Carlsbad Caverns National Park, New Mexico
It’s only about 11 kilometers from here in White’s City to the caverns, so we were there in good time this morning. We bought tickets for a guided tour of the “King’s Caverns” for the afternoon, and then headed into the line for the elevator. We would have had to wait for at least one round trip, so I said to Enid, “let’s just walk down the natural entrance and come up on the elevator,” to which the lady handling the elevator queue said “that’s a very good idea.”
It’s a good thing we did that, as we had no idea that the natural entrance walk would be so remarkable. You descend through the very large mouth of the cave down a fairly steep paved path of switchbacks. It gradually gets darker and darker, until you are into the main part of the cave where they start to light the rock displays. By this time you are several hundred feet underground, and continue on a general downward path until you have reached a depth of over 750 feet below the surface. Nothing in what we had read or heard about the cave suggested that we would have missed a great experience if we hadn’t walked down this route.
Both Enid and I were astonished by the enormity of the cave. The caverns are huge and the rock formations spectacular. The ranger at the top had told us it would take forty five minutes to get to the bottom, but it took us a lot longer as we stopped so often to admire the rocks and video them. By the time we got to the bottom it was after eleven o’clock, and so we decided to take the elevator back to the top and eat our lunch.
Chinese garden, Carlsbad Cavern's Big Room tour
After lunch we went back down on the elevator, and walked around the “Big Room” loop. It is very big, more than a mile long, and full of enormous caverns and all kinds of cave formations. We didn’t stop too much on the first part of the loop (there is a shortcut at roughly the half-way point) but continued on all the way to the end. We thought we would come back and see the shortcut loop after our guided tour which started at two.
The ranger led tour of the King’s Palace wasn’t as far as the Big Room tour, but had some very magnificent formations. You got a lot closer to them than in the other unguided parts of the cave. When that part of our day was over it was three thirty, and they were soon closing the walks. We did however spend almost another hour on the shortcut loop of the Big Room, and it was now much more peaceful as there was hardly anyone on the trails.
By the time we got back to the elevator they were closing things up and had roped off the entrances to the cave. A young female ranger asked me how we enjoyed the cave, and I honestly replied that the day had been incredible.