Carlsbad Caverns National Park

I had never actually heard much about Carlsbad Caverns before driving through southern New Mexico. I knew a couple people who had been, and had never heard anything bad about it, but it’s almost a 5 hour south of Albuquerque, and there’s not much reason to go there except to see the caverns. I wasn’t sure I would ever make it, but a work project came up that needed some aerial imagery nearby, so me and my son took a day to explore the caverns and watch the bats fly out at sunset. I wasn’t able to take any pictures of the bats, the park doesn’t allow cameras or phones because it can negatively impact the bats, so all of the photos are of the caves themselves. If you ever get a chance to go though, I would highly recommend going at sunset to see the bats, my son described it as a “bat tornado”! You sit in the amphitheater, which also acts as the entrance to the caves, and thousands of bats emerge from the cave and fly up and out to hunt for the night.

The actual caverns are pretty incredible. The biggest attraction is accurately called “The Big Room”, you can either take an elevator from the visitor center, or hike down through the natural entrance. We decided to hike down the natural entrance and hike the caverns, then take the elevator back up. I was really glad that we hiked down the natural entrance, it gives you a great scale of how deep underground you actually go almost 800ft down, almost the height of the Chrysler Building. It also kind of warms you up for the grandeur of the Big Room. Some people try to describe the canyons and say “think of the Grand Canyon underground”, I don’t think I got that vibe, but I think I do know what they’re trying to say. When you see the scale of the Grand Canyon, it’s almost unimaginable, and I definitely got that vibe from Carlsbad Caverns. It has a very ancient, alien feeling. It feels like a different world an you try to imagine you’re basically in a pocket hundreds of feet underground. By taking the natural entrance you not only get a good idea of the depth of the cavern, but you also realize how long and deep the cavern is. When we were there it was right after torrential downpour that flash flooded the road and closed the park down for the day. We were actually going to try and go the day it rained, but we were in Roswell and started to drive out of town and the roads had 2ft deep puddles, so I turned around and figured we’d try another time, thought it was a better idea to go to a movie…indoors. Because the park was closed down, I think a lot of people didn’t know the park had opened up the next day, so it was eerily quiet in the caverns, we only passed a few people and one or two Rangers. A lot of these photos are long exposure shots, my son got a little bored waiting for me to set up the camera every few feet to get a photo of all the amazing formations, so he ended up playing a tank battle game while he was waiting. At first I was irritated that he just wanted to watch his phone while we were surrounded by all this natural beauty, but he was only 8 years old and just walked a few miles into a cave, so I cut him some slack and he let me take as many pictures as I wanted. It was kind of funny though, sitting underground setting up a tripod, it was dark and empty, you could hear water dripping somewhere, and a little echo, and in the middle of it all is a little boy playing video games. It was also funny because we spent the last couple hours hiking into the depths of this cave, and saw these amazing formations, you feel very isolated, and then you see a well lit sign for “Restrooms”, and there is a gift shop and snack bar, all along the way to the elevator. Whoever got to make up the names for the formations must have had a sense of humor, it’s kind like looking at clouds with a kid, you can kind of see what some of the clouds they’re describing are, “Sure, I see that Bashful Elephant, and the Baby Hippo, and the Witch’s Finger, but that doesn’t really look like a Lion’s Tail”. I tried to label the one’s I remember, but wish I would have at least taken a quick iphone photo and labeled them while down there, because there are a lot of formations.