The SWR website has was completely offline for over a month, but has now been restored to service.

[UPDATE 2026-07-24: after some discussions over email we believe we basically understood what happened that made the website go down and for people to lose administrative access, and we believe there is now a better awareness at NSS that will hopefully avoid this kind of situation in the future.]

Due to a still unexplained reason, the SWR website which is hosted on the NSS servers, suddenly stopped working, all website access and links were broken, and all administrative privileges of the SWR Website Committee were deleted from the Plesk interface used to manage the website, so nobody was able to fix this.

Despite efforts to contact the right person, no mitigation or explanation was forthcoming. However, thanks to a member of the NSS website server team, our access to the Plesk hosting tool for swr.caves.org has been restored, which let us also restore the website as it was in May from a backup.

We still do not know what happened or why, but for now everything on the website appears to be restored to its previous functionality. Please contact the SWR Website Committee if any information on the website appears to be missing or outdated.

Thanks to everyone for their patience, and to the folks at NSS who helped restore our access to the website.

April 24 to 26, 2026. Information about the upcoming SWR Spring Regional is below. Click here for the flyer.

Southwest Regional April 24-26, 2026, arranged by Pajarito Grotto Location is on private land, east of US285 between Vaughn and Roswell. Coming from the north, turn off is after mile 155 of left (east). If you go too far you enter Chavez county. coming from the south, its 1.7 miles after the Mesa site, which is now just a feed tank, to DeBaca county. Please return all gates to as you found them. Its about 3.2 miles to the camp site, park off the road. Follow SWR signs or flags.

Camp coordinates 34.00086, -104.65914

As per agreements with the rancher, NO PETS, NO FIRES. (Expect it to be windy so fires are forbidden). Bring water, food, shelter from sun and wind, and sunscreen. Caving in at least 4 nearby caves that may be muddy or wet, nor not. Bring everything you need as there are no commercial facilities for miles!! Cellphones probably work. My number is 505 690 3504.

John Lyles

Additional information from Andrea Landaker:

As announced in SW Cavers, the Spring Southwest Regional will be April 24-26, on private land with gypsum caves between Vaughn and Roswell. See the attached flyer for directions and details.

John/Jerry will be arriving around noon on Friday the 24th, so please don’t arrive before then. The road is dirt but well maintained, and there will be some route markers placed. 

The business meeting will be at 9am on April 25. Here is the agenda; please let me know if you have an item to add.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hBufInJiIf9NVcCOQ0SPNwI74ro4glBANFDDc9JvOj0/edit?usp=sharing

Thank you to John Lyles and the Pajarito Grotto for organizing this!

The SWR now has a YouTube Channel which will currently contains videos from the 2025 Winter Technical Meeting, and can be used in the future to host other such videos.

https://www.youtube.com/@SWR_NSS

Here are recordings from the presentations at the 2025 SWR Winter Tech:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1K73yLgS6EjQTl9DfWy9HWLngEYLyer1t/view

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6FEaXzamao3woUisrkxrB674LPl4i9z6

Fall Southwestern Regional

At the Guadalupe Mountains-Lincoln National Forest

October 11-12, 2025

Hosted by Pecos Valley Grotto

For more info contact Jennifer.foote@USDA.gov

We will meet at the end of the gravel Forest Service Road 540(Klondike Gap Road/Rim Road), the road can be driven with passenger cars. There is plenty of space for camping, phone reception is poor in this area. 

The SWR business meeting will be at 9 am Saturday.

Afterwards, we will have opportunities for recreational and work cave trips, including horizontal and vertical caves.

Click here to download the flyer:

SWR Summer Regional sponsored by the Mesilla Valley Grotto

SWR Summer Regional in the Mimbres Mountains

Royal John Mine Cave

Date: June 6-7, 2025

Camping will be off Royal John Mine Rd, in the Gila National Forest, 8.5 miles form NM 61. The road to camp is suitable for just about every caving vehicle. Bring shade. Refer to the map for more info.

The Royal John Mine Cave natural entrance is on private property. Also on the property is a restored mining camp with extensive antique mining equipment.

Everyone entering the private property will be required to sign a liability waiver.

Royal John Mine Cave features an amazingly decorated Lake Room that overflows into the resurgence passage and exits through the natural entrance. This passage has pools of 43 °F water, tight spots and could be sumped. A wetsuit is advisable for those who would like to try to make a through trip. The current drought offers the possibility of a through trip from the natural entrance to the Lake Room.

For More Info Contact: Steve Peerman <gypcaver@comcast.net>

The Spring Regional will be held at McKittrick Hill near Carlsbad on March 29.

Watch your mailbox and email for updates.

Pajarito & Pecos Valley Grottos are sponsoring the event.

Contact: stefy_mccarty@yahoo.com

Hello SWR cavers! This is Wes Landaker, the SWR Website Committee Chair.

“Old” SWR Website Updated

Please take a look at the recently updated the “old” SWR website: https://swr.caves.org (this site).

We’ve just refreshed the “old” SWR website and would be happy to get feedback from the SWR board & general membership. You can send feedback directly to me, or to any SWR officer.

SWR Website Committee

I’ve been asked by the SWR Chair to be the committee chair of a newly formed website committee (instead of a single “webmaster”) for the SWR website.

As part of the website update, we updated the version of WordPress running the site, fixed a lot of security issues, and as part of this, cleared out what appeared to be some very old permissions and user accounts for security reasons.

If you have been involved in maintaining the SWR website in the past, and have lost access but would like to continue to be involved, or if you are otherwise interested in being part of the SWR website committee, please contact me or an SWR officer and we’ll get you involved. =)

Upcoming Website Changes

Please note that I don’t yet have access to update the “new” SWR website here https://caves.org/grotto/southwestern-region; this is a bit of a work in progress.

However, the two sites do now at least point to each other, and as soon as I have that worked out the intent is to merge these two sites in an intelligent way that retains the advantages of both.

One of the most exciting things coming up is that soon, active SWR members will have access to digital copies of back-issues of the Southwestern Caver newsletter. This effort is largely thanks to the efforts of Jerry Atkinson and Pete Johnson who have done a ton of work to make this possible. Stay tuned for this to roll out to the general SWR membership very soon. =)

You can watch the 2024 presentations and business meeting from the SWR winter Tech here:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1-fZgnCxL3dxudZ4a4ZrpKx5tHCbTwuW5?usp=drive_link

Jeff Forbes recorded the Audio files and can be accessed via his Google drive:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1xZOIiXY5II9ornuUzlt8UAdmP3UpRsUq