Driving across the Great Southern Plains under an overcast sky, we felt a little like we were a snow globe: The sky is an impervious dome overhead and, even at 85 miles an hour, you seem to go nowhere. I found the landscape of southeastern New Mexico hypnotic yet slightly unnerving. With no trees for miles and miles, it’s clearly no place to break down in August…but it’s easy to understand why aliens might aim for such a wide landing space.
The sky turned from ash to ebony as we arrived at our Carlsbad motel just after 9:00 p.m. After a terrific green chile-chicken-alfredo, we slept soundly in our clean, quiet room.
The crooner I swooned for.
I awoke in the early morning to the lovely song of an unknown black bird with Dr. Suessian tail feathers. My kids made fun of me trying to get a recording of its song, but I had to admit defeat in the interest of time. Carlsbad Caverns National Park was waiting!
A pop of color from the Texas Mountain Laurel was a welcome sight.
Growing up, I had often heard about the Caverns, but with a widowed mother with a fear of driving, there was no way I’d ever see them. We ventured to Las Cruces on a fairly regular basis to see my mom’s parents and brother, but because my mother first learned to drive on an abandoned airstrip in her early 20s, a straight shot down I-25 from Denver was all we were going to get. Angling to the left across unknown turf was not gonna happen.
My husband had planned everything (he’d even made a slideshow to psych us up for the trip), so we pulled into the visitor center ready to spend a day 750 feet underground. Still, nothing had prepared me for the fascinating, other-worldly experience of descending into a dimly lit cave the size of 14 football fields. I’m a slightly rabid fan of the National Park Service, but wow! I felt like I had entered some fairy tale world. This is an experience you can’t really capture on camera–my favorite kind.
Sure, we’ll just walk down hundreds of feet into the dark and not even think about the giant hill suspended over our heads! Earthquakes aren’t a thing here, right?
The Whale’s Mouth, the first major formation you see on the way down.
Lacy stalactites. Who says they can’t be elegant?
Millions of years in the making. I think they came out pretty good!
Zooming in on a huge formation, I see what looks like trees from an ancient Chinese painting. Or creepy Edvard Munch-type faces, depending on where you focus (top right, green part).
The lighting in the cavern is very well done. The cave is pitch black, but the collective effect of the specialized lighting is a dim atmosphere punctuated by golden light. It felt like we were walking inside a beautiful, golden Christmas ornament.
So many colors, so much time to form them.
View across a portion of “The Big Room,” several thousand square feet of the main underground cavern. There are 700 caves in the park, but the NPS has only developed three for public visits.
Believe it or not, there’s an elevator inside the cavern from the surface to an actual lunchroom (with bathrooms–yay!). No way in heck would I ever climb into an elevator lodged in a 750-foot tube bored through solid rock, but it’s an option for those needing accessibility (or the merely exhausted). It had broken the day before–with people inside. After a daring rescue, everyone emerged “in good spirits” and life went on (without elevator service). We passed many people whose prospects of climbing back out without incident looked uncertain, including some very pregnant mothers. Being fit and impatient, we decided to race back up the steep incline. Awesome workout I’d gladly do again!
Pretty sure that sunlight is gonna burn our eyes when we get there.
After a full day and some incredible memories, we reluctantly headed north to Taos. We really wanted to stay until twilight to see the 200,000 to 500,ooo bats that roost in the cave make their glorious nightly exit, but we had six hours of driving ahead of us. We piled into the car and I got out my camera. Time for some landscape shots!
