Caballo Lake & the Bat Cave

The biggest rock in Sierra County stands above Caballo Lake in the Caballo Mountains, fifteen to twenty miles south of town off I-25 — west-facing limestone running from roughly a hundred feet to close to three hundred, quality that Mountain Project itself calls honest: great in places, “pretty bad onion skin” in others. The centerpiece is the Bat Cave, a genuinely spectacular formation starting about thirty feet up the wall, roughly a hundred feet tall, capped by a triangular roof as deep as thirty feet — reached by climbing a 30-foot ladder from the base of the wall. Five more named sectors share the area — Grey Wall (also called Super Hero Wall), Gotham City, High Camp, Trojan Wall and Tufa Wall — and the Bat Cave Area is described as only the currently developed part of a larger Caballo Lake holding, which is a lead worth pulling on its own.

Plate reserved — hand-drawn map & photographs to come

The rock — and the name

Start with the best fact in Part I of this book. In 1952 Kelley and Silver, mapping the Caballo Mountains, split the Early Ordovician El Paso Group into a lower Sierrite Limestone and an upper unit they raised to formation rank and called the Bat Cave Formation. The National Geologic Map Database’s entry for it records where the name came from: Bat Cave, “whose opening is a prominent landscape mark on a sheer cliff in the upper part of the unit,” a few hundred yards northwest of the type section on the north side of Flordillo Canyon, opposite the Sierrite Mine. At that type section the formation is a lower light-coloured slope-former and an upper darker, banded, cliff-forming unit, thin- to medium-bedded, with biostromes and bioherms in the lower part.

Every detail of the climbers’ Bat Cave lines up with the geologists’. Same range, same county, same west-facing side above the reservoir; the approach past mine claims runs toward the Sierrite Mine and Cable Canyon; Bat Cave was mined for bat guano, which is as good an explanation as any for a fixed 30-foot ladder into a hole thirty feet off the deck; and “a prominent landscape mark on a sheer cliff” is a fair description of what you climb into. We stop short of calling it proven — that wants Memoir 49 or a GPS fix off the area map — but on the evidence, the cave the ladder goes into is the cave a North American rock formation is named after.

The wider escarpment explains the rest. The Caballo Mountains are an east-tilted fault block, the rift-flank uplift on the eastern shoulder of the southern Rio Grande depression: the rift dropped the valley, the block rotated, and its broken western edge now exposes about three and a half miles of section — every geologic period except the Triassic and Jurassic — in some 2,000 feet of local relief. Bottom to top the face reads reddish Proterozoic granite, amphibolite and gneiss; a dark band of Cambrian Bliss Sandstone; grey cliffs of Ordovician, Silurian and Mississippian carbonate; and ledgy Pennsylvanian limestone and shale on the crest. Unlike the Mud Springs block northwest of town, the Caballos do carry the Silurian Fusselman Dolomite and the Mississippian Lake Valley Formation.

So the six sectors are strung along a stratigraphic column, not spread across one wall, and they are probably not all in the same rock. The Bat Cave and its immediate neighbours should be upper El Paso Group. Sectors higher on the hill may well be Montoya Group — and it is worth knowing that the Upham Dolomite, a massive dark-grey cliff-forming dolomite, has its type locality near the Sierrite Mine at the head of Cable Canyon, and the cherty Aleman Formation has its type section on the north side of Cable Canyon opposite the same mine. Three formation type sections inside a few hundred yards of the climbing is not a coincidence; it is what a 3.5-mile section looks like when a fault stands it on edge.

What that means on the rock

• Onion skin. Mountain Project’s honest “great to pretty bad onion skin” names a real process. Desert carbonate dissolves and reprecipitates calcite at its surface, building a hard case-hardened rind; thermal cycling and salt weathering then pop that rind loose from the parent rock. It sounds hollow and it holds body weight right up until it doesn’t. Test everything, and distrust any bolt that may have been placed through a rind rather than into fresh rock beneath.
• Chert. The Aleman Formation is defined by its chert. Where a cherty dolomite weathers back, silica bands stand out as knobs and blades: sharp, positive, hard on the fingers.
• Dolomite versus limestone. Dolomitised rock is harder and more brittle than pure limestone and far less prone to deep solution pocketing — the Fusselman’s dolomitisation has erased most of its primary sedimentary structures. That is why these walls give features and small huecos rather than a Mediterranean pocket festival.
• The Villain Wall, a sector our sector list above does not yet carry, is described as generally solid and littered with features and small huecos, with more of the sharp grey limestone and less of the orange than the other walls — and Catwoman’s Claw there climbs brown crystal-filled pods. All three textures are diagnostic: grey is fresh rock, orange is iron-stained rind, and the pods are vugs lined with secondary calcite.
• The Tufa Wall is not a borrowed name. Those 20-foot tufas on the yellow-orange wall are calcium carbonate precipitated out of groundwater emerging at the cliff face — the same chemistry that builds travertine at the hot springs in town, twenty miles north, and the rift’s plumbing is what both have in common. Tufa implies a seep, a seep implies the wall can be wet, and young tufa is hollow and detachable at its base. Climb them; do not assume a bolt in one is a bolt in the wall.
• Aspect is a structural accident. The block tilts east, so its steep face looks west across the rift at the reservoir. Afternoon sun in winter is the reason the season here runs fall through spring.

Sectors

Six named areas fan out from the lake. The Bat Cave itself holds the crag’s serious testpieces — Helsinki (5.14d) and Titanoboa (5.13d), though sources split on the spelling (“Titanaboa” also appears, and we have not resolved which is correct). Grey Wall, also known as Super Hero Wall, sits nearby and carries the moderate classic Super Hero along with Gotham’s Finest. Gotham City lies beyond the end of the road, past High Camp — a short 70–80 foot yellow-and-orange wall directly above the upper parking area, which lends the sector its name. Trojan Wall stands to the right of the Bat Cave. Tufa Wall is reached on its own: park at the “T” 1.9 miles up the 4x4 road, walk or drive another 0.1 miles east to High Camp, then take the right-hand branch trail up a set of steps and a rising traverse.

History

This is the one corner of the county with a real, recorded history. Years ago, Bryan Pletta, Dave Baltz and Doug Teague put up a handful of mixed routes at a small cliff here — the county’s earliest known climbing, undated in every source we have found. The area then sat untouched for decades until the winter of 2008/2009, when Timmy Fairfield, John Kear, Marc Beverly and Lance Hadfield, among others, returned and built out the sport routing that defines the place today. Fairfield and Beverly in particular are known quantities in New Mexico climbing; either would likely have the full 2008/09 route list first-hand.

A 2017 trip report on the Climb Abroad blog adds color worth carrying as anecdote rather than fact: locals told the author the area was developed largely by the owner of an Albuquerque climbing gym, who bolted most of the routes to be friendly to beginners and older climbers. The same account describes the drive in as past local farms, through a tunnel under the dam, and up a twisty dirt road — consistent with what little we already had on the approach, but not yet a substitute for a turn-by-turn of our own.

Approach & access

Reaching the base requires a high-clearance or 4WD vehicle over rough road; the exact turn set and any GPS coordinates are not yet in hand, so we are withholding a written approach until we have driven it. Read this before you go regardless: active or historic mine claims sit near the approach, and Mountain Project explicitly warns climbers to stay on public land. Most of the Caballo Mountains are BLM ground, almost certainly under the Las Cruces District, but the exact boundary along this approach has not been confirmed from here. Dispersed camping is available at the site.

Routes

Route	Grade	Stars	Notes
Super Hero	5.10-/5.11	—	Grey Wall (Super Hero Wall); 5.10- to the first anchor, 5.11 if you climb through to the top. Third route from the left end of the wall.
Gotham’s Finest	—	—	Grey Wall (Super Hero Wall).
Gambit	—	—	A continuation of an unnamed 5.10a, into a large left-facing corner. Mountain Project files it under the broader Truth or Consequences tree rather than a named sector — but its own description references Super Hero Wall, which points here, to Grey Wall, rather than to Mud Mountain. Genuinely ambiguous; we note both rather than asserting either.
Zero Gravity	—	—	Starts left of Astrobunnies, somewhere in the Bat Cave area — exact sector unverified. Earlier notes had placed this route at Luna Park; the fuller record points here instead.

A crag spanning 5.6 to 5.13 across six sectors has far more than four routes on it — the rest awaits our own visit to the Bat Cave Area pages.