Saturday April 13, 2019
Road video and map – Alamogordo to Carlsbad, NM
Today was the first drive of the trip where I have had to use my wipers (for about 15 minutes) but there are a couple of scenic sections worth checking out in the road video.
The main focus of the day was Carlsbad Caverns National Park. The limestone in the park contains 120 known caves with the longest explored cave measured at 140 miles. However, the public tours focus on Carlsbad Cavern which is a 30 mile cave containing several large chambers, including the famous Bat Cave at the natural entrance and the modestly named Large Room. The Large Room is, in fact, the largest cave chamber (by volume) in the western hemisphere, with an area of 8.2 acres and thousands of formations.
Unusually, for a National Park cave, the regular tours are self guided. This has the advantage of flexible timing, not having to stay with a group and being able to listen to the descriptions of the things that interest you on the headset provided. There are two tours, the Large Room tour and the Natural Entrance tour. I began at the natural entrance and, since that tour ends where the large room tour starts, I simply followed on to the second tour. The whole cave is very dimly lit with brighter lighting on notable features and this made photography difficult since the brighter spots often came out pure white. The formations are similar to those I’ve seen in other caves but the scale here is much greater.
Unfortunately it is too early in the year to see the evening bat flight as the bats are still in their winter home in Brazil and don’t return to Carlsbad until May/June.
View from an overlook on US Route 82 east of Alamogordo.
The natural entrance to Carlsbad Cavern.
One disadvantage of self guided tours is that the lighting must be very dim because it is on all the time. This video snippet gives an idea of this.
The people in front of the distant stalagmite offer some idea of the scale and this was not one of the larger chambers.
Formations close to the path were easy to photograph.
It was difficult to capture any wide views due to the variability of lighting and long exposure needed. These are a couple of my more successful efforts.
Never been to Carlsbad. Really enjoyed the photos! As I get older I have developed a degree of claustrophobia. Funny, I’ve been on a couple of caving trips during my teens and remember crawling on my stomach quite a distance to access larger chambers. No way I could do that now w/o hyperventilating. I have issues with climbing into an MRI chamber now! Carlsbad seems tame enough though.
The main Carlsbad Cavern is large and I hardly had to even bend while following the path. They offer ranger guided trips in other caves that require the sort of crawling you are referring to and they provide hard hats, lamps, knee and elbow pads and gloves to those wishing to do that. At least it’s quiet in a cave, unlike an MRI.
I remember Carlsbad bat flight in August 1981! Glad the pesticides haven’t killed them off , even if they are on holiday in Mexico.
Tom … don’t attempt the long tour at Mammoth.. squeezing there, though it was at least dry .
Last year’s bat numbers were good – I think they said about 90,000.