The story sounds like one of those tall tales that cowpokes recount beside the campfire. It asks you to believe that this part of the world used to sit smack-dab down by the equator, that the rocks beneath your feet and overhead once were ferns, sea shells, sponges, fish, sea lilies and anemones, all fossilized and fused by calcium carbonate.
Those ingredients, goes the geological narrative, were packed together by forces that included deep seas that ebbed and flowed, plus the powerful shifting and crumbling of tectonic plates–the general wrinkling of the Earth that has been occurring over the last 500 million years. After all that movement, there were more transformations as–drip by drip by drip–water seeped through cracks in the gigantic fossil reef, eating away gaping underground holes, or forming rocky icicles and other limestone buildups inside those massive hollows.
All true!
Seventh-graders from a school in Houston followed Ranger Dave Hutson on a tour 750 feet below the Chihuahuan Desert in a section of Carlsbad Caverns called Kings Palace. They passed through an artistically illuminated wonderland of formations that resembled giant toadstools, icicles, curtains, soda straws, walking sticks, totem poles, cascades, columns, grottoes with frozen waterfalls, clusters of “popcorn” and one huge rock that evidently had broken off from the ceiling.
“What is Carlsbad Caverns all about?” Hutson asked rhetorically. “You look around and you see things like this 200,000-ton big rock, Iceberg Rock, once a section of the ceiling, and you wonder. That rock is about the same weight as a fully loaded aircraft carrier.”
“Oooo,” said the kids. And then they proceeded to tell Hutson what they thought Carlsbad Caverns is all about: rocks, water erosion, bats. Carlsbad Caverns is famous for its bats.
Hutson said: “Carlsbad Caverns is, in my opinion, about one thing. Carlsbad Caverns is about change. All of the things you have been talking about–the rocks, the water, the bats–all of this is part of that change.”
He went on to explain certain elements of the Tall Tale: How, long before there was desert, rainfall might have measured 80 inches a year or more–if there had been anyone around to measure it.
“A lot of these things we see are the result of what happened in the past,” Hutson told the group. “Caves have a tendency to preserve things for a long time.”
All those spires and pinnacles, stalactites and stalagmites, resulted from rain seeping down from the surface–drip, drip, drip. The whole magnificent reef itself–a 400-mile horseshoe of rock made from fossils–developed gradually. A recent study of some rare minerals revealed that the cavern where the pupils were standing is about 4 million years old. Up on top, at the opening called Natural Entrance, the rocks date back 6 million years.
“There have been battles here between the different forces of nature–the uplifting, shifting, dropping, the earthquakes taking place, floods,” Hutson said. “All of that is written here, but you have to look closely to see that.” All those millions of years are difficult to contemplate, so Hutson pointed out the changes wrought simply by the fact that people roam through the cave every day but Christmas. Their very breath brings subtle alterations, even threads from their clothing.
“We have a group of people who come here every year,” Hutson said. “They volunteer their time and spend a week or two weeks picking lint off the formations that had accumulated over the year. They use tiny tweezers and drill picks. Know how much lint they get every year? Between 20 and 25 pounds.”
“Ooooo,” said the kids.
“Just by being here we’re causing changes,” Hutson explained. “That doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing that we’re here. It just means that we have to keep the impact at a minimum.”
Visitation declines
The human impact has been decreasing steadily since the middle of the past decade as Carlsbad visitation figures show a steady decline. Butch Street, management analyst for the National Park Service, says Carlsbad is the only major park where the number of annual visits has waned markedly (although high gas prices and some anticipated forest fires might discourage visits at several western parks this summer). “As far as Carlsbad is concerned, we don’t know why there’s a decline,” Street says. “Have the people all been there and don’t want to go back? We would have to do a general population study to find out.”
As a first-timer who does want to go back, I can attest that Carlsbad Caverns packs as much scenic punch as all but the most grandeur-rich sites in the National Park Service. I first took the elevator down 750 feet in 60 seconds and then followed a paved trail in and around the wonders of the Big Room. The 14-acre space is a magnificent showcase of cave architecture, a splendid collection of speleothems–the technical term for stalactites and stalagmites, drapery, soda straws, popcorn and other “decorations.” They loom and hang and jut in the most startling ways. Minerals that have managed to seep in with the raindrops paint the features with tints that range from a milky beige to orange, red, blue and pink. Lights uncover the beauty of the structures, but the bulbs are white and add no color. It’s all nature’s work.
First explorer
The first known person to explore the caverns was a 16-year-old rancher’s son named James Larkin White, who went on to become a guano miner, explorer and guide. Jim White ventured into the cave in 1898, where he found nothing but pitch-black darkness, until his dim lantern picked out the eerie shapes so familiar today–huge domes and columns, spiky stalagmites, slender pipes hanging from the ceiling in dizzying profusion.
Indian settlers, including Mescalero Apaches, may have known about the caverns for 2,000 years or more, but there is no evidence that anyone mapped it before Jim White. In “Jim White’s Own Story,” a long interview compiled by Frank Ernest Nicholson, White says the cave first attracted him when he saw bats flying out of the entrance.
Today, Mexican free-tail bats are an integral part of the Carlsbad Cavern experience. At dusk each day in summer, they emerge by the thousands from their lodgings in a well-hidden chamber and spread out over the New Mexico and Texas countryside in search of food. Spectators watch this phenomenon from a specially built amphitheater, about where Jim White saw the bats exit from that same big, mysterious hole more than 100 years ago.
“I thought it was a volcano,” White told his biographer. “but then, I’d never seen a volcano–nor never before had I seen bats swarm, for that matter.”
Like most other range-riders in the area, White was thoroughly familiar with that impressive cavity in the stone outcroppings. He and everyone else would pass the hole regularly without feeling any compunction to take a look inside. But the bats got White to pondering. “The more I thought of it, the more I realized that any hole in the ground which could house such a gigantic army of bats must be a whale of a big cave.”
He first ventured in using a makeshift ladder and a kerosene lantern. White said he was stunned to see the vastness of the place and the formations his dim light revealed. He explored it many times and fashioned a crude stairway in hopes that others would come into the cave and share his awe.
Not many people did. Then, in 1901, a fertilizer expert turned up and showed a keen interest–not in the beautiful Big Room but in the bat cave and its tons of guano that he felt would enrich the soil of California orchards and turn a nice profit.
“The whole thing was a disappointment to me,” White related. “I tried to interest him in the scenic qualities, but he had only manure on his brain, and wouldn’t even make a sight-seeing trip with me into the larger chambers.”
For 20 years, White worked as a foreman for the various guano-mining companies that worked the cave. He continued his explorations, built some trails and handholds and persisted in telling everyone he encountered about the wonders down below. Public interest slowly mounted. Reporters wrote articles about the caves; photographers took pictures.
Finally, the federal government acquired the land from New Mexico and in 1923 declared Carlsbad Caverns a National Monument. Seven years later, it became a national park.
Soon the guano bucket and rickety stairs used by the first visitors would be replaced by smooth switchback trails and a bank of elevators. Electric lights illuminated features in the big rooms.
Underlining ranger Dave Hutson’s main point about change, Carlsbad Caverns underwent a lot of alterations in the 1930s. Jim White worked as chief park ranger for a time, but he retired when he realized the job was “too complicated for me with my limited education.” He noted even an old cave “can go too modern, too efficient and outgrow a common old cowboy.”
“The elevators were built in 1931 and were in operation by 1932,” Robert Hoff, the park historian, told me. “Before that, people had wooden stairs they could use to walk out–200 steps. Before the stairway, they had to go in and out in a guano bucket.”
Hoff still finds it incredible that so much could have been constructed in such a remote spot. “The amazing thing is the accessibility,” he said. “Some 80 years ago, this was just a desert. Now there are elevators and all this infrastructure. In 1931, they could dynamite and drill from the top and the bottom and come out only 1/4-inch of perfect alignment.”
Visitors ordinarily take self-guided tours of the Big Room, starting with an elevator ride, or work their way down on the asphalt trail that corkscrews from the Natural Entrance. Both experiences have tremendous visual and psychic impact. A mildly strenuous guided tour, the one led by Dave Hutson the other day, takes in the wonders of the Kings Palace and other rocky chambers.
“The first time I saw the Natural Entrance, I was amazed at the size of it,” Hoff said during our get-together in park headquarters. “I thought it was huge.” Hoff turned to Aleta Knight, the deputy superintendent. “Aren’t there other caves in the backcountry that have entrances even larger than Carlsbad Caverns?”
Knight nodded affirmation. “We’re up to 96 caves in the park,” she said. “And they’re being discovered all the time. In the time I’ve been here–four years–they’ve discovered six or eight. Double Canyon Cave has a huge entrance, and so do a couple of others. Those are not available to the public.”
Serious cavers may explore more difficult caverns than the brightly lit main rooms, getting a feel for the underground similar to Jim White’s experiences in the early 1900s–crawling into pitch-dark crannies, viewing features lit only by their own lanterns, getting dirty (though rough caverns available for exploration at least are guano-free zones).
And there’s more fun on top, as Knight hastened to point out. “We’ve got a great driving trail on the surface,” she said, meaning the 9.5-mile, gravel-road loop through Walnut Canyon and its stands of cactus and yucca. “We have hiking trails, a nationally known birding area, old ranch sites in the backcountry and some amazing geology on the surface.
“Our visitors come with so many different expectations. They’ve seen photographs, but some of them have no idea what they’re going to get into when they get here. It’s probably similar to the first time I saw the Grand Canyon. I couldn’t comprehend it, because I had seen so many paintings of it, and movies and photographs, it didn’t seem real to me. And here, the first few times I went in by elevator, it just didn’t really sink in. What made the difference was the first time I went down the Natural Entrance. That really made me feel I was actually going into a cave.”
It’s only Natural
The Natural Entrance experience begins at the huge archway, which appears capable of gulping down a Lake Forest mansion. Cave swallows twitter and fly in swarms above the steep walkway, where the trek to the bottom begins. After a few turns down the ramp, the entrance above is merely a slit of daylight. Soon all outside light disappears, and electric lamps take over, highlighting features in an immense stony vault that echoes with distant voices.
In several places up above, signs warn that the Natural Entrance route isn’t recommended for the faint of heart or the short of breath. But it’s all downhill and more exhilarating than frightening. Fear, it seems, most often strikes those who contemplate the desert up above.
Knight recommends taking the stairway to the visitor center roof and looking out on the endless expanse of Chihuahuan Desert basin just beyond the parking lot. “Out here, there’s too much expanse, too much vastness for some people,” she noted. “They get intimidated by it.”
She said a colleague told her that he once saw a crowd standing in the desert on the way from Roswell to Albuquerque. “There’s a stretch there that is just nothing–absolutely nothing as far as the eye can see in any direction. He saw that crowd in the road and he drove back to see what was wrong. It turned out they were from Japan and they had never seen that much of anything with nothing in it.”
Desert outpost
Historian Hoff figures that anyone willing to cross so much nothingness “really wants to get here, because we’re so off the beaten track.” On their way, the visitors might pause at White’s City, a tiny desert outpost 7 miles from the park visitor center. White’s City has nothing to do with cave explorer Jim White. Another, unrelated White family put up the two motels, the gas station, restaurant, gift shops, grocery and RV park that make up the “city.”
Celebrities turn up at the Caverns from time to time. “Clark Gable came here twice,” Hoff learned from historical records. “Will Rogers came here a couple of times. He went down in the cave in the guano bucket and liked everything he saw.
“Amelia Earhart came here in September of 1928, because she was having her plane worked on in Pecos, Texas. In a later newspaper article, she said, `I have been in six directions in my life–north, south, east, west and up. And now at Carlsbad Caverns, down.'”
. . . And a peak beyond
Guadalupe Mountains shows off a different face
GUADALUPE MOUNTAINS NATIONAL PARK, Texas–The limestone reef that runs underground through Carlsbad Caverns and for most of its 400-mile length pops up here in spectacular fashion.
The barely discernible peak of Guadalupe Mountain forms a bump on a mountain range that ends abruptly at the sheer, west-facing wall of a formation called El Capitan. Guadalupe Mountain is the highest point in Texas, 8,749 feet above sea level and about 3,000 feet above the ground.
“We have a fossilized reef here that is one of the most extensive fossilized reefs in the whole world,” chief interpreter Doug Buehler informed me during a chat in his office at park headquarters. “The geology from the Permian period of time (280 million years ago) is a very important part of the park story.”
Geologists from all over the world arrive to study the rocks here, because the Permian geology stands right out in the open, easy to see and analyze. Rugged and not so rugged recreational trekkers head for the park because its trails extend from desert heat to temperate forests to high mountain terrain. And those visitors won’t encounter much vehicle traffic, because roads don’t go far into the interior.
“This is pretty much a hikers’ park,” Buehler said. “A lot of the park is wilderness; it’s a beautiful area for that.”
Guadalupe Mountains National Park is beautiful from afar–a hazy wall of mountains as seen from Carlsbad Caverns, some 30 miles away in the underground portion of the massive Permian reef system. Or an intrepid hiker can stand on Guadalupe Peak and look down upon the roof of El Capitan, plus the desert and salt flats beyond.
Williams Ranch at the end of a rough road 7 miles long provides the cliff-side perspective that must have been familiar to cattlemen and those who made the mail run on the Butterfield stagecoach from St. Louis to San Francisco. There’s plenty of cowhand lore to be found in these parts.
Beautiful McKittrick Canyon leads hikers into glades of deciduous trees on a track that pauses at the well-kept lodge that once belonged to a Houston oil geologist. Farther on, the valley opens up to vistas of trees, boulders, big sky and yet another view of the flamboyant Guadalupes.
It’s hard to believe that Carlsbad Caverns and Guadalupe Mountains both belong to the same formation of fossilized limestone that came from an extinct sea and rose to its present height due to the constant shifting of a restless Earth. But they do, and they might be thought of as one big system, a single park split in two. State boundaries never seemed so arbitrary.
A guide to Carlsbad Caverns and Guadalupe Mountains
Getting there
Flights from Chicago to El Paso, the nearest major airport, are available from Southwest and American Airlines and Frontier. Advance-purchase fares quoted for a week in July varied from $251 on American to $371 on Southwest, but the prices can vary greatly and change constantly, so keep checking. From El Paso, northeast-bound U.S. Highway 62/180 skirts both parks, a drive of about 110 miles to Guadalupe Mountains and another 25 to Carlsbad Caverns.
Getting around
The main attractions at Carlsbad Caverns are 750 feet below the surface, where the dramatic formations may be reached via elevator or a twisty switchback trail (paved) from the Natural Entrance. More challenging caves are open to more rigorous explorations led by park rangers. Up top, hikers may walk a short nature trail or 50 miles of primitive backcountry trails. The Walnut Canyon Desert Drive, a 9 1/2-mile gravel road, winds through a rewarding mix of desert and mountain scenery.
Guadalupe Mountains’ interior welcomes hikers but shuns motor vehicles. A bone-jarring gravel road leads from the main highway to Williams Ranch, a round trip of 14 miles. Another road (smooth) leads to the McKittrick Canyon trail. Short spurs of asphalt access the Frijole Ranch and the Butterfield Stage Station ruins. Other than that, it’s all on foot over 80 miles of trails, 60 miles of which are available to horses. Trails leading to the high country–including the 8.4-mile, 3,000-foot-high ascent to Guadalupe Peak–are steep and rough. At desert level, the going is more gentle with plentiful, shady oases nurtured by natural springs.
When to visit
Temperature never varies in the caves at Carlsbad Caverns, where it’s always 56 degrees. On the surface, summers can sizzle and occasionally crackle with violent thunderstorms. Winters may be cold, but they lack much snow and ice. The park can be enjoyed year-round, but the startling nocturnal bat flights, when the animals soar out of their chamber at dusk in search of insects, occurs only in the warmer months, usually from mid-May until the end of October. After that, they return to their winter home in Mexico. Neighboring Guadalupe Mountains is in the same climatic zone, but the park is far more wind-whipped in winter and spring. Even on hot days, the air is cool at the higher altitudes and after dark.
Lodging and food
Bring camping gear if you want to stay inside either park. Carlsbad Caverns offers backcountry camping only. Pick up the free backcountry permit at the visitor center before setting out. Guadalupe Mountains provides 20 tent and 19 recreational-vehicle campsites near the headquarters/visitor center, but there are no showers, RV hookups or dump stations. Water and restrooms are available. The remote Dog Canyon campground at the end of New Mexico Highway 137, 110 miles by highway from park headquarters and 70 miles from Carlsbad Caverns, has nine tent sites and four RV spaces at a 6,290-foot elevation.
Campers, particularly in the backcountry, should bring all the water they will need. Guadalupe Mountains has no food available and water only near the headquarters campground.
A restaurant with well-prepared food graces the west end of the Carlsbad Caverns visitor center. Refreshments also are available at a small cafeteria and picnic table area down in the cave.
White’s City, 7 miles from the Carlsbad entrance and 15 miles from Guadalupe Mountains, has two motels, a general store, a restaurant, post office, gas station and RV parking. The food and lodging are there, but choices are slim.
In the city of Carlsbad, 18 miles farther up U.S. 62/180, visitors will find a variety of motels and a good selection of restaurants with an emphasis on steaks, Mexican and barbecue.
Accessibility
At Carlsbad Caverns, the self-guided Big Room cave tour and the visitor center are wheelchair accessible, as well as the bat-flight amphitheater and some picnic sites. A detailed Access Guide is available at the visitor center. In Guadalupe Mountains, the visitor centers at headquarters and in McKittrick Canyon are fully accessible. Pinery Trail from the main visitor center to the Butterfield Stage ruins is accessible and covers 3/4 mile roundtrip.
Information
Write Carlsbad Caverns National Park at 3225 National Parks Hwy., Carlsbad, NM 88220. Call 505-785-2232 for visitor information (extension 0) and cave tour reservations (extension 429). Headquarters: 505-885-8884; fax 505-785-2302; e-mail cave-interpretation@nps.gov; www.nps.gov/cave.
The address for Guadalupe Mountains National Park is HC 60, Box 400, Salt Flat, TX 79847; 915-828-3251; e-mail: gumo-superintendent@nps.gov; www.nps.gov/gumo.
Carlsbad main sights
1. Natural Entrance
At the beginning of a 750-foot descent involving steep, asphalt switchbacks, a yawning hole announces the presence of the immense caverns below. At dusk, in summer, hundreds of thousands of Mexican free-tail bats soar out of the entrance in their nightly search for food, i.e. insects. Spectators watch the flight from an amphitheater just outside the entrance. In late fall, the bats return to Mexico.
2. Main Corridor
As the switchbacks twist down a route that amounts to a 1-mile walk, the daylight from above eventually disappears and electricity illuminates stalactites (that grew from the roof down) and stalagmites (from the floor up), as well as fallen rocks and intriguing striations. These features bear such names as Whale’s Mouth, Devils Den, Witches Finger, Iceberg Rock and the Boneyard.
3. Scenic Rooms
Ranger-led tours start from the bottom of the unnatural entrance, the place where visitor-center elevators finish their 750-foot controlled plunge. Visitors get another look at Iceberg Rock–this time from underneath–and peek into the Green Lake Room, Kings Palace (yet another 80 feet down), Queens Chamber and the Papoose Room. At one point, they see a stalactite and stalagmite fused at their ends (forming what’s technically called a column). It’s known as “The Eternal Kiss.”
4. Big Room
You want sights? The Big Room has sights, all of them worthy of listing as main sights. But we lack the cavernous space to hold them all. Just know that the room contains wondrous displays caused by the dripping of water over limestone in a process taking centuries. When the stalactites form slender tubes, they’re called “soda straws.” Sheets of stone that resemble petrified foam are “draperies.” Little nubs all over a thick stalagmite are known as “popcorn.” Formations decorate the Big Room with an awesome beauty, and their labels hardly do them justice: Giant Dome, Twin Domes, Painted Grotto, Temple of the Sun. . . . You have to be there.
5. Walnut Canyon
Lest we forget that the caverns lie beneath a portion of the great Chihuahuan Desert, an interesting 9 1/2-mile drive loops past the cactus, agave and greasewood bushes with impressive views of the Guadalupe Mountains in the distance.
6. Visitor Center Observation Deck
Not the deck but the view: More desert–miles upon scores of miles–stretching to infinity. The Chihuahuan covers territory from New Mexico and Texas far into Mexico, and from here, it looks as if you can see all the way to the Mexican border. Curvature of the Earth prevents that, of course, but a chunk of parched land yonder might be in the Lone Star State.
7. Tough Caves
Some people are never satisfied by well-lit and highly accessible caverns. For them, the park offers tours that might involve negotiating 50 feet of ladders, squeezing through crevices, crawling in dirt, skirting dangerous dropoffs and lighting the way only with lanterns. The mildest of these are called Left Hand Tunnel, Slaughter Canyon Cave and Lower Cave (the ladder cave). Still too wimpy? Wild caving opportunities (“kneepads required!” says the brochure) can be found at Hall of the White Giant and Spider Cave.
CARLSBAD CAVERNS FACTS
Established as a national park: May 14, 1930.
Area: 46,753 acres; 750 feet from surface to floor of caverns.
Visitors: 469,303 in 2000.
Location: 23 miles southwest of Carlsbad, N.M., and 150 miles east of El Paso, Texas, on U.S. Highway 62/180.
Flora and fauna: Chihuahuan Desert plants on top include torrey yucca, prickly pear cactus, ocotillo, lechuguilla, agave and prairie grasses. From spring through fall, more than 500,000 Mexican free-tail bats live in a remote cave. The desert teems with a variety of rodents, plus mule deer, coyotes and raccoons. Occasional sightings of mountain lion and bobcat. Also home to 331 species of birds, including turkey vultures, ladder-backed woodpecker and black-chinned hummingbird.
Entrance fee: None, but user fees from $6 to $20 are charged for guided and unguided cave tours.
Guadalupe Mountains sights
1. Williams Ranch
A jounce-provoking road that crosses the Butterfield stagecoach route (see below) leads to the lone building that remains from a ranch started in 1908. Creosote and cactus grow where 3,000 longhorn cattle grazed. Now all is solitude with just a whisper of the Old West.
2. Guadalupe Peak
The highest point in Texas is 8,749 feet above sea level and 3,000 feet from the ground, a bump in the range that geologists refer to as the Western Escarpment.
3. The Bowl
Thick forest covers a mountaintop depression 2 miles wide, where elk, mule deer and wild turkeys roam.
4. Butterfield Stage Station Ruins
Starting in September 1858, the Butterfield Overland Mail stagecoach passed through Pinery Station on its biweekly run from St. Louis to San Francisco. The stage route lasted only 11 months, but portions of the station’s limestone walls remain.
5. Frijole Ranch Museum
Six springs in the foothills made this ranch possible. The house and outbuildings are intact, and an intriguing little museum in the living quarters describes cowboy activity early in the last century.
6. Manzanita and Smith Springs
An easy trail loops past both of these oases in the desert. Cattle drank here, and these days, park rangers close the trails in early evening so the deer feel free to slake their thirst.
7. McKittrick Canyon
Hardwood trees prevail in a gap that provides welcome shade in summer, vivid colors in the fall and impressive mountain scenery all year long. A cabin deep in the woods was once the summer hideaway for a Houston oil geologist.
GUADALUPE MOUNTAINS FACTS
Established as a national park: Sept. 30, 1972.
Area: 86,416 acres.
Visitors: 198,762 in 2000.
Location: On U.S. Highway 62/180, about 110 miles east of El Paso, Texas.
Flora and fauna: Desert, canyon and highlands environments produce plants ranging from cactus, creosote and maple trees to juniper and ponderosa pine. Similarly, reptiles give way to mule deer, jackrabbits and elk as elevations increase. More than 300 species of birds live in the park, including turkey vultures, golden eagles and peregrine falcons.
Entrance fee: None.
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Robert Cross’ e-mail address is bcross@tribune.com.
Stories on the 37 parks covered earlier are available at the Tribune’s Travel Web site: chicagotribune.com/go/parks
