It was just a little over two weeks ago that we visited Carlsbad Caverns. It truly is an amazing place and I can honestly say we’ve never seen anything like it before. We took a lot of pictures and unfortunately many didn’t turn out because it was so dark, but we did manage to get a few good ones.
The Caverns are located in New Mexico in the Guadalupe Mountains. There are two ways you can enter the caverns, first is a 1.5 mile walk down (equal to 79 stories) to the natural entrance of the cave and the other is an elevator ride down 850 feet. We had hoped to do the walk down but arrived too late in the day. Once we got to the end of the elevator ride, we entered a whole new world. This world was dark, damp and very cool. The temperature of the caverns is roughly 56 degrees year round. The self guided tour is about 1.4 miles of pathways through the caverns and takes about 2 hours.
The great thing about this National Park is that they have a pet day care so we were able to leave Ozzie and Sami in an air conditioned area while we toured the caverns. It’s been a long time since either has been in a kennel but they did pretty good.
This is the Great Room, it’s huge!
There were Stalagmites and Stalactites, as well as formations named Columns, Draperies, Soda Straws and Popcorn.
This place was just massive, it’s so hard to explain it. If interested, click on the link for more professional photos – http://www.nps.gov/cave/photosmultimedia/index.htm
It’s really important that you stay on the path while in the cavern. If you stray off the guided walk and try to explore on your own, you risk the rangers not seeing you on their last walk through, and if they don’t see you by closing, you stay there until the nextmorning, in the dark and all alone!! And although they say that the bats no longer inhabit that area of the caves, we heard them flying around in there and no thank you! That is the stuff nightmares are made of!!!
We left the caverns and headed south…Hello Texas, here we come!
4gslivingthedream 