Carlsbad Caverns National Park: Awed, one and all

A family goes deep below ground to witness what millions of years and sulfuric acid can do.

By Vani Rangachar, Times Staff Writer
12:00 AM PDT, May 16, 2004

My family and I were 750 feet beneath the surface of the Earth in an isolated corner of southern New Mexico, thanks to Lou Potter, a colleague of my retired father.

In the 1960s, Potter fired my dad's imagination with stories of amazing sights deep inside Carlsbad Caverns National Park. "It really boggled my mind," Dad said.

The park is best known for its caverns, including 1,567-feet-deep Lechuguilla, the deepest limestone cave in the country, and the Mexican free-tail bats that inhabit some of them.

More than 40 years later, Dad realized his dream, strong-arming his wife, Padma, granddaughter Meera and me into going with him. Who among us would deny the long-held wishes of their 74-year-old father?

Carlsbad Caverns National Park is not an easy place to reach. El Paso is the nearest city with a sizable airport — about 150 miles southwest of the park — and that's where our three bicoastal generations met. My parents flew in from New Jersey, and my 21-year-old daughter and I from Los Angeles, all arriving late on a Friday night last month. We stayed overnight at a Best Western outside the airport, and by midmorning Saturday we were driving northeast in a rented minivan through oil-rich flatlands.

U.S. 62 climbs steadily until a driver comes smack up against 8,085-foot-high El Capitan. The rock edifice was wreathed in clouds, a warning of blustery weather. We would not see the sun again that weekend.

Fighting a fiercely cold wind, we pulled into White's City, a tiny settlement just outside the park's boundaries that caters to park visitors. We hurriedly ate a lunch of sandwiches, chicken strips and nachos at Jack's diner, one of two restaurants in town, then followed the paved road until it dead-ended at Carlsbad Caverns National Park visitors center.

Above ground, the park is unremarkable. Its Chihuahuan Desert landscape is harsh and rocky, a monochromatic palette carved into gullies and canyons by the elements. Scattered plants — purple Texas mountain laurel, yellow cholla and flame-tipped ocotillo — struggled to keep their blooms against the wind and temperatures in the 40s.

But where we were headed, weather did not matter: The caverns were dry and warm compared with outside, with the temperature an almost constant 56 degrees year-round.

They are an ideal roost for migratory Mexican free-tailed bats. Almost 350,000 live and breed inside the caverns from spring to fall. In summer, the park service celebrates the bats' diurnal flights with a nightly lecture; once a year there's a bat flight breakfast (Aug. 12 this year). On our weekend, we saw plenty of bats in various inanimate forms in the gift shop but no live ones.

The park offers two self-guided tours and six ranger-led excursions into several of its 105 caverns. The week before our trip, I signed us up and paid online for two, Kings Palace and Left Hand Tunnel. Other tours promised "twisting belly-crawls," which did not appeal. We started with Kings Palace, a one-miler that descends into several cavern chambers. Along the way, the ranger regaled us with the caves' history.

Although Indians in the area had known about Carlsbad Caverns for centuries, they were first explored in depth by settlers when cowboy Jim White ventured inside in 1898. It took White more than a quarter of a century to persuade the federal government to declare the caves a national park in 1930.

It wasn't until the 1970s that scientists found out just how rare Carlsbad Caverns are. They were carved by sulfuric acid, created by the combination of oxygen in water with hydrogen sulfide gas from the oil deposits far below the surface. As the mountains rose, the highly caustic water table dropped, dissolving the limestone and leaving behind immense underground chambers such as the Big Room, which is large enough to hold six football fields.

A one-mile paved path winds through the Big Room. After the Kings Palace tour, we spent the afternoon walking through it. My mom and daughter saw fanciful shapes — one resembled a statue of the Buddha; others were as delicate as Belgian lace — among softy lighted flowstones, stalactites and stalagmites. Dad marveled at their structure and seductive beauty and at the geology that created this underground wonderland.

So enchanted were we that we lost all sense of time, and we were finally forced to leave 1 1/2 hours later by rangers who tailed us, shutting lights off as they herded us toward the elevators.

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