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.<\/p>\n
The main focus of the day was Carlsbad Caverns National Park<\/em>. 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<\/em> which is a 30 mile cave containing several large chambers, including the famous Bat Cave<\/em> at the natural entrance and the modestly named Large Room<\/em>. 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n View from an overlook on US Route 82 east of Alamogordo.![\"Lincoln](\"http:\/\/relativerest.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/Lincoln-National-Forest-View.jpg\")
\nThe natural entrance to Carlsbad Cavern.![\"Carlbad](\"http:\/\/relativerest.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/Carlbad-Natural-Entrance.jpg\")
\nOne 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.<\/p>\n