Carlsbad Caverns entrance road: Whites City up Walnut Canyon to the cavern

Welcome to Carlsbad Caverns National Park. This tour follows the park's only entrance road, about seven miles from the park gate at Whites City, up through Walnut Canyon, to the visitor center and the cavern entrance.

Start with the town at the gate. In 1928, a man named Charlie White homesteaded a hundred and twenty acres at the entrance to Walnut Canyon, and that homestead became Whites City. He was no relation to the other White in this story, Jim White, the cowboy whose name is tied to the cave itself. You'll hear about him later.

The road is nearly as old as the town. In 1927, the State of New Mexico built the first entrance road through the lower part of Walnut Canyon, four years after the cave was first protected.

Now, the rock. About two hundred and sixty-five million years ago, this corner of New Mexico sat at the edge of an inland sea. Along that edge grew a reef, shaped like a horseshoe and about four hundred miles long. Unlike reefs today, it wasn't built mostly by coral. It was built mostly by sponges and algae, each generation growing on top of the one before, until the reef limestone was more than eighteen hundred feet thick. The park calls it one of the best-preserved fossil reefs of its age exposed anywhere in the world.

Near the mouth of Walnut Canyon, that reef rock comes right to the surface. Geologists who study it describe big sponges still standing the way they grew. Farther up the canyon, the rock changes to the sand and lime mud that settled in the calmer water behind the reef. So this canyon is a trip from the reef itself into the lagoon that lay behind it.

Then the sea dried up. The basin filled with salts, and the reef was buried. Much later, mostly over the last twenty million years, the land was lifted almost ten thousand feet, and wind and rain stripped away the younger rock on top. Underground, acid made from hydrogen sulfide dissolved the caves. The park has more than a hundred known caves, and the most famous one is waiting at the top of this road.

Here's how the tour works. There are two stops: a picnic area in Walnut Canyon, and the visitor center at the top. I'll tell you a story on the way to each, and another when you get there. In between, I'll stay quiet, so you can enjoy the canyon.

This is the picnic area in Walnut Canyon, about halfway up the entrance road.

Take a look at the canyon walls. Geologists put this part of the canyon in the Yates Formation: layers of dolomite and sandstone that formed in the shallow water behind the reef. Some beds along this road hold small, round grains that grew in thin coats around a center, like pearls, from the size of a BB up to the size of a golf ball. Beside them are what geologists call tepees, little buckled domes where the sediment swelled and pushed itself apart. Their best explanation is a ridge of low islands, tidal flats and dunes behind the reef, with seawater seeping through into a salty lagoon. They still argue over the details.

The living landscape is the Chihuahuan Desert. No region has a greater diversity of cactus, and the park lists twenty-six species and subspecies. This park also sits where the desert meets the edges of the southern Rocky Mountains and the Great Plains, so many plants here grow at the very limits of their range. Ponderosa pine reaches its farthest point east in this park, and chinkapin oak its farthest point west.

People have made a living here for a very long time. The park's history puts American Indians in the Guadalupe Mountains twelve to fourteen thousand years ago, and their cooking ring sites have been found inside today's park. One of the foods was agave. It was roasted underground in rock-lined pits over hot coals, and once dried, it could be stored and eaten all year. The old roasting pits are called ring middens. Thousands of them dot this region, some dating back eight thousand years.

In the fourteen hundreds, Apache people came into these mountains, and they stayed until the late eighteen hundreds, when the mountains became their last refuge from the U.S. Army. Spanish explorers named them for that roasted agave: Mescalero, the mescal makers.

So this is a picnic spot with a long history. People have been sitting down to a meal in this canyon for thousands of years.

This is the Carlsbad Caverns visitor center, at about forty-four hundred feet. The building was finished in 2008. It replaced a visitor center from 1959, and before that, tours started from old stone buildings down near the cave mouth.

Inside are the ticket desk, the exhibits, and the elevators that drop to the Big Room. At eight point two acres, it's the largest readily accessible cave chamber in North America. To go into the cavern, you'll need a timed entry reservation, and entrance tickets are bought here. Bring a light jacket: down there, it stays around fifty-six degrees all year.

If you have the time and the legs, there's another way in. A short walk from here is the natural entrance, and the Natural Entrance Route follows the old explorers' path down more than seven hundred and fifty feet, over a mile and a quarter of steep, narrow trail. Near the entrance, look for red and black drawings on the walls. American Indians ventured into this entrance more than a thousand years ago, and the marks they left are still there.

At the mouth of the cave is the Bat Flight Amphitheater, built in 1963. From spring into October, several hundred thousand Brazilian free-tailed bats live in the cave, each weighing about half an ounce. Around dusk, they spiral up out of the entrance, counterclockwise, and nobody knows why. The flight can go on for hours. They feed over the Pecos and Black river valleys, and in a single night, a bat can eat more than half its body weight in insects. Toward dawn, they come back, folding their wings and dropping into the dark. In late October or early November, the adults and young leave for Mexico, and they return the next year. Cave swallows have nested just inside the entrance since 1966.

One more cave, one you won't see. Out in the park's backcountry is Lechuguilla Cave. Until 1986, it was a small, dead-end cave where guano had once been mined. Cavers heard wind coming up through the rubble on its floor, dug down with the park's permission, and broke into huge passages. More than a hundred and forty-five miles have been mapped since, and entry is limited to scientists and survey teams.

That's the end of the tour, and thank you for touring with me. You came up a canyon cut through a fossil reef and the lagoon behind it, and the cave below will take you down into the reef itself.