The New Mexico park says that a discarded snack bag may seem trivial but the impact to the ecosystem can be huge, urging visitors to leave the world better than they found it.

Rangers recently found a bag of Cheetos (still full of food) dropped off the trail in the Big Room, which is the largest single cave chamber by volume in North America. “At the scale of human perspective, a spilled snack bag may seem trivial, but to the life of the cave it can be world changing,” the post said.

The park noted that the cave's humidity softened the processed corn, which became a host to microbial life and fungi. Officials respond after tourist's dropped bag of Cheetos threatens national park ecosystem: 'A spilled snack bag may seem trivial,

It’s pretty simple — leave no trace. But at least one person didn’t get the message and left behind a bag of Cheetos at Carlsbad Caverns National Park during a visit earlier this summer.

Park Service employee Erich B. Koenig discovered spilled junk food inside New Mexico’s Carlsbad Caverns in 2023. His post about human impact on delicate ecosystems sparked a glut of media coverage.

CARLSBAD, N.M. (WKRC) - National park officials called a dropped bag of Cheetos "world changing." Carlsbad Caverns National Park officials issued a statement on its Facebook page regarding a bag of Cheetos that had been dropped at the cave's " Big Room. "

Plain water is the only thing visitors are allowed to consume inside the huge cavern at Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico. Cheetos are a no-go, and the recent park visitor who dropped a bag full of them created a “huge impact” on the cave’s ecosystem, park rangers said Friday in a Facebook post.

The government agency overseeing all 63 of the country’s national parks has previously released statistics showing that it sorts through an average of 70 million pounds of garbage a year, while a spike in visitor numbers post-pandemic has exacerbated the problem.