Is it worth crying over spilled Cheetos? Absolutely, say rangers at Carlsbad Caverns National Park
ALBUQUERQUE, NM — A bag of Cheetos is thrown on the ground. Seems insignificant, right?
Hardly.
Rangers at Carlsbad Caverns National Park in southern New Mexico are describing it as a “world-changing” event for the tiny microbes and insects that call this specialized underground environment home. The bag might have been there for a day or two, or maybe just a few hours, but those salty bits of processed corn, softened by the high humidity, caused mold to grow on the cave floor and on nearby cave formations.
“It had a huge impact on the cave ecosystem,” the park noted in a message on social mediaexplaining that crickets, mites, spiders and flies soon gathered to eat and spread the strange goop, effectively spreading the infestation.
The bright orange bag was spotted off the trail by a ranger during one of the regular inspections that park staff conduct through the Big Room, the largest single cave chamber by volume in North America, at the end of each day. They’re looking for any visitors littering the trail or any trash or other debris that might have been left behind on the paved path.
The Big Room is a popular spot in Carlsbad Caverns. It is a magical space filled with towering stalagmites, graceful stalactites, and clusters of cave popcorn.
From this subterranean wonderland in New Mexico to the lakeshores of Nevada, tributaries of the Grand Canyon and lagoons of Florida, park rangers and volunteers clean up tons of trash left behind by visitors each year in an ongoing battle to protect unique ecosystems while still allowing visitors access.
According to the National Park Service, more than 300 million people visit national parks each year, bringing and generating nearly 70 million tons of waste, most of which ends up in trash bins and recycling containers.
But for the rest of the discarded snack bags and other waste, it is often quite a job to collect the waste, and organizations such as Leave no traces have spread their message at trailheads and online.
At Carlsbad Caverns, volunteers comb the caves for lint. A five-day effort yielded a whopping 50 pounds (22.68 kilograms). Rangers also have sweep packs and spill kits for more delicate and sometimes messy work, like cleaning up human waste along the trail.
“It’s such a dark area, sometimes people don’t even know it’s there. So they walk through it and it tracks it all over the cave,” said Joseph Ward, a park guide who works specifically to spread the “leave no trace” message to park visitors and classrooms.
Park ranger equipment may include gloves, garbage bags, water, bleach mixtures for disinfecting, vacuum cleaners, and even toothbrushes and bamboo tweezers for those hard-to-reach areas.
As for the spilled Cheetos, Ward told The Associated Press it could have been prevented because the park does not allow food outside of the historic underground lunchroom.
After the bag was discovered in July, cave specialists at the park decided how best to clean it up. They scooped up most of the debris and used a toothbrush to remove rings of mold and fungus that had spread to nearby cave formations. It was a 20-minute job.
Ward says some jobs take hours and involve multiple park employees.
Robert Melnick, a professor emeritus at the University of Oregon, has studied the cultural landscape of Carlsbad Caverns, including features like a historic wooden staircase that has become a breeding ground for exotic molds and fungi. He and his team submitted a report to the park this week describing these resources and making recommendations for how the park can manage them in the future.
According to Melnick, balancing preserving and protecting landscapes with making them accessible to park managers in Carlsbad and elsewhere is a matter of fulfilling the dual mandate.
“I don’t know exactly how you would monitor that other than by constantly reminding people that the subsurface, the caves, are a very, very sensitive natural environment,” he said.
Signs throughout the park urge visitors to treat the caves with respect. Park rangers instruct visitors before they go underground. The back of each entrance ticket states what to do and what not to do.
But sometimes there’s a gap between awareness and personal responsibility, says JD Tanner, director of education and training at Leave No Trace.
Many people may be aware of the need to “keep it clean,” but Tanner said the message doesn’t always translate into action or there’s a lack of understanding that small actions — even leaving a piece of litter behind — can cause irreversible damage to a fragile ecosystem.
“If someone doesn’t feel personally invested in preserving these environments, they may not take the rules seriously,” Tanner said.
Diana Northup, a microbiologist who has spent years studying caves around the world, once crawled through the main passageway of Carlsbad Caverns to record everything people had left behind.
“So this is just one of many things,” she said of the Cheetos.
On any given day during peak season, as many as 2,000 people sail through the caves, bringing with them fragments of hair and skin, and those fragments can carry their own microbes.
“So it could be really bad or it could just be us and all the stuff we’re shedding,” Northup said of human contamination in cave environments. “But here’s the other side of the coin: The only way to protect caves is to let people see them and experience them.”
“The most important thing,” she said, “is to get people to realize that they want to preserve the caves and let them know what they can do to make that happen.”