Modern visitors to caverns have it easy

Back in 1898 — long before Carlsbad Caverns had an elevator that travels 775 feet down, Broadway-style lighting or a smoothly paved switchback trail — a 16-yearold cowboy lowered himself into a dark hole he knew nothing about using wire, wood and an oil lantern.

As the tale goes, Jim White had found the mouth of the cave days earlier when he went to investigate smoke from a wildfire. The smoke turned out to be bats, thousands of them.

He built a bonfire out of dead cactuses and pushed one flaming branch over the edge and into the hole.

“Down, down, down it went until at last the flame went out,” he later told someone who wrote down his story, excerpts of which can be found on the PBS “Weekend Explorer” website. “Finally I saw the glowing embers strike and sprinkle on the rocks below. As nearly as I could estimate, the drop must have been 200 feet.”

White decided to go in — an act of courage that floors me.

During the summer, my family and I visited the gigantic stalactite- and stalagmite-filled caverns, near the southeastern border of New Mexico, and heard White’s story via an audio tour.

Having been to Ohio Caverns many times, I thought I had a pretty good idea of what to expect at Carlsbad Caverns. But the caves dwarfed my expectations.

Under what we now call the Chihuahuan Desert lie more than 300 limestone caves, resulting from what were a great ocean and reef more than 250 million years ago.

The caves run more than 30 miles — some still haven’t been explored — but only 3 miles are open for regular public visits.

The deepest point open to visitors sits 830 feet below

the surface. (For comparison’s sake, Ohio Caverns’ is 103 feet down.)

Inside the New Mexico caverns, some of the ceilings soar higher than cathedral ceilings.

In a chamber named the Big Room, the ceiling arches more than 250 feet above the floor. The largest single cave chamber in North America, it could hold six football fields, according to the National Park Service.

The space isn’t empty. The stalactites and stalagmites rise (or cling) everywhere. They look like intricately designed works of art, waves frozen in time, melting icicles and hulking monsters.

A steep, rickety and now-closed wooden staircase shows how A monster-looking and -sized collection of stalagmites are visible inside Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico. visitors accessed the caverns in the 1920s, after Carlsbad Caverns National Park was

established. I can’t imagine it wasn’t risky.

Before that, White lowered his visitors hundreds of feet down in a guano bucket that came up to about the top of their thighs.

The cave’s awesome size and crazy structures must have truly frightened those explorers who didn’t know what they were walking into, as flickering lanterns revealed limestone giants taller than a house.

Among the early names White gave cave features: Devil’s Armchair, Devil’s Den, Witch’s Finger.

The ominous shadows and darkness that seemed to stretch endlessly would have sent my active imagination into overdrive — and me fleeing.

I’m glad White was made of sterner stuff — and that cave access is so much easier today.