This National Park is out in the middle of nowhere desertville.
The road in….
This is known as the “natural entrance” to the caverns. If you go in this way, you hike down, down, DOWN over 750 feet in depth, on a 1.25 mile trail. Another option is to take an elevator down, but then you miss a lot. You just have to have good compression brakes in your legs! We decided to take the trail down, and elevator back up!
One thing we didn’t have time for, is the “bat flight” that happens each night at dusk. That is the purpose for the amphitheater seating. There is a section in the caverns where a whole ginormous gang of bats live, and they explode out of this opening every night. I understand that it’s a pretty spectacular sight, and was sorry we would miss it since we wouldn’t be staying here another night.
I thought we might be walking through a for-real batcave!, so we wore hats so we wouldn’t get pooped on. But apparently, the bats live in a section where the park trails don’t go…(thank goodness 🙂
These are some giant columns – over 20′ high! Columns happen when a stalagtite connects with a stalagmite. These are in the ‘hall of giants’ in the “Big Room”, which is over 8 acres in size!! I think we walked over 3 miles in all down in the caverns. We took every available trail.
The formations were incredible. A song kept going through my head the whole time we were there – ‘God of wonders beyond our galaxy, You are Holy – the universe declares Your majesty!’ Our Creator provides some amazing nature for us to enjoy and view with awe.
I learned from my neighbor lady when I was a little girl, that stalagtites are from the top, because they have to hold on TIGHT!
There are all kinds of formations created by a variety of chemical reactions. Smooth, bumpy, piles of dribbles, some look like coral. Most of our pictures turned out blurry because it is dark in the caverns, with select lights shining on the formations. And flash photography still didn’t really work well.
In some areas the drips form what are called curtains.
All of these formations are rock hard.
This was an area at the elevators. Displays and gifts and restrooms – in a cave, 800 feet below the surface … Disney couldn’t do any better!
At the above ground gift shop, we found Minion hats! These could have been helpful on the trails underground! The trails were lit and had hand rails the whole way, but generally it is pretty dark in the caverns. There were lamps lighting the best formations, and little lights at ankle height lighting the path.
This is just an overview of the valley at the Caverns. Whole lotta desert out there!
And – we’re off again…. driving another 100 miles or so before the next hotel stop. Along the way, we see lots of oil fields.
And new oil being drilled.
My driver…. with redvines – the ultimate road trip food.
The Carlsbad Caverns were the most unusual and probably the coolest thing we’ve seen so far out of the 10 or so National Parks. (And it technically was definitely the coolest… at a constant 50ish degrees underground.) It was like a grand canyon upside down! And like the grand canyon, the camera cannot pick up the entire spectrum that your peripheral vision absorbs when you stand there taking it all in. Photos just cannot capture the awesomeness. Amazing!