The story of Carlsbad Caverns begins with an illiterate teenage cowboy who despite no training in caving, mapping, or exploring of any kind, became the most significant figure in the Park’s history.

In 1898 while rounding up cattle, 16-year old James Larkin White observed in a panic what he believed to be black smoke from a brush fire in the distance. Riding hard over the unforgiving landscape of the Chihuahuan desert to investigate, White was stunned to discover that it was not smoke from a fire that he had seen, but rather a “whirlwind” of thousands upon thousands of Brazilian free-tailed bats rising up from a massive dark hole in the ground.

White became fascinated with this natural phenomenon and returned every day for the next week to observe this mass exodus of bats, until one fateful morning his curiosity got the best of him and he decided to enter the cavern. Constructing a make-shift ladder out of spare pieces of wood and a spool of wire, White begin his first precarious descent into what is now known as the “Natural Entrance” of the cavern, dropping over 60 feet and discovering along the way a vast limestone wonderland full of massive stalactites and stalagmites.

Driven purely by his own will and the faint light of a simple wax lantern, White would spend the next several years descending deeper and deeper into the cave, discovering, mapping, and naming nearly famous feature of the cavern, including the 4,000-foot long “Big Room” located almost 750 feet below the earth. In the process, White would become a tireless advocate for the cavern, even helping tourists enter by lowering them down in a “guano bucket.”

Today, White’s impact is felt everywhere: his advocacy led to the Cavern being protected formally as a National Park in 1930, the original names he provided for cave formations remain, and the town around the Cavern is named in his honor.

A short two-hour drive from El Paso, the Cavern can now safely be entered either via elevator or a short hike down the Natural Entrance and is an absolutely stunning place to visit. Here are my photos from my trip into this vast and epic underworld: