Blue Hole of Santa Rosa

A Bell Shaped Artesian Spring Pool About 80 Feet Deep With Visibility Of Roughly 60 Feet, Holding A Constant 61F Year Round; The Main Scuba Training Site For The Southern Plains · Santa Rosa, New Mexico

Santa Rosa sits on the edge of the Llano Estacado on old Route 66, and underneath it is a system of water-filled sinkholes in gypsum karst. The Blue Hole is the most famous: a bell-shaped artesian pool about eighty feet deep and only sixty feet across at the surface, fed from below at around three thousand gallons a minute, which flushes the whole pool roughly every six hours. That constant turnover is why the water is startlingly clear - visibility runs to around sixty feet - and why it holds a steady 61F all year regardless of the desert above it. The combination of clarity, depth, constant temperature and a location eight hours from any ocean has made it the scuba training site for most of the southern plains, and divers arrive from Texas and Oklahoma at weekends. Everyone else jumps off the rocks into it, which is free and unsupervised and takes about four seconds to regret, because 61F feels very different in August than the number suggests. It is five minutes off I-40.

1085 Blue Hole Road, Santa Rosa, Santa Rosa, New Mexico, 88435, United States

The pool is open daily through daylight hours for swimming and jumping, free and unstaffed for most of that. Scuba diving requires a permit bought from the dive centre across the road, which keeps shorter hours and is generally open at weekends and on weekdays in the warmer months. Diving days and hours have changed more than once and the pool has been closed to divers entirely for periods. Confirm before travelling with tanks.

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