It wasn't as bad as I expected

It wasn't as bad as i expected
On the trip back to camp from Carlsbad Caverns, that is how Alex described the day.  Leave it to a teenager to see a spectacular natural wonder and expect boring.

The whole experience at the Caverns on Sunday was remarkable. The drive into the Guadeloupe Mountains was picturesque.  And smooth, in spite of the road construction.  The view at the top was wonderful and provided a nice backdrop to the views to come.  The park is clean and new and the visitor's center was efficient and well staffed.  LOTS of rangers everywhere.

We had reservations  for one of the tours through King's Palace, one of the large, individually named caverns.  The tour starts 750 feet below the surface of the Guadeloupe mountains.  We took the elevator down for this, since the trail takes 1.5 hours and we had 45 minutes before the tour started.  The elevator opens into a wide expanse which holds the old restaurant.  Only cold food and drinks are served now.  It is the starting point for all tours, including the self guided tours.  We were able to relax for a little bit and get our bearings before the Range tour guide gathered everyone for the start.  Ranger Rick was our guide, pretty funny.  The formations in the caverns are all limestone and mostly white in color.  The limestone by the restaurant was coated in black.  The restaurant used to be full service, hamburgers, hot dogs, etc. and that left residue on the 'ceiling'.  The caverns have all natural ventilation, no air is pumped in or vented by man.  Carlsbad Caverns is a 'show cave' with electrical lighting and paved walkways in a large portion of the cavern.

The limestone formations in the caverns are spectacular, but very difficult to describe.  Robert Holley said in 1923 "...I am wholly conscious of the feebleness of my efforts to convey in the deep conflicting emotions, the feeling of fear and awe, and the desire for an inspired understanding of the Divine Creator's work which presents to the human eye such a complex aggregate of natural wonders...."

http://www.associatepublisher.com/e/c/ca/carlsbad_caverns_national_park.htm
 This may be one place (haven't hit the Grand Canyon yet) where neither words nor pictures can adequately describe the scene.  Not to say we didn't TRY to click our way through it...

The tour allowed us to experience the total blackness of the cavern.  During a planned part, Ranger Rick had the lights in the cave turned off for this experience.  D-A-R-K dark...pitch black is not even close...and quiet (except for the 3 year old).  RR said that people lost in caves without lights can handle the dark fairly well, but the silence makes the mind loopy.  The coolest part of this experience was at the point where the lights were out he lit a small, cigarette lighter.  The whole cave was lit by this small light!  It's amazing what our eyes can do once adjusted to the light level.

We completed the tour and headed up to the new lunch facility.  We had burritos and quesadillas, of course.  Alex decided to stick his tongue to a fudge bar, just because we said not to...well let's say that we have pictures of that!

After lunch we wanted to go back down to the caverns to do a self guided tour of the big room (it's the only one that people are allowed in themselves).  We decided to walk down to the huge cave opening, dodging cave swallow bombs as entering the big black hole in the ground.  It's an impressive sight all by itself.  The trail goes down 750 ft but the walk is over a mile.  The deeper you get the more formations you see.  This hike was well worth the energy!  The tour of the big cave was spectacular as well.  This is a great place.  Ali's favorite part was when a different ranger picked her out and showed her a fossil shell in the limestone.  This limestone was deposited on as part of a prehistoric reef.  Fossils can be seen, but are not usually seen in the main sections of the caverns, since the formation of cave dissolves the rock.  The place opened by dynamite still have the fossils showing (ironic, I thought).

After exploring the big cave (and purchasing the requisite t-shirts) we had a couple hours before the next activity, the bat flight.  We rested and walked through a couple small wall presentations.  The most interesting one, explained the new theory of how the majority of the cave was formed.  Hydrogen sulfide (from oil tables) combined with ground water to form sulfuric acid.  The sulfuric acid ate away large portions of the limestone.  The typical  cave formation (slightly acidic ground water seeping through cracks and dissolving limestone) also played a role int he formations, but the huge caverns were probably opened by the hydrogen sulfide/water method.

We watched a short presentation on guano.  That was cool, since the kids were getting tired and this provided an energy boost!  We learned some more about J. White and also how the Guano miner's were partially responsible for the Caverns and how we see them now.

The caverns are home to bats, as you might suspect.  The Mexican free-tailed bat migrates (yes) here every year starting around Memorial day.  The population fluctuates, but can be many hundreds of thousand bats.  The bats are the reason the cave was explored in the first place.  Every evening, around sunset, the bats leave the cave, en mass, spiraling out of the big black entrance (counter-clockwise, seven times) before heading off to the find water and the night's meal.  The park built an amphitheater for the evening 'show' for people to sit and watch the Bat Flight.  Sure enough, about 8:15 mountain daylight time, near sunset, the bats came out.  Only a few at first, flying in their distinctive, erratic, flight pattern.  Then more and more came out together, the pattern really looked like a black whirlwind ending in a line of black all heading in the same direction.  There were only about 10,000 bats the night we saw, but I expect it is even more amazing with several hundreds of thousand bats going at the same time.  They say it can last up to 2.5 hours.  There are no pictures of this, all electronic devices and all cameras are banned from even being turned on starting before the bats might come out.  At least one person that night got a ticket for not listening.  Apparently, the bats can detect noises from electronic devices and it throws off there direction and can even cause them to change their feeding behavior, in some cases.

Anyway, no tickets for us, but we have sponsored a bat, just ask Ali to see the picture (a postcard).  It was a busy and exciting day, despite Alex's teen-aged angst.  I will update our Memorial day a little later.  Hope you enjoyed!