Sonya's Blog - Day 245 - Carlsbad Caverns

Sonya’s Blog - Day 245 - February 22nd - Carlsbad Caverns

This is the whole reason we came to Carlsbad, to explore the caverns. I had read about them a long time ago, along with White Sands in New Mexico, and adjusted our calendar to include these two stops.

We packed a lunch and headed out to the caverns. It is about 40 minutes to an hour drive to get to the caverns and they are run by the National Park Service. This works out great for us, because we bought a yearly pass when we were in Yellowstone, so we will not have to pay for admission.

We got to the caverns at 11 and decided to head down right away and then have our lunch when we got back up. We were not allowed to take any food down with us, but there is a small cafe at the bottom where we can buy food. It is a 750 foot descent into the main cavern. They do have an elevator that goes to and from this cafe area, but it is broken right now. So you can hike in and out, or not experience the caverns. We were up for hiking, so off we went.

Well the caverns are extremely cool and massive. There are many guided tours, but we chose to do the self guided tours. The first tour takes us through the entrance way and down to the cafe area, this took about an hour. We could have gone faster, but we took lots of pictures.

The start of our long descent:

This formation is called Whale's Mouth, they call these formations draperies and flowstone:

These types of formations are called popcorn:

When we got to the bottom, we went over to the cafe area. There are restrooms there and we decided to get a snack, because we were all a little hungry and we still wanted to do the Great Room tour before we headed back out.

After our snack we went to explore the Great Room as well, which is about a 2 KM hike. This was also very cool and had some great formations. Here are the pictures:

You cannot touch the cave walls, due to oils on our skin, so I am just faking it here:

They have called this formation Lion's Tale:

A ladder used by some of the original explores of the cave, looks safe!:

When we were done with the Great Room we decided to hike out and have our lunch. Since we had to hike out the way we came in, we just decided to go as fast as we could, as we were all hungry now. It is quite the uphill climb, but Isaac didn’t stop talking the whole way, nothing wrong with his cardio. Natasha hates climbing uphill and it takes Blake awhile to get his lungs working properly. Isaac and I made it out first, he ran to catch up with me and was still able to match my pace. When I have a hill to climb, I hate taking breaks on the way up, because then it is harder to start up again. I just like to go and have my break at the top. It was a good little workout. As we were heading back to the truck, to get our lunch, we saw a Roadrunner on the path. Isaac tried to get pictures, but they are fast!

We had our lunch, with a great view of New Mexico and probably some of Texas. We then went and explored the Visitor’s Centre which had a small museum and a gift shop.

A model of the caverns, the descent is at the back (not fully shown in picture):

When we got back to camp, we walked Kimet right away. This was good, because it started pouring rain, thundering and lightening not long after we returned. Isaac put on the TV to try and drown out some of the storm and he ended up putting on Monty Python and the quest for the Holy Grail. So, of course, we watched it and it was hilarious.

Sonya