If you are even slightly claustrophobic, Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico may not be for you. If you have chiroptophobia (fear of bats), you definitely do not want to visit Carlsbad Caverns.
Fortunately, we are both (okay… D more, and me less) okay with enclosed spaces, and with bats, so we ventured to the caverns for a self-guided tour. First off, you take a paved pathway that leads you down 750’ into the caverns below, passing through the Natural Entrance that the bats use to exit the cavern every night when they are nesting/roosting in the caverns.
Unfortunately, we did not see any bats, as we were there in February, and the bats inhabit the area only in late spring through early fall. Apparently it is quite a show when thousands of bats fly out of the cavern each evening at sunset, and many people visit just to see this spectacle.
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| Bat viewing area - space for a lot of people! |
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| The area called the Natural Entrance |
Did you know bat poop is called guano? It is estimated there are between 200,000 and 500,000 bats at Carlsbad Caverns during the summer. A roost of Brazilian free-tailed bats (the most common at the caverns) can produce between 22 and 99 metric tons of guano every year. Eew.
Fun fact: Bat guano is rich in essential nutrients like nitrogen, phosphate, and potassium, so it makes great fertilizer. Oh, and gunpowder.
But back to the caverns. In 1898, a brave, or maybe just stupid (Really, if his mother knew what he was up to!) teenager named Jim White discovered the cavern and explored it with a homemade wire ladder. He gave names to the rooms he found, such as Big Room, Kings Palace, and Green Lake Room. He also named many of the cave's prominent stalactite and stalagmite formations, such as Totem Pole, Witch's Finger, Fairyland, and Rock of Ages.
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| The pathetic little ladder Jim White used to make his way into the cavern |
The caverns are HUGE. to give you a perspective, the path from the Natural Entrance into the caverns is 1.25 miles. Then, the paved path through the caverns is another 1.2 miles. And those are just the paved paths. There are a total of 4.2 miles of designated trails in the caverns. Underground. Through natural formations. Not manmade, like an underground mine.
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| Getting into the cavern today is a lot easier |
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| Though still a long way down! |
Pretty F#@%’ing amazing. We were gobsmacked.
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| Some were just plain phallic-like |
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| The scale and size was simply overwhelming |
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| Looks a bit like one of the characters in a Star Wars movie |
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| Scary looking enough to give you nightmares! |
I have to admit though, I was not excited about climbing 750’ back to the surface at the end of our tour, so I was ever so glad to see an elevator to take us back to the top!
