Carlsbad Caverns

(Carlsbad, NM) Time for sightseeing! But before that could happen we needed to get the dogs worn out. So while I rested my legs, Mike took all four dogs out for a hike. Wow, is he ever brave. He found a nice place they could hike where the girls could be off leash the entire time. He kept both boys on leash and they were both very good about it.

With the dogs exercised, we could now head off for an afternoon of human activities - a rarity for us!

Our destination this afternoon was Carlsbad Cavern National Park.



These caverns must have been around for a long time as mom told me she came here when she was a kid! Ha ha. Mike informed me they've been here thousands of years.

The Visitor's Center is under renovation so everything is just in these small trailers. Our National Forest Service pass worked here so we didn't have to pay to go down into caves.

There are two ways to enter the caves. You can walk down a very steep eight mile trail or you can take an elevator. Needless to say, we took the elevator. The main elevators are also under renovation so we had to go in the service elevator. Man alive did this elevator go fast! We went 750 feet down in less than three minutes.

The thing that was amazing to me was that when you were up on the ground it just looked like desert for as far as you could see. Yet when you go down 750 feet there were these amazing caves. How did someone ever decide to go way under the ground out here in the middle of nothing but desert? Amazing.

There are many different tours you can do but we of course decided to do the easiest one, called the Big Room tour. So we were walking around with all the great-grandparents. But even so this self-guided tour was amazing. You can see on this map the route we took. To do the entire loop takes about an hour and a half.



I was amazed at the beauty of the caves. I also found out that it is really hard to take pictures in a dark cave. If I used my flash then the stuff close to me was just a super bright white spot and the stuff farther away was just all black. If I didn't use the flash then the pictures came out blurry because I just can't hold the camera still long enough. This was not a good time to not bring a tripod! I'll share a bunch of pictures with you but they aren't as good as I would have liked.

This is one of the first things we saw when we entered the caves. You can see many different type of formations seen in caves all in this one picture. If you look closely you can also see the railing of the trail we followed.



I'll try to share a little bit about caves as well...although I must say a lot of it seemed a little complicated so you'll just get some of the basics that I can remember!

Carlsbad Caverns are the second deepest caves in the U.S. at 1,022 feet. The caves here are a bit unique in that they were formed by acid rising from below, where reservoirs of oil give off sulfurous fumes, rather than by acidic water percolating from the surface. I'm not really sure the significance of this but the rangers seemed to be quite impressed by this fact.

The Big Room covers 14 acres and is the largest cave room in the world. This room is 1,800 feet long and ranges up to 1,100 feet wide. The maximum height of the ceiling is 225 feet. The size of the Big Room, the length of the caverns (14.9 miles, the 11th longest in the United States), and the depth make Carlsbad the biggest cave in the United States. I've been to a few others caves but this room was huge in comparison. I kept thinking we were about all the way around and I'd look at the map and see that we weren't even close.

The decorative dripstone features in caves are called speleothems. The most familiar speleothems that I'm sure you've all heard of at some time in your life are stalactites and stalagmites. I actually remember learning about this when my parents took me to the Oregon Caves when I was really young. Amazing how some things stay with you so long.



As best as I recall, stalactites hang downward from the ceiling and are formed as drop after drop of water slowly trickles through cracks in the cave roof. As each drop of water hangs from the ceiling, it loses carbon dioxide and deposits a film of calcite. Successive drops add ring below ring, the water dripping through the hollow center of the rings, until a pendant cylinder forms.



Here you can see some of the water on the rocks.





Tubular or "soda straw" stalactites grow in this way; most are fragile and have the diameter of a drop of water, but some reach a length of perhaps a yard or more.



The large cone-shaped stalactites begin as these fragile tubes and then enlarge to cones when enough water accumulates to flow along the outside of the soda straws. Deposition of calcite on the outside of the tubes, most of which are near the ceiling and taper downward, results in the familiar cone shapes.



Stalagmites grow upward from the floor of the cave generally as a result of water dripping from overhanging stalactites. A column forms when a stalactite and a stalagmite grow until they join.





A curtain or drapery begins to form on an inclined ceiling when the drops of water trickle along a slope. Gradually a thin sheet of calcite grows downward from the ceiling and hangs in decorative folds like a drape. Mike and I wondered if this is how the idea of drapes came for windows in houses.



Sheets of calcite that are deposited on the walls or floor by flowing water are called flowstone. Rimstone dams are raised fence-like deposits of calcite on the cave floor that form around pools of water.





Rock material produced by the collapse of the ceiling or walls of a cave is called breakdown and may range in size from plates and chips to massive blocks. We saw many huge boulders as well numerous smaller ones. Most breakdown present in these caves appears to have occurred thousands of years ago. But I kept wondering how they knew nothing was going to fall now. Even if one of the little "straws" fell, we figured it would easily pierce us all the way through.





We came to one section that they called the "Bottomless Pit." I guess they originally thought there was no bottom. But in fact, the bottom was really 225 feet down. I was surprised to see that when I looked at the picture I took, you can actually see the bottom and see a path along the floor.



In a different pit we could see a ladder that was used many years ago when the cave was originally being explored.



Another thing I found to be very interesting was what some of the rock looked like inside.







Mike had fun peaking through a little tunnel that was along our walk through the Big Room.



I noticed they like to name many of the formations in the caves. I only got pictures of a couple of them. The Big Room had a formation they called the Chandelier. It really did look like a chandelier.



They called this formation the Lion's Tail. You can see the long formation coming down with what they call "popcorn" at the end....thus looking like a lion's tail.



Here are a few more pictures of various formations we saw in the caves.
















































When we got back to ground level, I decided to show you what the ground looks like in this area....above the caves. This particular picture looks out over Texas.



What a trip - very interesting. But it was time to get back to all my sweet puppies. I didn't want to take any chances that some monsters might scare them tonight. No surprise - we didn't get any trick or treaters.

Debbie
10/31/07