Carlsbad Caverns

A cave system first noticed because of the bats pouring out of it, explored by a persistent cowboy with a homemade ladder, and now home to one of the largest single cave chambers in North America.

In the late 1800s, guano miners working the Guadalupe Mountains noticed what looked like smoke rising from a hole in the ground at dusk, and investigating found it was actually enormous clouds of bats emerging from a cave entrance. The discovery drew the attention of a young cowboy named Jim White, who began exploring the caverns extensively around 1898 using a homemade wire ladder, venturing deeper into the cave system than anyone had before.

White spent years afterward trying to convince skeptical locals and officials of what he had found underground, eventually leading tours himself and lobbying for the cave's protection. His persistence paid off in 1923, when President Calvin Coolidge designated Carlsbad Cave National Monument, and again in 1930, when Congress upgraded the site to full national park status.

The park's centerpiece, the Big Room, is one of the largest single cave chambers in North America, stretching roughly 4,000 feet with ceilings reaching up to 255 feet high. Hundreds of thousands of Brazilian free-tailed bats still roost in the cave and stream out in a dramatic mass flight each summer evening, the same spectacle that first drew attention to the site more than a century ago. Carlsbad Caverns was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1995.