Looking down into the entrance.
Looking up from inside the cave.
A few hundred feet down you start getting past the range of daylight and reach the Bat Cave. No Batman and Robin, but in the summer it is the home of hundreds of thousands of Mexican freetail bats. Then I continued down the one mile trail to the main caverns, about 800 feet deep. It is hard to show in pictures, but it was very eerie to descend so steeply in such a big dark hole, especially since I was alone most of the trip.
Then I got down to the Big Room where Debbie and I had walked the day before. Since I had some time before my guided tour I took some more pictures of the incredible formations.
And had lunch in the lunchroom that had been carved out by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930’s. The ham sandwich I had seemed to date from about the same time.
Next I joined the guided tour to the King Palace area of the cave, which is closed to the public except for two ranger-guided tours each day. The guide was a girl from Poland who came to this country just because she loved Carlsbad Caverns and the other big caves in the Guadalupe Mountains of New Mexico. She also liked telling stories about caves, so a tour with about 30 minutes of walking lasted an hour and a half. We went into an area called the King’s Palace, which had been used for meeting and weddings as late as the 1970’s, but was now restricted to protect the delicate formations. The rooms and formations were beautiful but difficult to get good pictures of because you were so close to them compared to the Big Room.
After leaving the cave I took the scenic dirt road through the desert out of the park and stopped at a little trail that went past a small pond to a rock overhang that had been used as a shelter by Apaches and other Indians. There was one very pretty male Wood Duck in the pond who seemed lonely and out of place.
Mike
11/1/07
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