Going underground again

Last month, I went on an epic 10 day road trip through four states. The second day was devoted to driving from Tucson, Arizona to Carlsbad, New Mexico where I would spend the next couple of days exploring both Carlsbad Caverns National Park and Guadalupe Mountains National Park to the south in Texas. I'll write about Guadalupe Mountains in another post later on.

The drive over to Carlsbad was rather uneventful, outside of getting into town after dark and having the Jeep basically sucking on fumes. No services on the road and I'm already 100 miles in with 130 to go and the sign says, next services, 100 miles. Ok, I can make that. Yeah, well the distance approximater in the Jeep doesn't take into account hilly terrain where the gas mileage and thus the mileage range of the vehicle will go down. Going up and over the Guadalupe Mountains tested my nerve, but the Jeep made it down the north side of the Mountains and into town where I was able to fill up the tank with about a gallon of gas to spare. I could just see my wife, had she been there, but I'm glad she wasn't.

The next morning, I got to the park fairly early, as I wanted to have a lot of time to explore the cave. I'd been there one other time in, I believe, 1983, but I don't remember much of it as my friend and I went through quickly since we had other things on our mind and places to go. I had no place to go that day since this was one of my destination stops. Still, I arrived and the cave wasn't open yet, but I got in line and got my ticket (which was free because of the National Park annual pass my daughter and son-in-law bought for me as a Christmas/retirement gift). 

I got my phone disinfected to prevent the possibility of carrying in white nose syndrome to the bats and began my journey into the darkness. I chose to use the natural entrance as opposed to the elevator mainly because I wanted to have a more natural experience. Taking the natural entrance also allowed me to see the swallows that nest at the entrance take off in the morning. Here's a video of them I took that day. 

Coming into the caves is like descending an 80 story building, but mostly on a paved pathway. Many of you know that I hurt my knee back in August, so this would be a serious test of my knee, but it passed with almost flying colors. Going down is always more difficult than going up on knees and this was no exception. By the time I was down at the bottom, my knee was barking at me, but it stopped once the path leveled out.

Perhaps it was the time of year, but I remember that there didn't seem to be as much reverence of the majesty of the place the last time I was there. I'll blame that on summer tourists. I remember it being so much more crowded back then and there wasn't as much time to just look around at the immensity of the cave formations. Coming in the off season was definitely the way to go. I was able to wander the trail in a logical fashion so I could see all the main formations as well as take my time in reading the various information kiosks set up along the trail. I'm not sure I can adequately describe the enormity of the place. It's huge. To give you an idea, if you look at the second photo, the drapery seen there is probably 50 feet tall. It's very hard to see the scale of this place, but I do know that once you're down in the Big Room, it's basic layout is much like a giant cross that's larger than the Capital building in Washington, D.C.

Once I had walked the entire trail, I ended up down near the elevators and decided at that time to take advantage of them going to the surface. I think many of the cave explorers that day, did the very same thing - walk down via the natural entrance and then come back to the surface via the elevator. 80 stories in just about 2 minutes. The last photo was taken along the Big Room trail and it's called the Chinese Theater. I really like the way this photo turned out, especially with the darkness of the non-lit areas around the edges of the photo.

Once up at the surface again, I chose to wander around the visitors center for a little bit, before I headed back to the Jeep. From there, I went out to find some lunch. I'd spent the better part of three hours underground and it's really amazing how you lose your sense of time, when you don't have any reference like the sun to tell you the passage of time. After lunch, I drove south into Texas to explore the same general area, but the above ground part in Guadalupe Mountains National Park.