A dry limestone canyon with scattered desert shrubs in the Guadalupe Mountains
Patrick Alexander / CC0 via Wikimedia Commons
New Mexico · Region

The Pecos & Carlsbad Caverns

The bat flight at Carlsbad Caverns, the cattle trail up the Pecos, Roswell's 1947 debris, and the salt beds where the country buries its nuclear waste.

4 places to explore

Under the Guadalupe Mountains, in the remains of a reef that grew in an inland sea some 265 million years ago, water and sulfuric acid hollowed out Carlsbad Caverns. Mescalero Apache people knew the cave mouth long before a young cowhand named Jim White began exploring the passages in the 1890s; the cave became a national monument in 1923 and a national park in 1930. On summer evenings hundreds of thousands of Brazilian free-tailed bats pour out of the entrance at dusk.

In 1866 Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving drove a herd of Texas longhorns up the Pecos to sell to the army at Fort Sumner, opening the trail that carried their names north to Colorado and Wyoming. Loving died the next year of wounds from a Comanche attack on the river. John Chisum built his cattle empire around Roswell, and the Pecos valley was turned to irrigated farms in the 1890s.

In July 1947 a rancher brought debris from his pasture northwest of Roswell, and the army field announced it had recovered a flying disc before calling it a weather balloon; in the 1990s the Air Force said it came from Project Mogul, a classified program to detect Soviet nuclear tests. East of the Pecos the oil fields of Lea County began in the 1920s, and near Carlsbad, since 1999, the government has buried radioactive waste from nuclear weapons work in salt beds 2,150 feet underground.

What to See in The Pecos & Carlsbad Caverns

4 places across the region, grouped by what they are.

Geology & Rock Formations

Two domed stalagmites lit in the dim vault of the Big Room at Carlsbad Cavern, formations hanging from the ceiling

Carlsbad Caverns National Park

Carlsbad

The way into the cave has changed four times: a guano miner's bucket, a wooden staircase, a 750-foot elevator, and now a timed ticket and a switchback trail down the natural entrance.

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Natural Areas

A still lake below red bluffs at Bottomless Lakes State Park, a campground on the far shore

Bottomless Lakes State Park

Roswell

Nine sinkhole lakes under red bluffs east of Roswell, named by vaqueros whose ropes never touched bottom, and set aside in 1933 as New Mexico's first state park.

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Sotol stalks, yuccas and prickly pear along a pathway and limestone ledge at Living Desert State Park in Carlsbad

Living Desert Zoo and Gardens State Park

Carlsbad

A zoo and garden of the Chihuahuan Desert on the Ocotillo Hills above Carlsbad, whose animals are injured or orphaned wildlife that cannot go back to the wild.

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Attractions

The International UFO Museum in a former movie theater on Main Street in Roswell, its marquee and vertical sign in blue and yellow

International UFO Museum and Research Center

Roswell

A 1930s movie theater on Roswell's Main Street turned into a museum by two men who had been part of the 1947 story, one of them the officer who announced the flying disc.

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Stories from The Pecos & Carlsbad Caverns

Geology

The Cave Beneath the Cave

For decades Lechuguilla was a dead-end hole in the backcountry of Carlsbad Caverns National Park. Cavers heard wind coming up through its rubble floor, dug, and in 1986 broke into one of the deepest and strangest caves in the world.

5 min read

The Pecos & Carlsbad Caverns rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.

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