Out Of Darkness

There are 59 National Parks in the United States. And by that I mean true National Parks with full status, not National Monuments or properties under the care of the National Park Service. Of those 59, three are caves. I visited one of these, Kentucky's Mammoth Cave, on a bourbon and music tour of Tennessee and Kentucky back in 2006 which I sometimes refer to as my camera-less vacation because I think it's the only significant trip I've taken without a camera since I got out of school in 1994. I managed to visit another this month: Carlsbad Caverns National Park just outside of Carlsbad, New Mexico.

Carlsbad Caverns had been on my non-existent bucket list for a while, probably ever since I took a trip to northern New Mexico in 2001 and became determined to do the southern half of the state in a subsequent trip. Sometimes these things take a while to come together; 16 years in this case as it turns out. Better late than never.

That '06 trip to Mammoth Cave got me a little bit inside the largest cave system discovered so far in the world, with a total of 400 miles of passageways documented to date. Carlsbad Caverns would be a little different. It is nowhere near as big but features one of the largest underground rooms ever discovered, appropriately nicknamed The Big Room which is almost 4,000 feet long; that's over 3/4 of a mile long if you thought about doing the math. 

The other famous draw of Carlsbad Caverns is the daily dusk departure of hundreds of thousands of Mexican free-tailed bats on their nightly hunt. But they are migratory and only live in New Mexico in the summer months. I visited in winter. The Big Room would likely have to suffice for this trip. I was excited to explore nonetheless.

Foreshadowing...

Carlsbad Caverns were granted National Monument status in 1923 after being surveyed by Robert Holley of the General Land Office. Accompanying Holley on that survey were photographer Ray V. Davis, whose photographs of the Caverns published earlier that year in the New York Times had brought national attention to the site, and Jim White, who was according to legend or myth or actually written history the first (white) person to enter the Caverns.

One year later an expedition featuring White was sponsored by the National Geographic Society and the following year the first stair was installed at what is called the Natural Entrance today. From there, things moved quickly: the National Park Service installed a trail all the way to The Big Room in 1926 and the first visitors arrived the following year. Admission was $2 per person, which was actually pretty expensive back then. And I can't imagine how long it took folks to get there 90 years ago on 1920s roads using 1920s transportation.

The Caverns became a full National Park in 1930 and achieved UNESCO World Heritage Site status in 1995.

There are basically two options for the visitor to explore Carlsbad Caverns: take a ranger-guided tour or take a self-guided tour. The two self-guided tours take you into the Caverns for a length of 1-1/4 miles and around The Big Room for about the same length. The ranger-guided tours take you further and some require that you get on your hands and knees and do a little bit of (almost) spelunking. Since we were traveling that day from Roswell (about 1-3/4 hours) and to Las Cruces (about 2-1/2 to 3 hours) we decided the self-guided tours would do us just fine. 

The first question we were faced with when buying tickets was do you want to take the elevator down? Sure, why not. Seems like a great way to get to The Big Room quickly. We took in the 15-20 minute introductory movie and then made our way into the elevator, which counts not in floors but in feet down. The Big Room, where the elevator dumps you out, is about 750 feet below the surface of the Earth.

After a couple of minutes of general "wow, it's dark down here" adjustment, we were off exploring. We were about to embark on an hour and 45 minute tour around The Big Room. And for sure it was big! Any time I spend almost two hours walking around a single room I know I'm someplace pretty large. And the formations are incredible: stalactites and stalagmites and soda straws and draperies and popcorn with names like the Chinese theater, the boneyard, the hall of giants, the lion's tail and rock of ages.

But I have to say after a while, it all starts to look the same. I know what you are thinking: there are many people who would go great lengths to stand where I stood earlier this month and my response is "yawn"? Not quite that bad but pretty much, yes. Don't get me wrong, it is worth the trip to stand in The Big Room but after the initial awe of how long and high the cavern is and after you've checked out formation after formation, the stuffy air, the poorly lit pathways (not really complaining about the lighting; I did not want it floodlit) and the more of the same started to wear on me. I feel like a horrible human being.

This is my favorite photo of The Big Room. The lighting on the main column is really clear.

I mentioned previously that there are two self-guided tours at Carlsbad Caverns. I have to admit I was so focused on getting to the main attraction in the Caverns that I completely forgot what the other trail was. But since we had come all that way, I was determined to do both. And here's where my Carlsbad Caverns experience turned around and made this into a special place for me.

The other self-guided tour is called the Natural Entrance Route and it is quite literally the way into the cave. Most people start out with this one and then end up at The Big Room, I suppose. Since we'd opted to say yes to the elevator question earlier, we completely skipped the Natural Entrance and just fast forwarded to the good stuff, or so we thought.

So there we were at the bottom of the cave looking at our map that we'd picked up at the Visitor Center and it hit us: we bypassed the way most people get into the cavern; why not take that way out. Yes, you read that right. We took the elevator down and decided to climb out. All 750 feet up, which on the surface of things doesn't sound that bad. It turned into an amazing hike for us.

750 feet is a long way up, especially when parts of the trail actually go back down to get around fallen rocks which require you to go more up. Pretty soon, we noticed we were pretty much alone in our ascent. Everyone we passed was going down; the easy way so to speak. We got some comments: Crazy! You're climbing UP? One woman offered us advice to stop every so often and breathe. The best was just a single word: "Suicide!" Well, hopefully it's not going to come to that.

We asked the woman with the breathing advice if we were close. Her answer was a one word "No!"

Natural Entrance a.k.a. the way out. What we spent an hour walking towards.

If you hustle (I like to think we hustled), it will take you about an hour to walk the bit more than a mile from The Big Room to the Natural Entrance. You also might get a bit sweaty. It's hard work. Waiting for us at the exit were some signs shown in one of the photographs above. I love the "Strenuous Hike Ahead. Exhaustion and Weak Knees Common." sign warning you about the descent. Start at the bottom and walk up and you'll see no such signs. Don't say you haven't been warned by me.

I have to say there's not a whole lot of super interesting stuff to see on the way out. There are no grand open spaces with huge rock formations or underwater lakes. Other than the one enormous rock that had fallen from the ceiling of the Cavern to open up a passage below, there was little to gaze at in awe. The payoff for sure is at the bottom.

But what the walk up did for me was make me appreciate how far underground we were and how difficult it must have been for the first cavers (both Jim White and everyone unrecorded that came before him) to get down to somewhere magnificent. I thought about how primitive their first exploration tools would have been: maybe a rope ladder or a bucket or platform on a winch and for sure just some candles for light. These people were not walking down and up a paved trail with a couple of warning signs on them. If they got lost or their tools failed, they were dead for sure. I can't imagine the sense of adventure that would have driven them to go deeper and deeper and the amazement they would have felt when they discovered each new underground room.

Once we passed the breathing advice woman and the suicide dude, we started looking for any signs of the end. Was that a sliver of daylight or just another electric light positioned to illuminate some ages old rock formation? We kept stopping and looking up to see if we could see the light. We didn't dare ask anyone how much further we had to go. We didn't want to get discouraged. 

Finally the end we sought was not visual but audible. We stopped and heard some chirping, which was a surprise to us because we assumed they were the bats which weren't supposed to be there. Just a little while later we discovered diffuse light filtering through a cloud of condensation with a  whole colony of cave swallows darting in and out of the cave entrance. We'd made it! We could have taken the elevator back up and left the Caverns with a little bit of a disappointing experience. By hoofing it out, I really feel like we accomplished something and understand this place on a deeper level. It made my trip there.

Made it!!! Finally out of the darkness and into the light of day.

Carlsbad Caverns wasn't done giving us good surprises yet, though.

The drive from Roswell to the Park is pretty monotonous: about 90 minutes of driving on desert highways before downgrading to some smaller similarly uninhabited roads. But just before you arrive there, the landscape changes dramatically.

The Caverns are on the northern edge of the Chihuahuan Desert and Guadalupe Mountains so when you get about a quarter of an hour away, the landscape changes from flat scrubby desert to rocky rolling hills. Eventually you realize you are driving on top of the Caverns and their huge open rooms below.

On our way out we stopped to take a picture or two of the landscape we traveled over to get there before we headed out on the long drive to Las Cruces. Our delay got us on the road right about when a deer was crossing after we came around a bend and we slowed down to let it pass. Only it wasn't a deer. It was a bighorn sheep, the animal I've been seeking all over the western United States for about seven years. I saw one a couple of years ago in Zion National Park on the top of a cliff at sunset. But this one was right in front of us. Stop the car! We're taking some pictures.

Turns out it wasn't A bighorn sheep. It was the last bighorn sheep in a herd of 12 or so that crossed the same road. The rest of them were already halfway up the hill by the time we rounded our bend. They are difficult to see in the picture below but they are there. There's a line of rocks right in the center of the picture. They are clustered right in the middle of that band.

What a day! A great climb out of a deep cave and a family of bighorns. Can't get much better than that.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, the third cave National Park is Wind Cave National Park in South Dakota. Guess that's on my list now. Gotta be a completist.