Carlsbad Caverns National Park United States

Legendary

Explore the underground caves that take you to the "Big Room", the largest chamber in North America.

Photo by tofoli.douglas

Deep beneath the New Mexico desert sits a cave chamber so massive that more than six football fields could fit inside it. That chamber, called the Big Room, is the largest cave chamber in all of North America.

Carlsbad Caverns sits within the Guadalupe Mountains in southeastern New Mexico. Underground, the park holds more than 119 known caves, carved out over millions of years.

Most caves form when rainwater slowly dissolves rock as it seeps down from above. Carlsbad's caves formed differently. Gas rising up from deep underground mixed with water to create a strong acid, which ate away at the rock from below instead.

The Big Room stretches almost 4,000 feet long and 625 feet wide, with ceilings reaching up to 255 feet high in some spots. Walking its full loop trail takes about an hour and a half.

Inside, visitors find towering rock formations with names like the Giant Dome, the Totem Pole, and the Bottomless Pit. These shapes formed slowly over thousands of years, as water dripped down and left tiny bits of mineral behind, one drop at a time.

The Guadalupe Mountains themselves used to be part of an ancient reef, formed under a shallow sea roughly 250 million years ago. When the sea dried up, the reef stayed buried until forces deep in the earth pushed it upward, creating the mountains that stand today.

Every summer evening, hundreds of thousands of bats fly out of the cave's natural entrance at dusk, swirling into the sky in search of insects. Watching the bat flight has become one of the park's most popular events.

Walk the Natural Entrance Trail down into the cave on your own, or take an elevator straight into the Big Room. Watch the nightly bat flight during the warmer months for one of the most memorable shows in any national park. Explore the underground formations up close, some of the most spectacular cave decorations found anywhere in the world.