An immense subterranean wonderland filled with the natural artwork sculpted over the course of eons by water and minerals in a vast limestone workshop.
Days at Park: Wed-Thu,18-19 December 2019 Base Camp: Karbani Inn - Carlsbad, New Mexico Expedition Parks: Guadalupe Mountains, Carlsbad Caverns, Big Bend, White Sands Point of Embarkation: El Paso, Texas
Since I was a child I have always loved caves. Every family vacation it seemed I found myself in some local subterranean tour. The fascination with the wonders that are created by water dripping over time and the excitement of exploring underground have never left me. Visiting Carlsbad Caverns has been a lifelong dream destination for me. I purchased my ranger guided tours in advance online but I could also have bought them at the visitor center. The two tours run concurrently in the morning so one day for each ranger tour was required.
King's Palace Tour (ranger guided)
Elevators in the visitor center go 800 feet down to a large area within the cave which includes a small cafeteria and bathroom facilities, where the tours begin and end. Alternately you can use the natural entrance, a long and winding road which begins from the bat viewing amphitheater on the surface and descends, steeply at times, for over a mile.
After gathering near the cafeteria we were joined by our guide. We descended by rail-lined rampways past immense formations into the Papoose Room, through the Queen's Chamber, the King's Palace, and finally the Green Lake Room. Although the distance walked is only 1 mile, the tour was leisurely lasting about an hour and a half. Favorite formations included the aptly named curtains or draperies where water instead of dripping straight down off the ceiling, ran along the ceiling leaving traces of minerals behind along the way which built up over time into long flowing formations.
Big Room & Natural Entrance (self-guided)
Since it was the middle of the week and also the week before Christmas, there were very few visitors (in fact one day they did not even collect general admission fees). The scarcity of fellow explorers made the self-guided experience feel more intense. Even though the walkways are all built for the crowds, I was frequently the only one in the area and often felt as if I was exploring the immense cavern alone. I was completely overwhelmed with the vast number of formations. Absolutely everywhere you look there are thousands of them in every size and shape imaginable.
The aptly named Big Room is over 8 acres of space through which a fairly level walkway takes you around the entire perimeter of the roughly cross-shaped chamber. Features include The Hall of Giants, Temple of the Sun, Mirror Lake, Bottomless Pit, Rock of Ages, and Painted Grotto. After exploring all the wonderful corners of this space, I chose to make the ascent manually to the natural entrance rather than use the elevators. My choice was greeted with the voiced admiration and disbelief of fellow explorers I passed on the descent. After finally emerging into the bat viewing amphitheater, I felt bad that all the bats were spending the winter in Mexico, but in some compensation my exit from the park grounds was fortuitously interrupted by a herd of Barbary Sheep.
Lower Cave Tour (ranger guided)
A true cave exploring experience, this smaller tour required sturdy boots/shoes and a brief training session in a classroom of the visitor center where we were given helmets, lights, and gloves. The descent from the Big Room to the lower portions of the cavern was achieved first by rope down a gentle slope and then by a series of 3 metal ladders each navigated individually by the tour group members. The path through the lower rooms was lined by orange tape laid on the cave floor with candy-striped tape marking hazards and features we were told to avoid stepping on. The only light came from the helmets of the tour group. Highlights include the visible bat carcass encased inside a stalagmite and graffiti by Jim White (the teenaged modern founder of the caverns) from Nov 1906. This was definitely one of my favorite national park visits.
Comments