect match to create a cave in.

“This is pretty easy for us to look and see that this rock, this particular rock package is not really fractured up much — so we knew it was pretty solid piece, of course, you don’t know until you get all the way in and blast all the way in.”

Luckyily, blasting into 60-million-year-old sandstone isn’t a problem when you live close to a mining town.  

“The story started with my dad,” Black said. “He was up fishing in Durango and meet a couple of out-of-work miners, at Old Times Café — just started chatting them up and they said, ‘hey we got some time,’ and dad said, ‘I got some money.’”

$20,000 later, you have 1,700 square foot of cave.

“It was one of those things that was like, nobody’s done this before, so we didn’t know what we were doing — try this, well that worked- – try that, that didn’t work — a couple of boys and dynamite and some lumber and it finally turned out OK.”

That was also the consensus among friends.

“People felt like it was one of those places that other people needed to experience, and we did too and after being here long enough we just thought it would be great to share with everyone,” Black said.

So, this geologist’s dream office is now a bed and breakfast, but for Black, it will always be about a couple of guys building a fort.

“The nice thing about it is that it’s been a labor of love between me and dad.”

Kokopelli’s Cave is closed for the season due to winter weather but will reopen in March.