Good morning. We woke at 8:00am to the wind still blowing and a forecast of very strong winds this afternoon. The night was quiet (putting aside the aforementioned wind). No coyotes or other critters about.
Today we are visiting the Carlsbad Caverns, a well known large cave system in the Guadeloupe mountain range of New Mexico. We have entrance tickets for 12:30pm and so take the morning easy relaxing in the van (to windy and sandy to sit outside comfortably).
We arrived at the Carlsbad cavern visitor center at 12:15pm and were allowed to start our self-guided tour immediately. We had heard that they were strict about observing entry times based on reservations so this was a nice surprise.
We chose to walk into the caverns using the natural entrance as opposed to taking an available elevator directly down the the ‘Big room’ so as to fully experience the caves.
The entrance is huge and is a good indicator of how large this cave system is. They have bat viewings at the entrance in the evenings when the bats swarm out of the caves into the sky to hunt for insects, we were not planning to stay quite that long.
The caves slowly get darker but there are plenty of low level lights that show you the way of the walkway.
The walk down the entrance cave is done on a paved walkway with stainless steel hand rails, there are only a few stairs in very steep sections. As per the signs at the entry, we had to walk down about 750’ (230m) or the equivalent of 75 stories (the height of the Empire State Building in New York).
In a nutshell, this is one big hole in the ground! It took us about an hour to descend to the level of the ‘Big room’ which is the main spectacle of the cave system stretching many hundreds of feet in multiple directions and containing so many different stalactite and stalagmite formations all lit with accent lighting. The temperature in the caves was a little warmer than we expected at 12C and so the sweaters we wore were off before we completed the descent.
Our walk about the ‘Big room lasted about an hour before we chose to take the elevator back up to the visitor center which of course drops you off directly in the gift shop. We purchased a couple of pins for our collection before departing.
In all we were in the caves for a little over 2 hours and really enjoyed the experience. The walk down is not hard but your knees and legs do get quite a workout. You do not need to be Uberfit to complete the walk, but you will want to take advantage of the seating provided along the walkway to rest, hydrate and enjoy the various views.
We drive back to the BLM land on which we camped last night and managed to snag the same site.
The winds had risen significantly while we were underground with wind gusts now at 64km/h. These are supposed to drop steadily overnight, so hopefully we will awake in the same place we parked.
All the best everyone.