Lechuguilla Cave

Interesting facts

A strain of Paenibacillus bacteria from the cave, isolated from the surface for around four million years, proved naturally resistant to many modern antibiotics, including daptomycin.

Unlike most limestone caves, Lechuguilla was dissolved from the bottom up by sulfuric acid, formed from hydrogen sulfide that seeped upward from nearby oil deposits.

Before 1986 the known cave was just a 27-metre entrance pit called Misery Hole and about 120 metres of dry, dead-end passage.

Cavers heard wind roaring up through the rubble floor in the 1950s, but digging was only permitted in 1984; the breakthrough came on 25 May 1986.

In 2012 cavers climbed more than 125 metres up into a dome and found a new section named Oz, with a vast room called Munchkinland.

The Oz section also holds Kansas Twister, a pit more than 155 metres from floor to ceiling and the deepest yet found in Carlsbad Caverns National Park.

Besides giant gypsum chandeliers, the cave holds lemon-yellow sulfur deposits, hydromagnesite balloons, cave pearls, rusticles and helictites that grew underwater.

It was the first cave known to reach deep enough into the Guadalupe Mountains for scientists to study five separate geological formations from the inside.

The cave takes its name from its canyon, which is named after Agave lechuguilla, a spiny desert plant that grows there.

The BBC team behind Planet Earth waited two years for permission to film the Chandelier Ballroom for the series' 2006 episode on caves.

Why it is worth it

For most of the twentieth century, Lechuguilla was written off as a minor cave: a modest passage that miners worked briefly around 1914 for bat guano to sell as fertilizer, then abandoned once it stopped paying. Cavers who kept coming back suspected there was more to it, based on air rising through a dig at the bottom of the entrance rubble.

They were right. In 1986, a team broke through that rubble into a system that just kept going — more than 240 kilometers surveyed since, making Lechuguilla one of the ten longest caves on Earth and, at nearly 490 meters deep, one of the deepest in the United States. What they found inside included gypsum "chandeliers" up to six meters long and hair-thin gypsum needles, formations found in almost no other cave anywhere.

None of it is visible to the public the way Carlsbad Caverns next door is. Lechuguilla has never been developed for tourism and never will be: access is limited to scientific researchers, survey teams, and National Park Service management trips, because the formations are fragile enough that a stray footprint or a shift in the cave's air chemistry can damage speleothems that took hundreds of thousands of years to grow. That isolation has also made the cave a target for microbiologists studying bacteria that evolved cut off from the surface for a very long time.

Good to know

Surveyed length: over 240 km, one of the ten longest caves in the world.
No public access exists or is planned — entry is by research or NPS permit only, unlike neighboring Carlsbad Caverns.

Getting there

36 km from Carlsbad. Cavern City Air Terminal (CNM) is about 28 km away.

From the encyclopaedia

Lechuguilla Cave is a cave in Carlsbad Caverns National Park, New Mexico, United States, known for its unusual geology, rare formations, and pristine condition. At 152.11 miles (244.80 km), it is the ninth-longest explored cave in the world. Its measured depth of 1,588.6 feet (484.2 m) makes it the seventh-deepest cave in the United States.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0