When is peak fall foliage at Carlsbad Caverns National Park?

We don’t forecast fall color at Carlsbad Caverns National Park. Chihuahuan desert scrub. No deciduous canopy. Publishing a modeled date here would be a category error rather than an uncertain forecast.

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National Park·New Mexico·46,458 acres

Carlsbad Caverns National Park

Forecast issued Nov 10, 7:57am ET

We don’t forecast fall color here. Chihuahuan desert scrub. No deciduous canopy. Our model reads latitude and elevation and will happily produce a date for anywhere; publishing one here would be a category error rather than an uncertain forecast, so we don’t.

Still greenStartingNearly peakPeakPast peakNo fall canopy we forecast

Around Carlsbad Caverns National Park The park is outlined. The counties around it are painted by how far along their color is today, Nov 10.

That’s 4 days later than our model alone would say. This September has been running warm, which shifts peak color.

The place

You take the elevator 750 feet straight down (or walk, if you have the knees for it) and step into the Big Room, an underground chamber spanning 8.2 acres with a ceiling 255 feet overhead. Then in the evening you sit in the amphitheater at the natural entrance and watch roughly 400,000 Brazilian free-tailed bats spiral out in a living vortex that lasts 45 minutes. Two experiences. Both will rearrange your sense of scale.

Established 1930. About 410,000/year visitors.

Plan this trip

If you can only come on certain days

Set the days you can be here. Everything under them answers for those days, not for peak.

ArrivingLeaving

Sunday, November 1 to Monday, November 2

You’ll find it peak color.

That's the day our forecast puts peak color here.

What turns: bigtooth maple, willow, velvet ash, Fremont cottonwood, Arizona walnut
Entrance: $15

What turns, and when

bigtooth maple17%
willow16%
velvet ash15%
Fremont cottonwood15%
Arizona walnut8%
chinkapin oak8%

Also named across New Mexico, outside what the canopy read measures here: Quaking Aspen, Narrowleaf Cottonwood, Gambel Oak, Rocky Mountain Maple.

Aspens turn gold in the Sangre de Cristo and Jemez mountains, Gambel oaks go russet and orange at lower elevations, and cottonwoods line the Rio Grande bosque in butter yellow.

Across New Mexico as a whole: Late September at 10,000 feet, early-to-mid October at lower elevations.

Questions people ask about Carlsbad Caverns National Park

When is peak fall foliage at Carlsbad Caverns National Park?: We don’t forecast fall color at Carlsbad Caverns National Park. Chihuahuan desert scrub. No deciduous canopy. Publishing a modeled date here would be a category error rather than an uncertain forecast.
Is there an entrance fee at Carlsbad Caverns National Park?: Entrance fee $15.

This forecast is built from the species that stand here, their elevation and this September’s weather, and corrected in season by cameras, foresters and our own crew. Out here we score it against NASA's satellite record of when the canopy shuts down, read inside each unit’s own boundary: two dates in three land within 12 days of it. How this map is made

All of New Mexico

Nearby, and when they turn

Lincoln is on the map above, with its own date.

White Sands National ParkNM · about 112 miles
Peak Nov 2 best Nov 1 to 4