Carlsbad Caverns elevator fiasco drags into new year

It’s nothing short of a travesty that the main passenger elevators at Carlsbad Caverns National Park have been out of service for more than a year — and that it could take another year before they are back in operation.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of the roughly 430,000 people who visit the park annually are forced to either curtail or forgo visiting the iconic cave system — given the limited capacity of the two operating freight elevators.

U.S. Rep. Steve Pearce, a Republican whose district includes Carlsbad Caverns, says bureaucratic red tape in the National Park Service’s contracting process is the culprit — along with an estimated $12 billion backlog in deferred maintenance at the nation’s 58 national parks.

At last check, the bureaucracy hadn’t even managed to issue a contract for the project.

Carlsbad Caverns has two sets of elevators that carry visitors down to the massive Big Room 750 feet underground — a pair of passenger elevators that can carry 16 passengers each and a pair of freight elevators that can carry eight passengers apiece.

The primary passenger elevators, built in 1955, have been out of service since November 2015. One of freight elevators, which date to the 1930s, broke down in the fall of 2015 and remained out of service for nearly six months. During that time, the second freight elevator was reserved for emergencies. Both freight elevators are currently working, but no one knows for how long.

Much to the state’s embarrassment, President Obama and his family had to ride the freight elevator when they visited the caverns in June.

Park officials say it will cost in the neighborhood of $20 million to refurbish all four elevators. But that would be money well spent, given the caverns’ importance to the state’s economy and its status as a World Heritage Site.

Park spokeswoman Valerie Gohlke estimates the faulty elevators are curtailing park visits by about 11 percent — which also costs New Mexico in tourism dollars.

Without the elevators, visitors have to complete a 3.75-mile round-trip hike from the cave’s main entrance down to the Big Room and back again. Elevation changes are roughly equivalent to climbing nearly 80 flights of stairs.

With only the freight elevators available, visitors who don’t want to — or can’t — hike back out of the caverns must wait in long lines for a ride up to the surface. And for many seniors, small children, disabled visitors and others, climbing back out is simply not an option.

The longer it takes to get the elevators back on line, the more people will avoid visiting what we know to be an amazing and unique natural wonder.

As the federal government struggles to take care of properties it already has set aside for protection, the current administration continues to add to its inventory in large parcels.

While some of the new places may be deserving of protection, Pearce and the rest of the state’s congressional delegation need to redouble their efforts to convince the incoming administration that the Carlsbad Caverns elevators are important enough to fix sooner, rather than later.