48 Fun Facts About Carlsbad Caverns National Park

Carlsbad Caverns National Park is in which US state?

New Mexico: the park lies in the state's far southeast, while California's beach city of Carlsbad shares the name only because both towns borrowed it from the same famous European spa.

How can visitors get down into Carlsbad Cavern's Big Room?

On foot or by elevator: hikers take the steep 1.25-mile Natural Entrance Trail, and until an elevator shaft was blasted through the rock in the early 1930s, every visitor also had to climb back out.

In 1952, photographer Tex Helm lit Carlsbad Cavern's Big Room for one shot with 2,400 of what?

Flashbulbs: Helm set them in reflectors all around the chamber and fired them together in a single instant, a split-second blaze bright enough to photograph the great room in full colour.

Which 1930s humorist wrote that Carlsbad Caverns is "just the Grand Canyon with a roof over it"?

Will Rogers wired the line to his newspaper readers after walking the cave, adding that inside it had "all the cathedrals of the world in it, with half of 'em hanging upside down".

Unlike most limestone caves, Carlsbad was dissolved mainly by what rising from below?

Sulfuric acid: a sulfur-bearing gas rising from deep oil deposits met oxygen in the groundwater and formed sulfuric acid, which dissolved the limestone from below rather than from rainwater above.

Which snack gives its name to the knobbly mineral clusters that stud Carlsbad Cavern's walls?

Popcorn: cave popcorn sometimes coats only one side of a formation, the side that faced the moving air, so it shows geologists which way the cavern's breezes once blew.

The limestone of Carlsbad Cavern formed about 250 million years ago from what?

A reef beside an inland sea: sponges and algae built the Capitan Reef, which was buried after the sea dried up and much later heaved up as a desert mountain range.

Which soft white mineral, also the sand of White Sands National Park, confirms that acid carved Carlsbad Cavern?

Gypsum: when the acid that carved the cave attacked limestone it left gypsum behind; thick gypsum blocks lie on the Big Room floor, and a neighbouring park cave holds 20-foot gypsum chandeliers.

Which formations grow down from a cave ceiling?

Stalactites: each drip of water carrying dissolved calcium carbonate leaves a trace on the ceiling, so stalactites lengthen downward while stalagmites build up from the floor beneath them.

Which cowboy, still in his teens, explored Carlsbad Cavern around 1900 by homemade wire ladder?

Jim White went on to guide the cave's first tourists and, in 1923, the government surveyor whose report won it national monument status.

The cowboy who explored Carlsbad Cavern said he first took its swirling evening bats for what?

A volcano was his first guess, by his own much-told account: he watched the dark column for half an hour, then pushed through the brush to "the biggest and blackest hole I had ever seen".

Which photographer shot Carlsbad Caverns in the early 1940s for murals planned for the Interior Department?

Ansel Adams photographed the cave for the Interior Department's Mural Project, but the war ended the scheme in 1942 and the wall-sized prints were never made.

Before a staircase was installed in 1925, how did the first tourists get into Carlsbad Cavern?

In an iron guano bucket: before the 1925 stairway, the cowboy explorer winched early sightseers down the old mining shaft in the big iron bucket that had hauled up bat droppings.

Which newspaper published Ray V. Davis's photographs from inside Carlsbad Cavern in 1923?

The New York Times ran the pictures in 1923; Davis had been taking the first photographs inside the cave since 1915, and they did much to stir interest in it.

Which president proclaimed Carlsbad Cave National Monument on 25 October 1923?

Calvin Coolidge signed the proclamation six months after Robert Holley, a government surveyor sent to map the cave, came out so impressed that he urged monument status.

In 1930, what turned Carlsbad Cave National Monument into Carlsbad Caverns National Park?

An act of Congress: a president can proclaim a national monument alone, as one had for this cave in 1923, but a national park can be created only by Congress.

Which organisation sponsored Willis T. Lee's 1924 exploration of Carlsbad Cavern?

The National Geographic Society printed Lee's first account of the cave in January 1924, then paid for his six-month return that spring; his "New Discoveries in Carlsbad Cavern" followed in 1925.

In 2024, Carlsbad rangers warned that a dropped bag of which snack had a "world changing" effect on cave life?

Cheetos: the processed corn softened in the humid air and fed mold, then crickets, mites, spiders and flies, one reason only plain water is allowed in the cavern.

The town of Carlsbad took the German name of a famous spa town now in which country?

Czechia: Karlsbad, "Charles's Baths", is now Karlovy Vary in the Czech Republic, and the townsfolk voted to borrow its name in 1899 because mineral springs nearby were said to match the spa's waters.

On old ranger-led tours of Carlsbad Cavern, the lights went out while four rangers sang which hymn?

Rock of Ages: tours gathered at the giant stalagmite of that name, the cavern went black and a quartet of rangers sang; the park recalls the custom on its December lantern tours.

What did cavers use in 1985 to get a rope up to the Spirit World, in the ceiling of Carlsbad's Big Room?

Helium balloons carried a light cord, looped on balsa wood, over a stalagmite some 250 feet up; a climbing rope was hauled after it, and the first explorer went up into a room nobody had seen.

A chamber discovered high in Carlsbad Cavern on 31 October 2013 was named what?

Halloween Hall: two cavers finishing a survey above the Spirit World climbed one more unexplored ledge that night and found a colourful chamber littered with thousands of bat bones.

Whatever the desert heat above, what do rangers advise wearing inside Carlsbad Cavern?

A light jacket: the cavern holds at about 56°F and humid all year, so even in a desert summer visitors walk down into jacket weather.

Which amenity awaits visitors deep underground at the edge of Carlsbad Cavern's Big Room?

A lunchroom: the Park Service has drawn up plans to take the Underground Lunchroom out of the cave, but spending bills have repeatedly barred any contract that would remove it.

What do cavers call the pencil-thin formations that crowd the ceiling of Carlsbad Cavern's second-largest room?

Soda straws: each drip leaves a ring of calcite, building a hollow tube of even width; if the tip plugs, water runs down the outside and the straw thickens into a full-sized formation.

Which New Deal programme kept a work camp at Carlsbad Caverns National Park from 1938 to 1942?

Civilian Conservation Corps: its recruits put up adobe staff housing near the cave entrance in 1940-42, buildings that now form part of the park's historic district.

What has been banned at Carlsbad Caverns' evening bat flight since 2006, to avoid disturbing the bats?

Cameras: flash photos kept being taken despite a no-flash rule, so the superintendent banned cameras outright; the ban now covers phones and every other electronic device.

Which Carlsbad Caverns National Park cave, broken into by cavers in 1986, had over 150 miles mapped by 2020?

Lechuguilla: cavers who had heard wind roaring up through rubble since the 1950s broke into it in 1986, and its surveyed passages passed 150 miles by 2020, making it one of the world's longest caves.

A Carlsbad Caverns National Park cave famed for 20-foot crystal chandeliers featured in which BBC series?

Planet Earth: its 2006 "Caves" episode filmed the Chandelier Ballroom, in a cave so fragile and tightly restricted that few people other than scientists and survey teams are ever let in.

Bacteria sealed inside a remote Carlsbad Caverns National Park cave gave scientists evidence of what?

Antibiotic resistance is ancient: microbes cut off from the surface for some four million years had never met a modern drug, yet some shrugged off a dozen or more, so resistance long predates medicine.

Every bat species recorded in Carlsbad Caverns National Park lives on which food?

Insects: every species in the park is an insect-eater, and bug parts sifted from the guano show the big free-tailed colony living mostly on moths and beetles.

How did researchers count the bats streaming out of Carlsbad Cavern in 2005?

Thermal imaging: each warm bat showed as a bright speck for software to track without disturbing the colony, and the peak of about 793,000 undercut old claims of millions.

Which way do Carlsbad Cavern's bats spiral as they climb out of the entrance each evening?

Counterclockwise: the colony corkscrews up out of the bowl-shaped entrance to gain height, a habit that left the naturalist Joseph Wood Krutch asking, "Why counterclockwise?"

The Mexican free-tailed bat is the official flying mammal of which state?

Texas: its Bracken Cave, near San Antonio, shelters up to 20 million of the bats each summer, the largest bat colony known, and Oklahoma has since adopted the same species as its own flying mammal.

In which month do the year's pups join Carlsbad Cavern's evening bat flight, bringing the best shows of the season?

August: the pups are born in June and need about five weeks to fly, so by late summer they and bats migrating from farther north make the evening flights the season's biggest.

The natural entrance at Carlsbad is an Important Bird Area for its summer colony of which bird?

Cave swallows: the colony breeds just inside the cave mouth each summer, flying by day from the same entrance the bats pour out of at dusk.

Which detached unit of Carlsbad Caverns National Park is a wooded desert oasis and Important Bird Area?

Rattlesnake Springs: the Park Service acquired the old homestead for its water, piped six miles to the cavern since the 1930s, and the wooded oasis has drawn more than 300 bird species.

Which famous aviator was photographed touring Carlsbad Cavern's Big Room in September 1928?

Amelia Earhart posed in the Big Room on 11 September 1928, three months after the Atlantic crossing that made her famous, though she had flown it only as a passenger.

Which president signed the 1978 act creating the Carlsbad Caverns Wilderness?

Jimmy Carter signed the National Parks and Recreation Act on 10 November 1978; in one stroke it made wilderness of nearly two million acres in eight national parks, Carlsbad's back country among them.

Which Apache people lived in the mountains around Carlsbad Cavern before American settlers arrived?

Mescalero: the name is Spanish for people of the mescal, after the agave hearts they roasted for food, and their old roasting pits still lie near the cavern's entrance.

Carlsbad Caverns National Park lies in which of North America's great deserts?

Chihuahuan: it is North America's largest desert, most of it in Mexico, and each dusk the cavern's bats fan out across it to feed.

What near Carlsbad Cavern's natural entrance shows Native Americans knew the cave long before any cowboy?

Pictographs: the rock paintings by the entrance, with cooking pits and artefacts close by, show people knew the cave some thousand years before its famous cowboy explorer.

Which international status did Carlsbad Caverns National Park gain in 1995?

World Heritage Site: UNESCO listed the park for the size of its caves and the profusion, diversity and beauty of their mineral formations, singling out one pristine cave as a natural laboratory.

Carlsbad Cavern's Bifrost Room takes its name from a rainbow bridge in which mythology?

Norse: Bifrost is the rainbow bridge the gods built between the human world and their own realm, and strong as it is, the Prose Edda foretells that it will break under Muspell's riders at Ragnarok.

When his lantern died in Carlsbad Cavern, its cowboy explorer said the smothering dark fell like a million tons of what?

Black wool: the dark felt choking, he said, and in a mad urge to run he scrambled along the edge of a black abyss before he got his lamp going again.

The Natural Entrance Trail into Carlsbad Cavern descends about as far as a building of how many storeys?

80, near enough: the park reckons the 750-foot drop at about 79 storeys, and warns anyone with heart or breathing trouble off the mile and a quarter of steep switchbacks.

Why are visitors asked never to touch the formations in Carlsbad Cavern?

Skin oils stop them growing: the film keeps dripping water from laying down its minerals, so one touch can stall a formation that has taken thousands of years to build.

Which national park lies just southwest of Carlsbad Caverns, across the state line?

Guadalupe Mountains: the park began with a gift from Wallace Pratt, an oil geologist who had bought land in McKittrick Canyon for a retreat and later gave it to the Park Service.