In 1898, a sixteen-year-old ranch hand named Jim White was riding the New Mexico desert at dusk when he saw what looked like smoke boiling straight out of the ground. There was no fire anywhere in sight. He rode closer to find out what was burning.

Smoke With No Fire

What White found wasn't smoke at all. It was bats, pouring by the thousands out of a hole in the desert floor, spiraling up into the evening sky. He sat and watched for half an hour before the darkness sent him back to camp.

He kept the sighting to himself for days, worried the other cowboys on the ranch would laugh him off. Curiosity won out. He went back to the hole to see how far down it went.

Down a Ladder of Wire

White had no rope and no gear built for caving, so he made his own. He twisted wire and scraps of wood into a crude ladder and lowered himself into the dark, holding a kerosene lamp in one hand and the ladder in the other.

He dropped roughly sixty feet before his light found open space below - the first chamber of what turned into one of the largest cave systems in North America. As he pushed farther in over the following years, his names for the rooms shifted from spooked to plainspoken: Devil's Spring and Witch's Finger gave way to the Big Room and Left Hand Tunnel.

The Hole Became a National Park

The cave White found by chasing smoke is now Carlsbad Caverns National Park, and the hole itself is still called the Natural Entrance.

Several hundred thousand Brazilian free-tailed bats roost in the cave each summer, migrating in from Mexico to raise their young in the dark.

Visitors seated on the stone benches at the Bat Flight Amphitheater at Carlsbad Caverns National Park at dusk, waiting for the bat flight, ranger nearby — The amphitheater at the Natural Entrance, where the nightly bat flight program is held.

You Can Still Watch It Happen

Every evening from April through October, a park ranger gives a short talk at the Natural Entrance before sunset. Then everyone goes quiet and watches the same hole White found in 1898.

The bats spiral out counter-clockwise, thousands at a time, for up to three hours. No cameras, phones, or recording devices are allowed at the amphitheater, so what visitors see, they only get to keep in memory.

The seats are free. No reservation is required. The show still starts the same way it did for one spooked teenager more than a century ago: with the sky over the desert filling with bats.

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