Rangers at Carlsbad Caverns National Park had to clean up a bag of corn chips a visitor dropped/NPS

A bag of corn chips dropped off a trail in Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico provided park staff with the perfect opportunity — albeit a disturbing one —  to urge visitors to leave only footprints.

"Here at Carlsbad Caverns, we love that we can host thousands of people in the cave each day. Incidental impacts can be difficult or impossible to prevent. Like the simple fact that every step a person takes into the cave leaves a fine trail of lint," park staff said in a social media post the other day. "Other impacts are completely avoidable. Like a full snack bag dropped off-trail in the Big Room. To the owner of the snack bag, the impact is likely incidental. But to the ecosystem of the cave it had a huge impact."

"The processed corn, softened by the humidity of the cave, formed the perfect environment to host microbial life and fungi," the staff continued. "Cave crickets, mites, spiders and flies soon organize into a temporary food web, dispersing the nutrients to the surrounding cave and formations. Molds spread higher up the nearby surfaces, fruit, die and stink. And the cycle continues."

Superintendent Carmen Chapin said the bag, dropped "directly off trail" in the Big Room, and its spilled contents were cleaned up "after consulting our cave specialist on how to proceed without creating further impact."

"The ranger spent about 20 minutes carefully removing the crumbs and the top layer of cave soil," she said in an email.

The task involved "removing the foreign detritus and molds from the cave surfaces," the park's social media post said. "Some members of this fleeting ecosystem are cave-dwellers, but many of the microbial life and molds are not. 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."

"Great or small we all leave an impact wherever we go. Let us all leave the world a better place than we found it," the park staff said.

The chips were dropped along a trail in the Big Room/NPS file