Carlsbad Caverns

Carlsbad Caverns is a national park located in the Guadalupe Mountains in southeast New Mexico. The park preserves a portion of the Capitan Reef, one of the best preserved exposed Permian-age fossil reefs in the world. Its sister park, the Guadalupe Mountains National Park, about an hour away, is home to the landmark El Capitan Peak.

History

Established first as a national monument on October 25, 1923, Carlsbad Caverns was designated a national park on May 14, 1930, to protect and preserve Carlsbad Cavern and the other caves in the mountains. The park also protects a portion of the northern Chihuahuan Desert ecosystem. It was named a World Heritage Site on December 6, 1995.

The park contains a total of 46,766 acres, with a 33,125-acre section designated as a wilderness area. The beautiful, rugged Chihuahuan Desert and caves in the backcountry area of the park get little use, but as many as half a million visitors flock to Carlsbad Cavern each year.

Caves

Carlsbad Caverns National Park is popular for two reasons: caves and bats. The park has over 119 known caves, including the famous Lechuguilla Cave, named for a desert agave species plant. The deepest limestone cave in the United States, over 110 miles of underground passageways have been charted in Lechuguilla, many more than the 30 miles in Carlsbad Cavern. Lechuguilla Cave also boasts formations and microbes found nowhere else in the world.

The interconnecting limestone caves, chambers, stalactites and stalagmites of Carlsbad Caverns started forming 60 million years ago as groundwater began dissolving the rock. In addition to its beautiful speleothems (cave formations), Carlsbad Cavern itself has one of the world's largest underground chambers, known as the Big Room. More than 700 feet below the surface, the room is a huge, majestic chamber measuring 1,800 feet long and 1,100 feet wide. Big enough to hold fourteen football fields, it is among the largest, most easily accessible underground chambers in North America and the world. Will Rogers, who visited the Big Room in 1939, described it as the "Grand Canyon with a roof on it."

Seven miles of the trails are illuminated by electric lamps, but one of the tour highlights is a brief "lights out" experience deep underground. The tour guides usually call it the closest to total darkness you may ever experience. The temperature of the caves is a constant cool, comfortable 56 degrees Fahrenheit.

Wildlife

Along with jackrabbits, mule deer, ringtails, roadrunners and other wildlife, fifteen species of bats inhabit Carlsbad Caverns National Park. The flight of the colony of Mexican free-tailed bats attracts visitors each evening from mid-May through September or October. Just before dusk, hundreds of thousands of bats swarm out of the caves in a counterclockwise swirl. Over a period of up to 2 hours, as many as 5,000 bats per minute fly from the caves to feed on night-flying insects.

Before dawn, the bats return to the caverns from all directions, diving into the cave entrance at speeds of 25 miles per hour. During the day, the bats hang together on the ceiling of Bat Cave. The greatest numbers of bats are in flights in August and September, when baby bats born during the summer and other migrating bats flying south join the nightly flights.

The Mexican free-tailed bats do not hibernate; instead, they migrate to Mexico in late October or early November for the winter, returning in April or May depending on the weather.

Exploration

Although there is evidence that some of the caves were used by humans during prehistoric times, Carlsbad Cavern came to the attention of modern society in the 1890s. A teenager named Jim White was camping nearby when he saw the dark swirl of bats one evening, leading him to the mouth of the cavern. Although the first discovery of the cave is disputed, White is generally regarded as the key figure in exploring and popularizing the site, parts of which were mined for bat guano in the early twentieth century. After he guided photographers to the caverns beginning in 1915, the photos published in the New York Times in 1923 led to the creation of Carlsbad Cave National Monument. White explored Carlsbad Caverns for years, and guided a six-month National Geographic Society expedition in 1924.

After the site was designated a national park in 1930, an elevator into the main cavern was installed the next year. Self-guided tours of the caves first began in the late 1960s.

Today the Carlsbad Caverns National Park continues to amaze visitors and scientists alike. Mineralogists, geochemists, and geomicrobiologists continue to explore the caves' unique characteristics, looking for everything from microbes that may lead to new cancer treatments to clues about the origins of life on Earth. However, new challenges have emerged, such as the threat of White-Nose Syndrome among the bat population. Special cleaning regimens were introduced to prevent visitors from carrying the deadly fungus into the cave system.