For several tourists vacationing in Arizona this week, a fun outing in a local cavern has turned into a bit of an ordeal.
It sounds like the beginning of a rather cheesy movie, but it’s completely true: An elevator at a popular tourist destination in Arizona malfunctioned, stranding 5 people 200 feet underground.
A group of five tourists were stuck 200 feet underground in Grand Canyon Caverns on Monday evening, about 24 hours after the elevator they took into the cave on Sunday broke down.
It wasn’t exactly a “survival” situation, however.
Grand Canyon Caverns, located about 100 miles west of Flagstaff, Arizona, features a small hotel and restaurant 20 floors down where the stranded tourists have been staying while workers try to fix the elevator.
Authorities believed that they had a possible plan to extricate the group should the elevator repairs take an inordinate amount of time.
The Cococino County Sheriff’s Office was determining whether they would need to hoist the tourists out through the elevator shaft on Monday.
“We have this thing – it’s like a lift, and we would basically lift them up the elevator shaft in a harness, something like you see come out of a helicopter in the ocean, something to that effect,” Jon Paxton, a spokesperson for the sheriff’s office, told Fox News Digital on Monday.
The cavern was equipped with a rather arduous set of emergency stairs, but these 5 tourists were unable to use them on account of medical issues.
