Coolest Carlsbad Caverns

In the middle of nowhere in southeast New Mexico are the Carlsbad Caverns.  If you are ever anywhere near them -- anywhere at all -- I urge you to go visit.  Nay, I insist.

This is the land above the Caverns, for as far as the eye can see.

I'd heard about the Carlsbad Caverns before.  As in, I'd heard the name but didn't know anything about them.  But they were on the map of New Mexico and were sort of on my way to Austin, Texas, so I decided to stop and see them.  In my head, before arriving, I pictured something like the Luray Caverns in the Shenandoah Valley.  That is, pretty cool but something I'd seen elsewhere.  Boy was I wrong.

The entranceway, looking out.

As you know, I've been a lot of places this year.  And in the past two years, I've been even more places, including Yellowstone National Park, Glacier National Forest and The Badlands, plus all the places I've blogged about here.  And I have never seen anything that impressed me more than Carlsbad Caverns!  They were ... amazing.  O.M.G.

Probably the inspiration for some H.P. Lovecraft stories.

The caverns are enormous.  There are two main caverns (and a few smaller ones), each of which is at least as vast as a football stadium.  Except they are completely enclosed, by rock.  I took the elevator down to the lower big cave, then walked back up and out through the other cave.  At first, I didn't see a whole lot, then all of a sudden, I had one of those moments where I stopped dead in my tracks and my mouth dropped open and I could only stare, the cavern was so big and magnificent.

Sadly, even the world's best camera cannot capture the magnificence of the caverns because it is impossible to light up the entire space.  My little point-and-shoot was certainly no match for the place.  :(  But I hope these close-ups of some formations give you an idea of how cool it is inside, even if they don't begin to show the scope of the caves.

Can you see the moisture on the rocks?  They were created from thousands of years of water slowly dripping down the walls.

My one small sadness at Carlsbad was that I missed the evening's bat flight, when thousands of bats come pouring out of the cave at sunset.  (So if you do take my advice and go see the Caverns -- and you should! -- be sure to plan your trip so you can catch the bat flight either the night before or the day of your trip.)  As a small consolation prize, though, I did get to see some 45,000 year old bat guano, just sitting on top of some giant rocks in the main cave.  Pretty impressive stuff.