We drove north from Texas, arriving near the entrance to the famous Carlsbad Caverns late in the day. We found a campground where we park the van overnight and as we listened to the wind howling outside during the night, were happy we weren’t tenting! In the morning, we noticed several tents in our section had indeed blown over during the night – yikes! Lucky for us there was a nice restaurant open for breakfast as it was just too cold to think about cooking and eating out of doors. We knew that coming this way we were going to run into some colder weather, but didn’t want to miss out on seeing some of the amazing sights, the caverns being one of them.
So, a nice warm breakfast in our bellies, we happily drove up to the park and again, using my National Park Pass, didn’t pay a dime. Have I said how happy I am to have this pass? What a deal!!!
We were happy to have our morning activity located indoors, thus mostly avoiding the cold, but in order to get to the entrance we were using, there was a short cold walk outside – brrr!!! To get down to the caverns you have two choices. The easiest way is to take the elevator down to the Big Room. However, by taking this, we would miss out on seeing a fair bit of the caverns. To go down through the Natural Entrance, you need to be fairly steady on your feet as its a pretty long and winding downward walk, but we weren’t about to let that keep us from our explorations, so off we went. During the warmer weather, bats can be seen coming from this entrance late in the day, which would have been so cool, but wrong time of year and wrong time of day, so we had to content ourselves with looking down the mouth of the cavern from above and imagining what it would look like with thousands of bats coming out. Me not being one who like heights, I have to admit to being a bit trepidatious about our choice, but it was worth it – so amazing!
As we moved along in the caverns, it was like being in a giant natural cathedral and visitors for the most part were adhering to the request by the parks people to keep voices down to a whisper. It made the experience of walking through these ancient caves a much richer experience. It is hard to describe the wonder we felt, viewing the enormous rocks and natural decorations of stalactites, stalagmites and more. We were so small and insignificant and the time we humans have been here dwarfed by the timeline of these structures. Just truly breathtaking!
We came to several signs which helped us to understand the differing speleothems (the name for all of the different “decorations”). It was so much more interesting to see such amazing examples of things I had learned about years ago in school, and it made it so much easier to get it straight in my head which things were stalactites (coming down from the ceiling) and stalagmites (growing up from the floor).
We eventually joined more people in the Big Room, where there were several main features that people come to see. In the Hall of Giants, there were the Twin Domes and Giant Dome (some very very large stalagmites – the Twin Domes are 58 feet tall!).
As we walked along, there was a broken ladder behind a barricade left behind from the early explorations of this cavern. I can’t even imagine how much courage (or insanity?) it would take to enter and explore this ginormous place. What kind of person does stuff like that? Not me, that’s for sure!!!
As we moved along, viewing more and more amazing sights, we eventually reached the Rock of Ages. At 30 feet tall, it certainly is an imposing sight!
There were so many interesting formations to look at, you could spend the entire day down there and not see it all!
Eventually, we came to the elevator and rose to the surface. It was probably 3 hours later – and what an amazing 3 hours that was! After a quick snack at the cafe in the Visitor’s Centre, we headed out, eager to explore more of New Mexico but wondering how anything was going to top this place.
