Aug 12 - Carlsbad Caverns

We got up bright and early to drive to the Carlsbad Caverns. What a beautiful drive as we wound up the mountain. At home when we go into the mountains, we are in the Redwoods, or pine forests. But here, we are in desert. There are so many different types of cacti. I wish that I could grow some of them in my backyard, but I’m not sure that they would thrive at our elevation. As soon as we got out of the car, we were greeted by lizards, ants, flying grasshopper sort of things, and huge beetles! FUN.

We arrived at the caverns at about 11:30 so we purchased our tickets for a special tour of the “King’s Palace” at 2pm, and began our self guided walk through the “Big Room”. We descended via an elevator to over 750 feet below ground. It was very cold (a constant 56 degrees) but quite refreshing. I have been to caverns before in Arizona and Oregon, but this one is HUGE!! We walked for 1 ½ miles and never left the one chamber! It was very hard to get pictures that could capture the beauty of this most excellent work of nature. It was very serene, and so quiet that you could hear the constant drip, drip of the water making its way through the ground above, and seeping through the limestone. As the water drips and evaporates, it leaves behind minerals that form icicle like shapes called Stalactites. These grow at the rate of about 2-3 centimeters every 100 years, and some of them in these caverns are over 60 ft! It is so sad to think that, before it became a National Park, people used to break them off as souvenirs. The next tour to the “Kings Palace” was guided, and we walked down another 100 plus feet. This part of the caverns had the biggest formations. We learned a lot from the tour guide here, it was very interesting.

After our tours, we ate a big lunch in the cafeteria. It was getting late and we had a pretty good drive ahead of us still. Shortly after we crossed into Texas, it began to get dark fast. We saw some pretty big refineries around Odessa and Midland. All the lights on the rigging and such looked like Christmas lights against the black sky – very cool. Soon we found ourselves again in pretty remote country, our headlights just illuminating the road ahead. I’m pretty sure there were lots of oil wells around, because we could smell the natural gas that comes up with the crude for HOURS! I can only imagine that there were hundreds of grasshopper pumps surrounding us for a major portion of our journey this night, I wish that I could have seen them. We finally pulled into Abilene about 1:30am. Before retiring for the night, we wanted to double check the schedule for the museums that we wanted to see in the morning. Oops, we made a major error! We routed our trip here because of some cool things we wanted to see in Abilene, but it looks like the Abilene we wanted to see was in Kansas!!!!!!!!! We got out the guide book, and went to plan “B”.