Carlsbad Caverns National Park

The dry, barren landscape of the Chihuahuan desert disappears into a subterranean cavern that is home to some of the most magnificent geological formations. Carved by now-evaporated waters of an inland sea several millennia ago, the Guadalupe Mountain holds as many as 119 clandestine caves. Craggy formations, each fascinating in its distinct form, stay suspended from the cave's roofs, the karst-like remnants of limestone that was dissolved by sulfuric acid over great many years. A geological repository of sorts, the Carlsbad Caverns Park is home to a plethora of patterns, from The Big Room, a 4000 feet (1,220 meter) long chamber, to the Bat Cave, a guano-laced corridor that houses a majority of the caverns' bat population. The Lechuguilla Cave is perhaps the most fascinating, fabled for intricately contoured stalactites that cling to the roof, in what is deemed to be the second-deepest limestone cave in the United States.