Carlsbad Caverns

The campground at Brantley Lake

Late on a Friday morning, we left Brantley Lake RV park in just the Smart car. Waze took us south, on NM-285, then along the truck route to avoid the traffic in the town of Carlsbad, and beyond to Carlsbad Caverns National Park. It was maybe a half-hour drive. We arrived at noon. The remaining Ranger-guided tour was filled so we rented little electric docents and took off to do the self-guided tour ourselves. We arrived at the entrance at the same time as a cluster of families with rambunctious kids and a snowy-headed grandma. I thought they’d move slowly, and tried to get ahead, but, since we stop every few feet to admire and photograph, they were right with us. We held back and they giggled, ran and questioned their way ahead into the darkness. Soon it was blissfully cave silent with only the occasional drip of water patiently building another point of interest for whatever visits in another million years.

The Natural Entrance as you approach

The Natural Entrance from the inside. (Note the  visitors on the ramp.)

Early in the 1900s a cowboy named Jim White started exploring the cave we now visit. In the 1930s(?) they blasted a yawning opening which is used today under the questionable title of ‘“the natural entrance.” The path starts with tight little switchbacks that quickly take you deeper and darker into the cave. It seems really dark at first as you walk the black asphalt path and your eyes struggle to adjust after the mid-day New Mexico sun. At the deepest part they say you’re 740 feet down from the surface. An alternate is to take the elevator from the visitor center to the centrally located snack bar/gift shop and loop out from there in either of two directions. After walking all the trails and each taking maybe a hundred inadequate photos we took the elevator up to exit. Other, heartier souls trekked both in and out via the switchback ramps. 

Part of the Gift Shop / Snack Bar 740 ft. down

While it's easy for us to visit, it's taken some heroics to explore the cave. One group took four nights with a helium balloon attempting to hook a rope around stalactites more than 200 feet overhead so they could then climb up said rope to explore passageways they thought they could see in a cavity that rose another fifty-plus feet into the ceiling above. After all that effort and courage they found those passages only went twenty or so feet.

It would seem, in a cave, you'd spend a lot of time looking down. But a lot of the action is overhead.

In the summer 400,000 free-tailed bats rush out of the cave each sunset. We were there in late January so no bats for us. The cave's attractiveness to bats over centuries led to decades of guano mining. (There's a cheery trade!) The guano was used for fertilizer and gunpowder; it's mostly saltpeter. Mining their local guano kept the South in the Civil War long after blockades had prevented foreign imports.

Carlsbad Caverns has some two and a half miles of asphalt trails with stainless steel pipe railings on any side that’s not protected with a cave wall. They ask you to never touch the walls or formations, and we were careful to avoid them. The path is easy; wide and flat side to side, To cover the route and reach the rooms does require a fair amount of up and down, but nothing treacherous. 

The path is along the left, defined by the stainless pipe rail.

The size of Carlsbad Caverns is hard to depict or describe.

Most of these pix are long, full frame iPhone shots.

For scale, Maureen is standing next to the bottom half of the red at the bottom of this pix.

The part of Carlsbad Caverns we casual tourists get to see is a wonder. The decorations or speleothems in this massive cave are indescribably complex and varied. The color palette is not great, mostly a very pale tan with some streaks of caramel or accented with black manganese markings. But, the shapes astound. One rocket-sized column seems to have captured in glistening stone the pulsing climb of the father of all jellyfish. 

Stone curtains hang from the ceiling as if waving in a gentle breeze. Needle-like darts hang by the thousands overhead, sometimes clustering and combining into great inverted spires, all vaguely threatening unless you trust in the momentary protection of the the scale of geologic time. 

The Park's lighting of these fantastic sculptings is both gentle and dramatic. The range was well beyond our iPhone cameras, always leaving something black or another area burned out, but the eye, the human eye, is capable of so much more. The cave is a delight for the eye. 

Below the cave accessed by this easy walk is another level, another cave, the lower level. There are also many chambers and tunnels that extend in other directions. Under this hilly section of the Chihuahuan Desert are said to be 300 caves all formed some 250 million years ago. 

They're still exploring another cave, Lechuguilla, that intersects Carlsbad. Spelunkers felt wind blowing up through rubble on the floor ninety feet below another entrance. Cavers say, "Where it blows, it goes." A group of Colorado cavers obtained permission from the Park service and dug through the rubble. They broke through into new passageways May of 1986. Since then explorers have mapped 136+ miles of passages and have pushed the depth of the cave to 1,604 feet, ranking Lechugilla as the fifth longest cave in the world (third longest in the US) and deepest limestone cave in the country. To me the thought of traveling over many miles in natural caves - climbing, rappelling, crawling, skootching along, carrying in all the food and gear you need in complete, perpetual darkness and then finding your way back out, leaving nothing behind, is just astounding.