Finding the Caverns

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by Janice Van Cleve

Carlsbad Caverns is a magickal place by any estimation. Far back in the Permian Period, some 250 million years ago, the valley that stretched out before me at my visit was a vast sea called the Delaware Basin. The range of hills dancing in the orange glow of evening on the far horizon used to be the opposite shore. This was one of many ancient bays of Pangaea, when all the continents of the earth were united as one. Around the edge of this bay, billions of sea creatures piled their remains to build up a huge wall of limestone called Captain's Reef.

Time passed. The basin dried up, and sediments buried the reef. Pangaea was broken, and the continents drifted away from each other. Huge tectonic pressures thrust the land up a mile or more, and erosion ate away the sediments. Captain's Reef was exposedfor many miles along the eastern flank of the Guadalupe Mountains. The falling water table permitted air to mix with hydrogen sulfide in the cracks and fissures of the limestone shelf, creating sulfuric acid that ate away the rock and created the caverns beneath. Over millions of years, rainwater percolating down through the limestone from the surface above carried minerals to the caverns to decorate them with a wild display of fantasy and whimsy.

How to get there: If you are an extraterrestrial, you can land your spaceship at Roswell, New Mexico, which is just 75 miles north. If you are a regular Terran, the closest airport is El Paso. From there, it is a very bleak 150-mile drive in a rental car across a desolate countryside with not a restroom in sight.