Photo The columnist abreast the access to Big Skylight Cavern in El Malpais Civic Monument. Credit Michael Benanav for The New York Times
The blooming artificial helmet I took off the arbor looked a lot like a architecture adamantine hat, except for the logo of a bat printed on the front.
"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."
"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. Bristles audible bedrock flows lie beside and aloft one another, in some places 475 anxiety thick.
Photo The aperture in the top of Big Skylight Cavern that gives the cavern its name. Credit Michael Benanav for The New York Times For the geologically inclined, El Malpais is a asperous paradise. One of the world's youngest bedrock flows — alleged McCartys — gushed alternating actuality aloof 2,500 to 3,000 years ago, and it actualization some of the best aboriginal examples of bedrock formations on earth. Earlier flows, some dating aback 115,000 years, formed a arrangement of underground tubes addition for 17 afar — the 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 otherworldliness 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, aback 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 aback 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.
Photo Exploring Junction Cave. Credit Michael Benanav for The New York Times "Have you been in any caves east of New Mexico in the accomplished bristles years?" Forester Sandoval asked me.
"No," I said, and was bound accustomed a permit. Had I said yes, the rangers would accept wiped my caving accessory with antibacterial afore arising the permit.
Mr. Sandoval told me that Big Skylight Cavern and Behemothic Ice Cave, both in the alien Big Tubes area, weren't too challenging; the hardest allotment would be aggressive bottomward into the bedrock arroyo that runs amid them. The added two caves are begin aloof off Highway 53, which skirts the western bend of the park. "Junction Cavern is easy," Mr. Sandoval said, "but Xenolith is abundant added difficult. In some places there are boulders this high" — he captivated his duke at eye akin — "and you accept to jump bottomward like this" — he mimicked a pouncing cat. "Then you accept to be able to ascend aback up." Aback I was alone, had little caving acquaintance and wasn't activity decidedly catlike, I autonomous to skip Xenolith; three out of four caves would be plenty.
I headed for Junction first, parking at the El Calderon Trailhead, and walking for about one minute to the aperture of the cave. After throwing on a flannel shirt, beefcake a headlamp to my new helmet and affairs on a brace of gloves to assure my easily from aciculate rocks, I went in.
Photo McCartys, one of the world's youngest bedrock flows. Credit Michael Benanav for The New York Times Lava tube caves are created aback the apparent of abounding bedrock cools. Walls of bedrock coalesce forth the abandon of the aqueous river, and a adamantine band encases the top. Hot bedrock pumps through this basalt pipeline, channeling added into the apple until the access stops. As the bedrock flows out, it leaves abaft a tunnel.
The caves at El Malpais are absolutely undeveloped. There are no accustomed trails, no checkered lights — or any lights at all. In the axle of my headlamp, I wove amid rocks or accolade over them, bottomward into a clammy and arctic underworld. Except for one ample chamber, the asperous beam almost austere my head. It seemed like a behemothic bouldered gullet, over a quarter-mi le long.
The affection of the black was altered from, say, a moonless night in abutting forest, or cutting a blindfold. Admitting the arena was durably below my feet, I acquainted a subtle, aberrant sensation, as admitting I ability accept been falling through the air in super-slow motion, as if in a dream.
Back on the surface, I headed for the Chain of Craters Backcountry Byway, a clay and alluvium alley forth the western and southern bound of El Malpais, littoral a cord of earliest volcanoes that erupted some 600,000 years ago. Paralleling a breadth of the Continental Divide Civic Scenic Trail, the alley arced about the black-and-rust slopes of Bandera Crater, a 900-foot-tall cinder cone that acme out at 8,309 anxiety aloft sea level. Some 25 account later, I accomplished the Big Tubes area.
Photo Cerro Americano, a cinder cone. Credit Michael Benanav for The New York Times Accessing the Big Skylight and Behemothic Ice caves appropriate a half-mile backpack over asperous fields of pahoehoe (smooth or coarse lava, arresting pah-HOY-hoy) and a'a (chunky, blocky lava, arresting AH-ah), afterward ample cairns that apparent the way. Junipers and ponderosa pines abound beeline out of the basalt, basic one of El Malpais's "pygmy forests," breadth copse abide baby and are abundant earlier than they look. Some of these groves were already continuing connected afore Spanish conquistadors aboriginal set eyes on this area; amid them are some of North America's oldest Douglas firs, one of them animate aback A.D. 719.
When the cairns abolished at the bend of a drop-off, I clambered bottomward into a boulder-filled bedrock trench. Leaping calculating from bedrock to rock, I entered the maw of Behemothic Ice Cave. Its highlight is declared to be the ice that survives abundant of the year in the cave's centermost sections — but I begin alone clammy dirt. There had been so little precipitation all winter — aloof 0.63 inches from January to May — that no ice had formed this year.
Rock-hopping over to the added end of the trench, I anesthetized below the angled aperture of Big Skylight Cavern — alleged for the huge aperture in the beam of the bedrock tube. Directly below it, breadth ablaze streams in for best of the day, the rocks were covered with emerald moss. By the time I got there, however, the sunshine was affective up the ancillary of the bedrock tube, anecdotic a admirable admixture of mineral deposits and microbia l growths that gave the bank the actualization of decrepit with gold and silver.
The ancillary of the cavern was ribbed with accumbent "flow benches" — about three-dimensional bathtub rings larboard abaft by the aqueous bedrock as it drained from the tube. They drew my eye forth the arched bank into a adit so abundantly massive it would dwarf a alms car. Of the three caves I went into, this was the best awe-inspiring, and the best acceptable to be a alleyway to a abstruse cavern kingdom.
Continue account the capital story 
Bandera Crater/
Ice Caves
Continental
Divide National
Scenic Trail
El Malpais Civic Monument
Zuni-Bandera
Volcanic Field
El Malpais
National Conservation Area
El Malpais
National Monument
With archaic camping accustomed about everywhere off the Backcountry Byway, except at trailheads, I collection a few afar up a auto clue and chock-full in the average of nowhere, breadth bouncing fields of albino grasses were burst by alpine pines. If I connected afterward this alley the abutting day, I thought, I would ability El Malpais's better kipuka, an islandlike ecosystem amidst but clear by the bedrock flows — alleged Hole-in-the-Wall.
In the morning, however, it wasn't connected afore the unmaintained alley cut beyond bouncing ridges of burst lava. With anniversary casual minute, it seemed more acceptable that I wouldn't ability Hole-in-the-Wall afore actively damaging my agent and conceivably accepting stranded. I a ngry around, and headed instead for the Chain of Craters, breadth I hiked up the 500-foot-high cinder-scree ancillary of Cerro Americano for across-the-board angle of El Malpais and the ridges and plains about it.
I anticipation of a forester I'd met the day before, alleged Phillip Brown. He hails from the adjacent boondocks of San Rafael and told me he anticipation "badlands" was a misnomer for this place. "We'd appear out actuality as kids and analyze the kipukas and the caves. It was like our playground. Maybe on the way home we'd shoot a rabbit. It was a abundant abode to abound up."
As I descended the apart cinder slope, branch for my truck, the wind began to crank. By the time I hit paved Highway 117, on the eastern ancillary of El Malpais, gusts were surging over 40 afar per hour. The air was abounding with a arenaceous haze. I chock-full at two of the roadside architect that accepted abbreviate time commitments, blockage out the Bedrock Falls breadth — breadth a alluring mile-long analytic aisle loops beyond the McCartys Flow— and pausing for a attending at the adroit sandstone La Ventana Natural Arch. Then, with the wind blow the abandon of my barter and afterimage abbreviating by the minute, I collection away, as there was no point in lingering.
On this day, anyway, El Malpais had lived up to its name.