Carlsbad Caverns National Park

Driving into Carlsbad Caverns National Park, winding up the northern Guadalupe Mountains, sets a high bar for what will be below the ground when you reach the top. Because I visited during the early winter, the bats had already migrated to warmer climates for the year. However, even if the major living attraction isn’t available, thegeologic wonders of the Big Room, and all it has to explore, is quite enough to get by with for a first visit.

Let me pause here for my ecology-loving students (and readers!): while the bats are the main attraction there is this worm that lives in the caverns. A horsehair worm. Y’all, if you get queasy, skip to the end of this paragraph and do NOT watch the video. Considering that most of the ground is in rock instead of soil, these worms are parasitic and survive by living inside their hosts. So far, so normal (for a worm). However, these particular worms have to be in water at the beginning of their life cycle, so they release an enzyme that tells the grasshopper they live inside that they are thirsty. The grasshopper could be completely satiated and cannot stop wanting to go to the closest puddle to get a drink. Then, the worms go all Alien on the poor thing and slink about in the water making tiny worm babies to be unintentionally swallowed by the next cricket who is just normal thirsty. Art imitates life. But I digress.

I took the early afternoon to hike around the Big Room, which is the central cavern at Carlsbad Caverns. Roughly 75 floors below ground, you could fit multiple football stadiums inside this single space. You shouldn’t though, because then the rock formations would be entirely destroyed and they are a wonder beyond the massive space.

The variety of karst features was overwhelming. Lots of styles and formations to learn!

Unlike Mammoth Cave National Park, this hollowed interior of the Earth was primarily created by sulfuric and carbonic acids - not an underground river. The formations are still mostly gypsum (mineral) and limestone (rock), but the two spaces are completely different experiences. Beyond the more traditional, self-paced tour (during which all of the photos were taken), I stuck around for a special candlelight tour of the caverns. This is a rare experience only offered a handful of times a year and sometimes cancelled for years at a time, so it was 100% worth the effort.

After the caverns section of the park officially closes for the evening, a group of curious adventurers met in the visitors center to say our names and where we we’re from. Just a little ice breaker before being handed actual wood-frame lanterns with candles inside. Down the elevator shaft, blasted to allow a less strenuous and time-consuming entrance than the hike-in natural opening, and one final stop to use the bathrooms.

Sidenote: If Carlsbad was going to win awards for parkitecture, the cavern bathrooms would be high on the list. It is set back into a smaller cave and feels like you made wrong turn and must be on a trail; for about 50 feet anyway. That was just the beginning of a really incredible experience of seeing the caves as the first modern explorers would have (the first people to use the caves would likely have used torches and or maintained fires closer to the natural entrances).

And then the lights went out...

Having been in the Big Room earlier and spent a good 20 minutes trying to figure out exactly where I was on the map, I at least had a casual sense of direction for where the rangers were guiding us. They told the story of the anglo-discovery of the cavern: teenager riding their horse toward fire and discovering it wasn’t smoke but a cloud of bats coming out to feast on insects. There was the story of the woman whose fearlessness made finding the layers of the cave possible. There was the music played, recorded within the cave to create the echoes and played again multiplying the voice parts into a natural surround-sound. None of that compared to the key tour feature: candlelight.

The space had seemed unfathomably large with lighting; without it might have had no boundaries at all. The shadows from our candles made the Fairyland area come to life with sparkles - like fairies - countered by shading and contours I had missed in the strategic LED path lights. Without the far side of the room visible, the three Giants were even more mesmerizing. 

The Three Giants tower over most of the other stalagmite structures.

Of course, without the lights, it is difficult to see most of the ceiling features (which are beautiful) and the immensity of the draperies, with the fine layers from years of evaporation of the water in the mineral solution, seem more like ribbons of rock. As we walked along between ranger talks, I had an opportunity to talk to my tourmate, Christine.

Stunning draperies adorn the walls and arches.

Christine lives in Texas and was visiting on a road trip home from a family vacation to other national parks further west. The candlelight tour was her first look at the caves, and I was uncertain whether to envy the order she saw them in or not. We talked about her life in Germany, how she came to be in the southwest, and school systems. At the place where they blew out all the candles for us to experience the cave in total darkness, a couple got engaged in the beams of a ranger’s flashlight; after that we talked about families.

I’m always fascinated by the stories of others, maybe even more so than the geology of a place, because it is so much more relatable. I know what it is like to be human (for me) and can more easily imagine what it is like to be a human (for someone else) than, say, what it is like to be a cave cricket. The way life twists and pivots because of an outside force mimics physics, biology, geology, you name it. Maybe that is why my students understand the life cycle of a star or the rock cycle better when it is personified.

These tiny structures make up the puppet theater (?). It reminds me of an alcove in an ancient European church where one might find a statue of Mary.

I haven’t met too many new people along this way (a. I prefer solitude right now. b. safety). Meeting Christine helped me open up and ask more questions, to be socially brave in circumstances above the ground. I’m grateful, because as a social species, we need community to survive.It’s hard to find your place in the world if you cannot find a way to connect with others. 

Like wandering through caves in the dark, the light of a single candle can bring the scenery to life. I’m glad my new friend has been the tiny flame that encouraged me to add a bit more human life to my journey.

For more adventures above and under ground, you'll have to keep coming back!