Imagine a big hole in the ground. Now, imagine that the big hole is filled with rocky spikes and fantastic shapes. OK, you've now successfully imagined Carlsbad Caverns. Really! That's it!
Of course, it is a little better in person. Not that I mean any offense to your imaginations.
The basic Caverns experience involves taking the self-guided tours. The Natural Entrance tour is about a mile walk that takes you 830 feet down and then about fifty feet back up again. You go in a big hole in the ground (remember what you imagined) on a paved path with a handrail and wind your way back under that hole into the very depths of the earth. The whole time, you move through these enormous passages in the rock that are hundreds of feet wide and tall. Speleothems start to show up early on, though the most impressive formations are in the deeper areas of the caves.
The second element of the self-guided tour is the Big Room tour. That's another paved loop that takes you around the biggest room in the cave. Its floor space is 357,469 sq ft! And the trail is more than a mile long! This area is full of huge stalagmites, and parts of the ceiling are covered in thickets of stalactites. It's really like something out of this world. At the end of the tour, there's an elevator that whisks you back up to the surface right into the Visitor's Center.
We did the walk in the morning, and then took the elevator back up to have lunch in the parking lot. After lunch, we took a little walk around the parking lot and down a small nature trail that begins there to see the typical birds of the area. This turned out to be sparrows - Canyon Towhees, Black-chinned Sparrows, and White-crowned Sparrows were very common. We also managed to dig up a Rufous-crowned Sparrow - a lifer for Libby! Pyrrhuloxia and Sage Thrashers were also typical parts of the area's plentiful avifauna.
Following our walk, we took the elevator back down into the cave for our scheduled 2:00 King's Palace tour. This is really a must-see part of the caves, and it's been fairly recently restricted so that you can only see it via guided tour. The rooms you visit are smallish, but incredibly full of all kinds of amazing cave formations - draperies and stalactites and stalagmites that will just blow your mind. Naturally, I decided not to bring a camera on this part of the tour.
However, I did take a camera on the rest of the trip - and the pictures are available here: Carlsbad Caverns set. There are a few pictures from the Walnut Canyon exhibits we visited, also, on our way in and out of the park.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment