CARLSBAD, N.M. Carlsbad Caverns National Park will host an event Oct. 25 to celebrate 100 years of preservation and protection beginning at 9:30 a.m. at the park’s visitor center. There will be a variety of ranger-led activities at the park throughout the day.
“I am very excited to share this event with our local community,” Superintendent Carmen Chapin said in a news release. “I thank the City of Carlsbad and the Chamber of Commerce for helping spread the magic of this great wonder with all of New Mexico and throughout the United States in our celebratory year.”
Signed into law by President Calvin Coolidge in 1923, the park was set aside to preserve and protect its “… extraordinary proportions and … unusual beauty and variety of natural decoration…several chambers contain stalactites, stalagmites, and other formations in such unusual number, size, beauty of form, and variety of figure …”
Carlsbad Caverns National Park preserves Carlsbad Cavern, the largest cave chamber in North America, and more than 119 other known caves including Lechuguilla Cave, the deepest in the United States. The caves formed over the last 20 million years as sulfuric acid dissolved the surrounding limestone of an ancient reef. The park also protects an extraordinary and unique ecological association of bats, cave climate, speleothems, hydrology, cave fauna, and microbes. In 1995, the United Nations recognized the worldwide significance of Carlsbad Caverns National Park by designating it as a World Heritage Site.
Twelve-to-fourteen thousand years ago, Native Americans lived in the Guadalupe Mountains. Some of their cooking ring sites and pictographs have been found within the present-day boundaries of the park.
Throughout 2023, the park and partners have provided opportunities to reflect on 100 years of preserving and protecting the park, highlighting successes, and lessons learned from yesterday, today’s challenges, and a vision for the future.
