Bottomless Lakes: Cowboys, Sinkholes, and New Mexico's First State Park
Near Roswell, New Mexico
Twelve miles east of Roswell, along United States Highway Three Hundred Eighty, a chain of dark blue lakes sits in the desert like something left over from a wetter world. They are called Bottomless Lakes, and the name comes from a story.
The story goes that in the days of open range, a group of cowboys came across the deep clear pools and wanted to measure how far down they went. They tied their ropes together in a long line and lowered it into the nearest lake. They ran out of rope before they touched bottom. The cowboys concluded the pools had no bottom at all, and the name stuck.
They do have bottoms. The lakes are sinkholes, formed where underground water dissolved the limestone and gypsum beneath the surface, causing the ground to collapse into the cavern below. The deepest one reaches about ninety feet. They are fed by groundwater from the same underlying artesian aquifer that transformed Roswell's agriculture in the eighteen nineties.
In nineteen thirty-three, Bottomless Lakes became New Mexico's first state park, established during the tenure of Governor Arthur Seligman. During the Great Depression, the Civilian Conservation Corps built the park's basic infrastructure, including buildings still in use today. The park now covers around fourteen hundred acres and includes nine lakes strung along a limestone escarpment on the eastern edge of the Pecos Valley. The cowboys who named them were wrong about the depth. They were right about the beauty.
