Carlsbad Caverns

We visited Carlsbad Caverns almost seven years ago on the trip to New Mexico when we got engaged.  It was part of a trip we made around New Mexico, including Santa Fe, the VLA, Roswell, and Carlsbad.  We stayed in Carlsbad for several days and did one ranger-led tour, which was fun.  Unfortunately, the last time we visited, the rest of the trip wasn’t so fun.  To get some perspective, here’s a summary of our last trip:

• NOT FUN:  We arrived in Carlsbad, NM very late.  The lady at the hotel lost our Expedia reservation and proceeded to argue with us about whether or not we had a reservation – for an hour.  At the time, this was the only hotel in town with any rooms at all, so we really had nowhere else to go.   After 45 minutes of bickering, she looked on her fax machine as I’d asked her to do multiple times and miraculously found our paperwork.  We were rewarded with a smoke-smelling room with a number of roaches frequenting the bathroom.
• FUN:  We went on a great ranger-led cave tour
• FUN:  We saw a great bat flight out of the cave.
• FUN:  We enjoyed the natural entrance.
• NOT FUN:  Breakfast at Denny’s was horrendous.  We both ordered some sort of egg and bacon meal.  The waiter brought us our food after a very long wait.  Her eggs had the imprint of my plate and my plate bottom had remnants of her food stuck on.  The food was cold, and the bacon was basically not cooked.  (I’m familiar with floppy bacon, but this just wasn’t cooked.)  We ate what we could then drove to a grocery store to buy some fruit.

We really had a pretty low bar for this part of our trip.  The cave tours I’d scheduled (Left Hand Tunnel and Slaughter Canyon Cave) were going to be spectacular, but we had low hopes for the rest of the visit.
The RV really came in handy this on this leg of the trip.  Several times we used the RV to cook a hot meal before or after a tour, and it was nice to have a “home base” to fill water jugs etc.

Ready to go caving!

However,  it was a full hour and a half of driving between our KOA and The Caverns.  To make matters worse, the entire downtown section of the drive was under construction and was so bumpy the entire RV puked cabinet contents all over the floor several times.  It wasn’t until the second day we discovered a bypass route to get to the caverns that completely disagrees with the GPS but winds up being shorter.  (likely due to construction)

Despite the driving impediments, we were both really excited to get into the cave.  This is one of my favorite places to see, and the hike into the cavern to the big room (the “natural entrance”) is simply impressive.  It’s 700+ feet down switchback paved trail.  There aren’t many other places where you’ll need to walk down an incline for 700 vertical feet.  They tell you to plan for an hour to walk down, and it’s really strenuous on your knees.  We stopped to assess our situation first.

The entrance looks unimpressive, but it’s huge…and vertical.  The hole here is 2-3 school busses wide, but it’s the part you don’t see (the straight down part) that’s amazing.  The best way to explain it is to show a picture from inside the cave, complete with mist rising up out of the cavern.

The Natural Entrance

The Twilight Zone

The Bat Cave

A little ways into the cave is “bat cave” where the bats roost.  The trail drops pretty much straight down from here.

The trail winds along a path that in some places has followed the natural cave, but in other places has been carved into the rock.  There are some pretty neat smaller side passages we ran into.

Sarah in a side passage

The cave was formed by a very interesting set of geological forces.  Oil deposits far below the cave released Hydrogen Sulfide gas, which seeped up through the rock and combined with water to form Sulfuric Acid.  This is a very strong acid and ate through the rock to form the large caverns you see here.  The cave was also somewhat geologically active – several places in the cave show large cracks and joints formed by movement of the surrounding earth.  Finally, Carbonic Acid coming from above ate through more limestone to form the cave formations inside the caverns.

Sarah in The Big Room

Feed Sarah!

We were a little disappointed that the Bat Flight was not really occurring.  It sounds like the bats hadn’t returned from their winter vacation yet, so there were only about 20 bats flying each night – nothing compared to the hundreds of thousands of bats we’d seen on our last trip.

We finished our hike for the day, but Sarah was pretty beat and desperately needed dinner.

The Nightly Bat Flight Area

The next day we took the Left Hand Tunnel ranger-led tour.  It was pretty impressive to see some undeveloped cave like this, but I didn’t take my camera – the lighting was too difficult.  We learned that a 1972 sci-fi show was filmed in the tunnel called Gargoyles. 

The hike to Slaughter Canyon Cave was very steep

Rare Shield Speleothems

On our last day in Carlsbad we took a ranger-led tour to Slaughter Canyon Cave.  This was a 1.5 hour drive to a remote location, then a 45 minute hike up a mountain to a gate.  The cave was impressive because it was for the most part undeveloped.  We took our own lights since there was no lighting system.  (We had a couple of laughs – I took one of my dive lights on this trip which really made pretty much all other flashlights on the tour useless, and the kids behind us complained to their Dad the entire trip that they wanted a “real flashlight” the entire time.)  We got a new maglite for Sarah at Walmart - a 2-D cell LED version that is far and away the best maglite I've seen.  Her light was really good at focusing on far away features in the cave, while mine was really good for lighting up an entire area.

We also saw some very unique Shield Speleothems - disks the size of a large pizza.  These apparently grow differently due to cracks in the rocks and the pressure of water pushing mineral laden fluids out.  We hadn't seen these before and they were really neat to see.

A very neat formation in Slaughter Canyon Cave