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How to Move Water Six Miles up a Mountain and Make Sure It’s Safe

Providing water to 400,000 park visitors a year at 4,000 feet in the Chihuahuan Desert is an engineering achievement. Testing that water gets help from a little insect.

By Max Bray

About this article

This article was first published online on March 31, 2026, as part of the Picturing the Unseen series.

Photo of mountain slope with dry grass, shrubby evergreens, rocks, and a white pipe snaking up it.
View from the east parking lot of Carlsbad Caverns National Park, showing the park's water supply pipeline running up the hill.

NPS / Max Bray

The visitor center and park facilities of Carlsbad Caverns National Park, New Mexico, sit in the Guadalupe Mountains at 4,680 feet. They’re perched above an impressive view of El Capitan, Guadalupe Peak, and Lincoln National Forest—with not a drop of water to be seen. So serving around 400,000 visitors a year takes a little creative engineering.

The area has a rich history of land use, with Native peoples likely visiting it as early as 1,000 BCE.

South of the visitor center, tucked into a valley near the Black River, is a lesser-known area of the park called Rattlesnake Springs. The area has a rich history of land use, with Native peoples likely visiting it as early as 1,000 BCE. In the 1500s, Rattlesnake Springs became a stop on Spanish trade routes. A private rancher used the spring for livestock and crops in the 1800s. In the 1930s, the National Park Service acquired the historic spring and began construction to pipe water six miles up the mountain to the park.

Today, this little spring provides water for all park operations. “The water that you drink anywhere in the park starts at the aquifer beneath Rattlesnake Springs and gets pumped up through our well house," said National Park Service water operator Will Hagwood. "That's where it is treated and tested for the first time. From the pump house, it gets pumped through four miles of pipe to our first tank that holds 250,000 gallons.”

View of a small pond with submerged gray building, trees, and blue skies in the background. The pond flows over a small built waterfall in the foreground.
Water from Rattlesnake Springs pours into an irrigation ditch. The spring house in the background hasn’t been used since the park installed submersible wells.

NPS / Max Bray

It gets tested again before booster pumps pipe it up another two miles to the second tank, which holds 350,000 gallons. “After that, gravity does the rest of the work,” said Hagwood. “It flows downhill for the final two miles into the visitor center and over to the historic district.” In 2025, the park used about two million gallons of water.

The water gets tested daily at the visitor center and weekly throughout other areas of the park. The health of the ecosystem supporting the spring is monitored through testing by National Park Service scientists from the Dragonfly Mercury Project. Mercury, a neurological toxin, naturally occurs in Rattlesnake Springs.

In 2024, mercury in the spring was at a “sub-impairment” level, less than the EPA limit.

The EPA considers drinking water mercury levels at or below two parts per billion (0.002 mg/L) as low risk for harm to humans. That’s the equivalent of about two drops in 10,000 gallons of water. To gauge the mercury levels, National Park Service employees capture dragonfly larvae at the spring and send them for testing. In 2024, mercury in the spring was at a “sub-impairment” level, less than the EPA limit. The video shows how we do the sampling.

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Duration:
3 minutes, 59 seconds

Carlsbad Caverns National Park recently collected dragonfly larvae for the Dragonfly Mercury Project. Here is a day out in the field with our Resources team and Park Guide sampling larvae.

Headshot of smiling man with dark hair, straw hat, and NPS uniform

About the author

Max Bray is a visual information specialist with Carlsbad Caverns National Park. Image credit: NPS / Max Bray

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This article is available for unedited republication, free of charge. We ask that you use the following credit: Originally published as “How to Move Water Six Miles up a Mountain and Make Sure It’s Safe.” on nps.gov, March 31, 2026.

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Cite this article

Bray, Max. 2026. “How to Move Water Six Miles up a Mountain and Make Sure It’s Safe.” National Park Service, March 31, 2026. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/psv40n1_how-to-move-water-six-miles-up-a-mountain-and-make-sure-its-safe.htm

Part of a series of articles titled Picturing the Unseen.

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Last updated: March 31, 2026