Carlsbad Caverns

Twenty miles southwest of Carlsbad on US 62/180, Carlsbad Caverns National Park lies in the rugged foothills of the Guadalupe Mountains. Within its 46,776 acres is Carlsbad Caverns, a series of enormous rooms that forms one of the world's largest caves.

At the turn of the century in Southeastern New Mexico near the ranching community of Carlsbad, James White, a Carlsbad-area cowboy, was intrigued by a huge flock of bats that seemed to fly right out of the ground. After further investigation, White discovered a cave opening, and after spending countless hours mining bat guano from the mouth of the cave, he ventured past the opening, and discovered an underground environment so astonishingly magical that for years no one believed his descriptions. A few hundred feet beneath the cactus-laden Chihuahua desert, mineral-laden drops of water dripped steadily from slippery limestone walls, creating house-size stalagmite statues and eerie stalactite icicles. Pagodas and palaces rose from the damp surface, creating a fantasy world of improbable beauty.

Curiously, it wasn't the beautiful cave formations that first interested the early explorers, but rather it was the bats - or specifically, the bats' guano, which was valuable as a fertilizer. Guano mining operations began about 1904 and the fertilizer was shipped to the orange groves of southern California. Although the mining lasted twenty years and produced more than 100,000 tons of guano, high shipping costs prevented the efforts from being profitable. The guano operation experienced problems much like the difficulties other miners experienced with another fertilizer ingredient of the region, potash.

James White worked for the various guano-mining companies and in his spare time, descended deeper and deeper into the caverns. His tales of fantastic formations caught the attention of public land officials who assigned federal geologists to explore Carlsbad Caverns. The reports filed by these geologists impressed President Calvin Coolidge, who declared the caverns a National Monument in 1923. The following year, White led a National Geographic expedition into the caverns, and the subsequent publicity - including an on-location radio broadcast by "Believe It Or Not" reporter Robert Ripley - made the caverns so famous that they were declared a National Park in 1930.

In the late 1920s, the caverns were scouted as a possible location for Hell by flimmaker Henry Otto, who was making the film Dante's Inferno for the Fox Film Company. Unable to find a suitable location in California realistic enough to "satisfy the fundamentalists," Otto toured Carlsbad Caverns but came away disappointed. According to one witness, "One look at the vast interior of the cave convinced Mr. Otto that here was no place to shoot the Inferno. This didn't look like Hell. Why if he made his film in this fairyland, it would be nothing less than a clever bit of propaganda for Hades, and everybody would want to go there."

The vast caverns began as an organic reef complex in the inland sea which covered southern New Mexico during the Permian period about 240 million years ago. This reef was covered by the sediment of subsequent seas for millennia and then about sixty million years ago, earth movements caused an uplift that fractured the reef, which was now buried beneath the surface of the earth. This fracture allowed water to filter down through the reef and dissolve parts of the limestone. Over millions and millions of years, the water created crevices, then pockets, and finally the huge rooms one can see today. Then, about three million years ago, the uplift that created the Guadalupe Mountains (also a reef), lowered the water table and the water drained out of the caverns and was replaced by air.

Rainwater and melting snow seeped into the caverns and filtered into the underground chambers, dissolving more limestone as it went. As soon as this water was exposed to the air, it evaporated, leaving the crystalline forms of limestone, calcite, and aragonite. Over many centuries, this process produced an incredible number and variety of stalactites, which develop from the ceiling of the chambers. Water that reached the floor of the chambers before evaporating created stalagmites, and when joined together, the two formations make columns or pillars. The brown, red, and yellow colours of these formations are the result of small amounts of minerals, such as iron dioxide, in the limestone.

Carlsbad Caverns has 21 miles of surveyed subterranean corridors and great chambers. The natural entrance is 90 feet wide and 40 feet high. Leading into the cave is a paved but mostly steep and often slippery trail, making flat heeled shoes with rubber soles the safest and most comfortable footwear. Lighted, paved trails snake three miles through the cave, taking visitors past the Whale's Mouth, Rock of Ages, and the draperies of the Queen's Chamber, and on into the Big Room, where 14 Astrodomes could fit side by side under the room's curved ceiling, which soars 256 feet above the floor. Carlsbad's underground temperature hovers at 56 degrees Fahrenheit year-round.

For the less hardy, high-speed elevators are available to plunge visitors 750 feet into an underground lunchroom, from which they can embark on a 1.25 mile tour of the Big Room and other parts of the cave system.

During the summer, one million Mexican freetail bats return from their winter sojourn in Mexico to sleep the summer days away in the cool interior of the cavern, emerging only at night to search for food. For visitors, a seat at the cave's entrance will assure a sunset vision not soon to be forgotten: a black cloud rises from the dark depths as the airborne hunters embark at the rate of 5,000 to 10,000 bats per minute. The flight outward may last a half-hour or more; the bats return near dawn. During the day they hang head down from the walls and ceilings of a portion of the cavern not open to visitors.