Carlsbad Caverns Are A Stunning Surprise
There are few things in life that will illicit quiet awe. The Carlsbad Caverns is one of them. It is one thing to have people tell you to visit. It is entirely another to stand in a cavern and look at stalactites creeping down from the ceiling over 250 feet above.
My heart had acted up after the trip to Roswell so I’d been laid up the following four days. I was supposed to head toward Phoenix that Saturday but stayed the extra day so I could visit the caverns. It was absolutely the right decision.
Carlsbad National Park
The Park Service has a wonderful visitors center. After getting your tickets (registration in advance required) you have two choices. You can enter the caverns by elevator or by natural descent. Unless you are wheelchair bound the natural descent is the way to go. My reservation time was at 9:30 but I’ll give you a little tip. Your reservation window is one hour. Almost everyone shows up right on time. The result is a crowd of people descending together. I waited until 10:15 to enter and it felt like I had the entire place to myself all the way down.
The Caverns
The entrance is through the Bat Flight Amphitheater where, from May through October, Brazilian bats emerge by the thousands every evening to take flight. These swarms of bats were how the caverns were first discovered.
The descent is through a series of switchbacks that quickly carry you away from the light of day until only canned lights scattered throughout the cavern illuminate your way. As you look around and up you begin to feel quite tiny in comparison.
Lighting is strategically placed to draw your attention to various geologic growths, each formed in its own unique way. As I descended I couldn’t help but think the caverns were trying to bring the famous Tolkien novels to life. I kept waiting to hear a whisper from the shadows, “My precious…”
Reaching the bottom brings you to the Big Room…a 1.25 mile walk through a whole other world. The ceilings soar hundreds of feet into the air, disguising more cavern entrances above. In some areas the floor is scattered with pools of water. In other areas giant stalactites and stalagmites, distinctly different in form and texture from one another, have come together to form stalagnates.
When I Do It Again
I spent a total of 2 1/2 hours visiting the caverns. In the end my heart was struggling and I had to leave. If I did this trip over I would have split it in two, the descent one day and the Big Room on another so that I could have had more time taking it all in. Even for an able bodied person I think there is simply too much to absorb in one day.
The elevator ride to the top takes you the equivalent of 75 floors back to where your journey first started. I was quite sad to leave.
My words and even these pictures do not do justice the this gem in our National Park system. The caverns are simply something you must see with your own eyes.
