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We’re all familiar with the humble Cheeto, a puffy mass of corn and artificial flavors that’s literally

But it turns out, Cheetos can also alter a delicate ecosystem when placed in a subterranean environment—a fact many of us learned this week. On Friday, September 6, the Facebook account for Carlsbad Caverns National Park�� about littered Cheetos that, in my opinion, should be nominated for the annual Lascaux Prize in Creative Nonfiction. Here’s the intro:

Great or small we all leave an impact wherever we go. How we choose to interact with others and the world we share together has its effects moment by moment.

And we feel it. When we are greeted with a smile. When we share the first rays of dawn with someone we care about. Or when someone imposes their frustration on us, or when someone we care about forgets to pack the sunscreen and snacks.

Apparently, a visitor to the New Mexican National Park dropped a bag of Cheetos in the Big Room, the cave’s largest chamber. And then, to quote Jeff Goldblum in ���ܰ��������������ʲ�����,��“Life finds a way.” According to the Facebook post, the discarded Cheetos bag attracted all sorts of flora and fauna, namely mold and bugs, and within a day of its discovery, the pile of Cheetos had become a thriving neighborhood for creepy crawlies. Poor park rangers had to spend 20 minutes cleaning up the mess.

The essay recounted the ordeal, and��closed with a friendly reminder:

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.

Anyway, the post spawned an impressive tonnage of media coverage. Stories appeared in , ,��and even India’s news site��.���ճ����Washington Post to inquire whether or not Cheetos could really throw the flora and fauna of a cave out of whack.

As a professional writer and editor, I was truly moved by this Facebook post—it’s thoughtful and smart, and not intended to blame and shame the careless owner of the lost Cheetos bag. I recently tracked down the post’s author, a ranger named Erich B. Koenig, and asked him if he intended the Cheetos post to go viral. His answer: an emphatic “no.”

“I won’t pretend to know why it did,” Koenig, 31, told me. “Maybe it has something to do with the word ‘Cheetos,’ and how relatable it is to everyone.”

Koenig told me that the Cheetos incident actually occurred back in July, 2023. The park had closed for the night and he was performing a sweep of the cave for lost visitors when he saw the orange bag and its contents. He guessed it had been left overnight, and was immediately amazed by how quickly the mold and insects had transformed the familiar orange snacks into a beige powder.

“It was fascinating how quickly nature fell into place to take advantage of this windfall of resources within an ordinarily barren ecosystem,” he told me. “As I passed my light over the crumbled corn I could see micro-invertebrates and mites, and from what I know these creatures eat fungus.”

Koenig didn’t think much of the Cheetos incident at the time, but as the months went by he realized the ordeal could be used to illustrate an element of Carlsbad Caverns that he and other rangers continually stress to visitors. People may assume that caves are devoid of life, but that’s simply not the case. Just like boreal forests or coral reefs, subterranean caverns support their own thriving universe of bugs and bacteria, and humans can and do alter this balance all of the time, even when we’re being careful. Rangers stress this when they speak to visitors in a one-on-one basis. But sending that message to a broader audience presents challenges.

Could an essay about Cheetos illustrate this concept? Koenig thought so.

“Carlsbad Caverns has been open for 100 years, and the impact humans have already had is immense—there’s no going back,” he said. “We all have an impact on it by choosing to visit, so we should all try to be as respectful as possible when we do go there.”

Earlier this summer, the national park’s social media team asked rangers if they had any ideas for content that could educate potential visitors about the caves. Koenig remembered the Cheetos bag and volunteered. While he does not have a professional background in creative writing—prior to joining the NPS in 2021 he was an outdoor education instructor—Koenig said he had a vision for what he wanted to both accomplish, and avoid, in his essay.

“This wasn’t about finger-pointing. I know how the rhetoric around these things can escalate to blaming someone,” he added. “Hopefully it makes the next person who might drop a Cheetos bag think about their impact.”

After his essay posted on Friday, September 6, Koenig finished his shift and went home for the weekend. On Sunday, a coworker emailed him that SFGate had published a story. Then, on Monday, Koenig saw that more sites had picked up the post. The media snowball grew over the next few days. Koenig said he couldn’t be happier.

“I put a lot of thought into it,” he told me.

“Leave No Junk Food,” an important element of Leave No Trace, has become my new mantra, and I can thank Ranger Koenig for it.