2007-09-08, Sammer Gateway: 卡尔斯贝洞窟国家公园

It is early evening and soon this amphitheater will be standing 1 room only for the evening show. Bats, hundreds of thousands of Mexican Free-tailed bats, are hungry tornado 2 that swirls 3 out of New Mexico's Carlsbad Caverns 5 each night in search of food. It's one of the many sights enjoyed by the park's half million visitors each year. There are more than 100 known caves in the Carlsbad Caverns National Park. One of the caverns is not only a popular attraction but also a potential problem. About 1 in 3 visitors stops to fuel up in this underground lunchroom. The park service conducted an environmental assessment 6 of the caverns, and in 1993 concluded that this lunchroom had to go. Among other problems the study said that light, heat, and fumes 7 associated with the lunchroom were probably damaging the delicate limestone 8 formations that are Carlsbad's crown jewels. There's also a concern that it's disruptive to the bats. Trouble is for many visitors the lunchroom is part of the show.

Most every visitor that has ever been here before, you ask them what they remember, and they can remember the bats and they can remember the underground lunchroom. We ate lunch in the underground lunchroom.

Picking up where his father left off, Frank Hodnett has built a multimillion-dollar concession 9 here, including a second restaurant and gift shop up top. Cavernous in itself, the entire lunchroom sits on a paved floor with seating for some 700 people. Some kiosks here date from the 30s, and they are solid concrete. Frank Hodnett maintains that tearing out the facility would cause more environmental havoc 10 than leaving well enough alone.

If you took everything out, and not allow another visitor in here, it would never be restored to the natural state. So what we have to do is manage the resource the best we can.

Randy Rasmussen wasn't convinced. He ran a regional office of the National Park's Conservation Association.

There are issues associated with demolition 11, it has to be studied, but I think in the long term, my organization and others would support those types of activities that remove this, return this to a more natural state.

Wandering through the enormous, 8.2-acre cavern 4 known as the Big Room, tourists, even the kids show up quiet reverence 12 for the place. The park service and environmentalists say the lunchroom is a glaring contrast.

This is like funneling 13 that you simply fall(s) into a plastic tube and running the visitors through a, into a giant water slide.

It appears that at the bottom of the scientific and political abyss, the food fight in Carlsbad Caverns is at least partly a matter of taste.