The Entrance to Big Skylight Cavern in El Malpais Civic Monument. (NYT)
"Do I absolutely charge this?" I asked the esplanade forester abaft the board at the Northwest New Mexico Visitor Center, abreast the boondocks of Grants. His name tag said "Anthony Sandoval," and based on his tattoos — one of an antler, the added of a deer's arch central an outline of the Land of Enchantment — I affected he admired venison.
Mr. Sandoval recommended that I buy the "bump cap."
Cerro Americano, a cinder cone. Credit: Michael Benanav
"It's absolutely aphotic in the caves, and the ceilings are all jagged," he said. "It'd be absolutely accessible to cut your head, or alike beating yourself out." For $8, it seemed account it, aback I hoped to abstain alarming academician injuries while exploring the bedrock tubes at El Malpais Civic Monument.
El Malpais — Spanish for The Badlands, arresting el-mal-pie-EES — is the accepted name for the Zuni-Bandera Agitable Field, a abashed sea of askance and billowing basalt that sprawls over 100,000-plus acres, an hour west of Albuquerque. Five audible bedrock flows lie beside and aloft one another, in some places 475 anxiety thick.
For the geologically inclined, El Malpais is a asperous paradise. One of the world's youngest bedrock flows — called McCartys — gushed alternating actuality aloof 2,500 to 3,000 years ago, and it appearance some of the best aboriginal examples of bedrock formations on earth. Older flows, some dating aback 115,000 years, formed a arrangement of underground tubes addition for 17 afar t,he longest such arrangement in the continental United States.
Thirty cinder cones, agitable debris far added age-old than the capital bedrock fields, acceleration forth the horizon. In added words, El Malpais is like a pop-up arbiter of the magmatic armament that shaped our planet. It lures with a raw added acquaintance that, at the aforementioned time, is so acutely of this world.
While best of the bedrock acreage is aural the civic monument, genitalia of it and the surrounding breadth — including the sculpted sandstone cliffs to the east and the Chain of Craters to the south — are adequate aural El Malpais Civic Conservation Area, managed by the Bureau of Land Management.
I was absorbed in all of it, but exploring the bedrock tube caves was at the top of my list. The aftermost brace of times I'd been in the area, they had been bankrupt to the accessible to assure the park's bats from white adenoids syndrome.
The ache is associated with a bane aboriginal apparent in Northeastern states that has advance as far west as Oklahoma. For affidavit not able-bodied understood, it wakes bats anon from hibernation, back there are no bugs about for them to eat, consistent in afterlife by starvation. At some dawdling spots in Eastern states, over 90 percent of wintering bats asleep back their centralized anxiety clocks malfunctioned.
While no one knows how the bane travels, it's accessible that bodies can backpack it from one cavern to another. So from December 2010 to June 2013, visitors to El Malpais were banned from its bedrock tubes. Now, four caves are open.
A simple and chargeless admittance arrangement is in abode to abate the accident that bodies ability acquaint the bane to the park. You aloof accept to acknowledgment a catechism or two.
Information
Admission is chargeless to El Malpais Civic Cairn and Civic Conservation Area. Downloadable cavern maps and aisle guides are at nps.gov/elma. Junction Cavern is bankrupt annually from about Nov. 1 to April 1. Joe Skeen Campground has barbecue tables and outhouses but no baptize or electric hookups.
Into a Lava-Lined Underworld Abreast Albuquerque.
Title : Into a Lava-Lined Underworld Near Albuquerque, New Mexico
Description : The Entrance to Big Skylight Cavern in El Malpais Civic Monument. (NYT) "Do I absolutely charge this?" I asked the esp...