Santa Rosa, New Mexico, The Blue Hole

Santa Rosa is a small city on the Pecos River in eastern New Mexico, and it has an unlikely celebrity: a natural pool called the Blue Hole, a roughly circular sinkhole about eighty feet across where an underground spring pushes three thousand gallons of water per minute up from the aquifer below. The water holds at a constant sixty-two degrees year-round and runs so clear it appears impossibly blue. Indigenous peoples and Spanish settlers used the spring for centuries, and Coronado Road travelers on what became Route Sixty-Six made it a landmark pit stop. The Blue Hole became a federal fish hatchery in nineteen thirty-two and later a dive training center, drawing certified divers from across the Southwest into the cave system below, which descends to roughly two hundred feet and has never been fully mapped.