Intrigued when he came upon the large hole in the ground, Jim White did what any teenager would do, he began to descend the opening, only to find a drop-off into the darkness too steep to climb. He threw a hastily made torch off the cliff and as it careened out of sight, Jim soon…
In 1898, 16-year-old Jim White was rounding up cattle in the Chihuahuan Desert in present day New Mexico, when up on a ridge he saw a massive plume of dark “smoke.” Fearing wildfire, Jim made his way up the ridge to inspect the source of the smoke… ≡Canon R5/RF24-240 83mm f/6.3 1/200sec iso-125
16-year-old Jim White, riding to inspect the source of smoke he observed on a ridge in the Chihuahuan Desert in 1898, soon realize the “smoke” he had seen from a distance was millions of bats, primarily Brazilian free-tailed bats, spiraling out of a massive hole in the ground… ≡Canon R5/RF24-240 24mm f/18 1/320sec iso-2500
Unable to reach the floor in the first attempt of entering his new discovery, 16-year-old Jim White would return later with homemade wire, a wood ladder and a kerosene lantern. So, in 1898, alone, Jim descended down the cliff roughly 60 feet to the first landing inside the cave, and began exploring the pitch-black tunnels….
On subsequent journeys, Jim White would continue several miles underground and descend vertically more than 700 feet below the surface. He spent the next several years exploring the cave system, naming iconic landmarks like the Big Room, King’s Palace, and Devil’s Spring. For a long time, his claims of a “buried fairyland” were dismissed as…
For Jim White, who discovered the cave in 1898 at age 16 while herding cattle in the Chihuahuan Desert, recognition finally arrived in the early 1920s when photographer Ray V. Davis took its first interior photographs. The photos sparked a National Geographic expedition led by Dr. Willis T. Lee, which confirmed the cave’s immense scale….
Having spent eight years working at Wisconsin’s Cave of the Mounds during my younger years, visiting Carlsbad Caverns National Park was both an extraordinary underground adventure and a tough photographic challenge. Capturing photos in caves like Carlsbad Caverns isn’t easy because the artificial lighting is kept minimal to protect the fragile ecosystem. Even the best…