Carlsbad Caverns

Friday, October 14

After our good night’s sleep we headed to Carlsbad Cavern National Park.  We took a self guided audio tour of this fantastic underground world.   I had thoughts of feeling claustrophobic but the “big room’, as they call it, was huge.  It was like being in a domed football stadium only fourteen times that size filled with stalagmites, stalactites, columns, popcorn and huge rock formations.  Our tour took us on a mile and a half foot path that wound throughout the cave.  We can’t even try to explain the processes occurring that continue to create the wonders below.  

Pictures were difficult to take, flash, no flash, but we took a few that we will share. 

This was a surreal experience and due to the formations we saw we sometimes felt we were in outer space, other times on a Disney ride and others in a fanciful fairyland ~ very cool.

our dark path into the unknown

through the tunnel

into the amazing underworld

the lion's tail

 

Giant Dome

Fairyland ~ popcorn

Temple of Sun

 

Mirror Lake ~ ripples from water droplets

The decomposing reddish brown deposits of          

bat roost

bat guano on this rock  indicate that a 

bat colony roosted on the ceiling in this 

area long ago.

the underworld

 

Next we continued a few miles down the road to the Guadalupe Mountain National Park in Texas.  Actually, Carlsbad Caverns are in the Guadalupe Mountain Range.  We were told at Carlsbad that this range is like a sponge, just filled with holes and caves.                    

 McKittrick Canyon, in the Guadalupe Mountains is home to maple, walnut, ash and oak trees so we were expecting to see some beautiful fall colors.  Unfortunately, we were a little too early for this part of the country.  The leaves don’t peak here until late October or early November.  This is a wilderness park designed mostly for hiking, backpacking and walking through the mountains.  We had hoped to camp here but they were full and since it was 93 degrees in the shade we elected to forgo the hike.  So we walked around a little, checked out the campsites, saw ‘the big one’ (there is an El Capitan mountain here also as in Yosemite) and then headed on toward Lubbock, Texas.   We met a   great couple that overheard us tell the ranger we were heading to Lubbock.  “We’re from Lubbock,” they said and proceeded to tell us about lots of things to see there and where to stay.  So we were all set. 

El Capitan

It was getting late and we passed through another time zone, losing an hour so we stopped for the night in Brownfield, Texas.