Carlsbad Caverns National Park

Carlsbad Caverns sits in southeastern New Mexico, about two and a half hours from El Paso. Its centerpiece is the Big Room, the largest single cave chamber in North America, a limestone hall 4,000 feet long with a ceiling 255 feet overhead. Skip the elevator and walk down the steep Natural Entrance Trail instead, descending 750 feet the way early explorers entered. Summer through October is the time to go, when hundreds of thousands of bats spiral out of the cave mouth at dusk in the free evening bat flight program.