Cavers heard wind roaring from beneath a rubble-choked pit in New Mexico; after years of digging they broke through in 1986, and more than 145 miles of Lechuguilla Cave have since been mapped
Photo: A map of Lechuguilla Cave in July 2019Photo credit: NPS For decades, Lechuguilla Cave was just a footnote in New Mexico’s Guadalupe Mountains: a 90-foot entrance pit leading to 400 feet of dry, dead-end passages that had once been mined for bat guano. But in the 1950s, cavers began noticing something strange: wind roaring…