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| Carlsbad Caverns National Park Weather |
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39°F | | CLEAR | | Visibility:
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From the WSW at 9 mph |
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|  | | (NPS Photo by Peter Jones) | | The natural entrance to Carlsbad Cavern. | 
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President Calvin Coolidge established Carlsbad Cave National Monument on October 25, 1923, under the provisions of the Antiquities Act, to protect scenic Carlsbad Cave. On May 14, 1930, Congress established Carlsbad Caverns National Park. In 1978, Congress designated 71 percent of the park’s surface area as wilderness. The park was designated a World Heritage Site in 1995 to protect the “physical and biological formations and groups which are of universal world-wide value and interest.”
There are more than 100 known caves in the park, including the internationally known Carlsbad Cavern and Lechuguilla Cave. The park lies in the Guadalupe Mountains, near the northern end of the Capitan Reef geologic formation, a limestone reef that formed approximately 250 million years ago at the margin of a Permian ocean basin. Today, the park is one of the few large protected areas of the northern Chihuahuan Desert.
The park contains habitat for many plants and animals that are at the geographic limits of their ranges. For example, the ponderosa pine reaches its extreme eastern limit here, the federally threatened Lee’s pincushion cactus is endemic, and several species of reptiles are at the edges of their distributions. The desert grasslands of the Southwest contain some of the highest diversity of mammals, birds and reptiles in the United States. The park provides important habitat for top predators such as cougars, and is home to what is perhaps the largest colony of cave swallows in the northern hemisphere. An important colony of Mexican free-tailed bats reside and raise young in Carlsbad Cavern every summer. Rattlesnake Springs, a rare desert riparian area that was recently designated an Important Bird Area, draws birders from around the world to see some of the 300-plus species that have been noted there. Current checklists for park fauna identify 64 species of mammals, 342 species of birds, and 56 different reptiles and amphibians, despite the lack of thorough inventories.
The park extends for about 34 kilometers (21 miles) southwestward from the plains, along the uplands of the Capitan Reef (or escarpment), and into the high country of the Guadalupe Mountains. Elevations within the park rise from 1,095 meters (3,595 feet) in the desert lowlands to 1,987 meters (6,520 feet) atop the escarpment. The park encompasses 18,926 hectares (46,766 acres) of federal land, including the Carlsbad Caverns Wilderness Area—13,406 hectares (33,125 acres) of remote and challenging terrain. The reef uplands, comprising much of the park, have been described as a broad “gently sloping peneplain, broken at intervals by deeply incised canyons.” The reef escarpment is dissected by several deeply cut, visually spectacular, and biologically diverse canyons.
The park has a semiarid, continental climate with mild winters, warm summers, and summer rains. The mean annual temperature is 19º C (63º F) and mean annual precipitation is 36.6 cm (14.4 in). |
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