Carlsbad Caverns

Carlsbad Caverns - April 21, 2003

Carlsbad Caverns

Carlsbad Caverns can be found in the southern part of New Mexico, very close to the Texas border. In fact, the same geologic phenomenon that created Carlsbad Caverns also created nearby Guadalupe Mountains National Park.

The Caverns were a strange place, they felt strange to me. The Park isn't all that big; it consists of the caverns, which are mostly underground (hence the name "caverns"), the drive to get from the entrance to the visitor's center, and a scenic drive along an unpaved road. I thought about doing the latter once I was done visiting the caverns but didn't feel like it when it came time to do it.

White Sands

I had made a reservation for a tour - there are several guided tours each day that one must pay for. Prior to departing on my trip, I went onto the internet and reserved a spot on the Kings Palace tour. This tour lets paying visitors into 4 additional rooms that are generally not open to the public.

What is open to the public (and, therefore, is free) are the main room and the natural entrance. So, naturally wanted to save money, I did both. I did rent the headphones at the visitors center so I could listen to a narration of the natural entrance (which comes first) and the main room attractions. Since it is a cavern or series of caverns, the natural entrance is basically a downhill hike. It takes about an hour because you want to stop all of the time and just look around. This is the first view you get of the caverns, and it is pretty impressive.

Both the natural entrance and the main room have paved paths. Makes it easier to walk around but tough on the feet on the natural entrance part of the walk - my feet kept going forward into the toes of my shoes and, by the end of the day, my toes were killing me.

The main room's path is over a mile in length. On this day it was very crowded for some reason. According to what I remember, the main room cavern itself is over the length of 9 football fields. I remember it had some impressive formations, like the one above. The formation has a name, but I forget what it is.

The caverns also have many different colors. It just looks like a lot of white and gray and black (and there is a lot of that) but different minerals cause different colors to show up in the lighting they have there. The color that I saw most often (other than those already mentioned) was green. I don't think that having a lot of different colors was good for the formations; for some reason, I think the various colors indicate some sort of polution. Not the polution you and I are most acquainted with, but polution to that environment.

The rangers stressed that we should not touch the formations. (The formations themselves have a lot of different names depending on their shapes, and I won't go into all of them here.) The formations are constantly changing and growing as a result of the ground water seeping into the caverns. Touching the formations will cause damaging skin oils from you to be transferred onto them, which in turns causes them to stop growing. Not good.

Carlsbad Caverns