Get to Know Carlsbad Caverns Wildlife
Illustrations by Chris Philpot. CARLSBAD CAVERNS NATIONAL PARK’S MOST FAMOUS RESIDENTS are its Brazilian free-tailed bats, but they’re just one of more than 67 mammals and 368 bird species that live…
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Category: Parks
The History of Carlsbad Caverns
AN APACHE STORY TELLS OF A MEDICINE MAN who ventured into the caverns and was never seen again. Every year, tribal members would visit the cave around the anniversary of his disappearance and leave…
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Give These Desert Hikes a Try
MORE THAN 50 MILES OF TRAILS access some 33,000 acres of the park that are designated wilderness areas, where you can take in views of the Guadalupe Mountains rolling on into Texas, explore canyons…
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Experience Big Room Magic
CARLSBAD CAVERNS IS UNIQUE for the rock that it occupies and how it formed. Most caves form from the top down, but sulfuric acid helped create these from the bottom up. A few factors had to combine to…
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Explore Lechuguilla Cave
A CAVERS’ MAP IS DOTTED WITH QUESTION MARKS, indicating where other cavers have spotted a crack or crevasse that offers a possible unexplored passage. Some become impassably small. Some dead-end in…
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Dive Into the Depths of Carlsbad Caverns
THE DARKNESS IS SO COMPLETE that I can close my eyes, open them again, and see no difference. For seemingly long moments that might have been a few seconds, our group of 25 falls silent. Only the…
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The Feather and the Cellphone
MY COMPANIONS AND I LABORED THROUGH DEEP SNOW for 15 long minutes—and this after driving through two-foot-deep drifts on the way up to the caldera on a frigid February evening. Now, as we trudged on…
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Monumental Effort
"LET'S GO RIDE SOME DITCHES," Matt Mason says. We pedal through downtown Las Cruces and quickly turn off the pavement onto a dirt path alongside a dry irrigation ditch. For a few minutes I wonder if…
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Trek Back Through Time
IF PEOPLE HAD BEEN THERE TO SEE IT—and there’s a chance Ancestral Acoma or Zuni people were—lava flowing across what’s now El Malpais National Monument might have looked a little like a dark ocean…
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Dig Into Ancestral Chocolate at Chaco Canyon
More than 100 rare black-and-white cylindrical vases were found in Room 28 of Pueblo Bonito. Photograph courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History Library, ptc-3521. ENTOMBED IN AN EARTHEN…
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