Carlsbad Trip!
Yes! I'm back everyone, and with an AWESOME new experience under my belt to share with you all :) I shall place it under a cut since it's pic-heavy, to save f-lists and routers :P
Hubby and I left Saturday morning around seven A.M. Carlsbad is a ten hour drive, but that's not too bad. All we truly needed to stop for was food and drinks, and occasionally to stretch and just walk a bit. On the way out, we saw a sign where you could see Billy the Kid's tombstone and actual gravesite! So we decided to go check it out. It's not like we had to be to Carlsbad, NM at a certian time...we already had everything reserved and set up. So we drove for miles down this road, until we started to wonder if we'd missed it. There were just farms and hick-ville all around us :P Suddenly this museum just is like "OH HAI! Over here..." XD Sure enough, you can walk into this little cemetary where they have Billy the Kid and his two best friends all buried side by side.
It was pretty neat really...
From there we headed on to Carlsbad and got all settled into our hotel (we got a deal and so we got a King room, whoo!), watched some TV, ya know...
The next day we got up early, and headed for the Caves to beat the rush of bodies that'd want to be there later in the day. We meandered our way up to the top of the hill where you go in, stopping to take some small footpaths along the way where you could see native plantlife and learn about how the native Tribes of the area used to use them. It was kinda neat!
Nothing really gets across though, what it's like to look down into the mouth of this HUGE cave. Carlsbad Caverns is the largest limestone cave system in the Western Hemisphere! To enter the cave you walk down a series of switchbacks that takes you 750 feet below the surface of the Earth, most of which is walked at a 20% grade slope. I tell you, my legs are STILL sore after that one. It was really neat though, to watch the sunlight filtering less and less the lower you got. What was not so neat was nearly getting pooped on by the hundreds of cave swallows flitting around LOL
Once you're in the cave, you really see just how huge this thing really is. The ceiling is always around 300 feet above you. It's cool (it was around 55 or 60 down there), and the humidity is in the 90%-range. It was heaven! All the way down the winding, slanted, sometimes slick path were amazing formations, made by nothing more than water, limestone, and colored with impurities. The first one you really see is called the Whale's Mouth:
It was really neat to look at--the whole thing is made of what is called Drapery and Flowstone, where instead of the traditional stalactite or stagmite formation, the rock "flows" into this veil or curtian-looking pattern. It's truly astonishing to see rock form such delicate shapes and patterns.
The next one I liked was called The Witch's Finger. Boy howdy did it ever look CREEPY! Like a skeletal finger pointing toward the roof of the cave. I didn't get a great shot of it, but the one I did I rather like...
How it kinda just gets lost in the haze and darkness always gets me :P
My absolute favorite one though, has GOT to be "The Lion's Tail". It's a stalactite with "popcorn" formations on the tip. Forgive the blurry, but I think you can see exactly why it was named what it was:
It made me chuckle when I saw that one :P
Further into the cave (about an hour in), you reach The Big Room. It's 14 football fields long (That's 660,000 feet!), and the ceiling is 300 or more feet from the base there. This huge room would make a Jumbo Jet look dinky! There were several lovely formations in there, including the "Hall of Giants", which included the Twin Domes and The Giant:
as well as "The Temple of the Sun"
I won't post every single picture here--but those are the neatest ones, for sure.
The whole self-guided tour took 2 hours, and it was just astounding! I really hope you all get to go, and I hope I get to go BACK!
If you want to see the rest, go the Photobucket Album and enjoy!
Hubby and I left Saturday morning around seven A.M. Carlsbad is a ten hour drive, but that's not too bad. All we truly needed to stop for was food and drinks, and occasionally to stretch and just walk a bit. On the way out, we saw a sign where you could see Billy the Kid's tombstone and actual gravesite! So we decided to go check it out. It's not like we had to be to Carlsbad, NM at a certian time...we already had everything reserved and set up. So we drove for miles down this road, until we started to wonder if we'd missed it. There were just farms and hick-ville all around us :P Suddenly this museum just is like "OH HAI! Over here..." XD Sure enough, you can walk into this little cemetary where they have Billy the Kid and his two best friends all buried side by side.
It was pretty neat really...
From there we headed on to Carlsbad and got all settled into our hotel (we got a deal and so we got a King room, whoo!), watched some TV, ya know...
The next day we got up early, and headed for the Caves to beat the rush of bodies that'd want to be there later in the day. We meandered our way up to the top of the hill where you go in, stopping to take some small footpaths along the way where you could see native plantlife and learn about how the native Tribes of the area used to use them. It was kinda neat!
Nothing really gets across though, what it's like to look down into the mouth of this HUGE cave. Carlsbad Caverns is the largest limestone cave system in the Western Hemisphere! To enter the cave you walk down a series of switchbacks that takes you 750 feet below the surface of the Earth, most of which is walked at a 20% grade slope. I tell you, my legs are STILL sore after that one. It was really neat though, to watch the sunlight filtering less and less the lower you got. What was not so neat was nearly getting pooped on by the hundreds of cave swallows flitting around LOL
Once you're in the cave, you really see just how huge this thing really is. The ceiling is always around 300 feet above you. It's cool (it was around 55 or 60 down there), and the humidity is in the 90%-range. It was heaven! All the way down the winding, slanted, sometimes slick path were amazing formations, made by nothing more than water, limestone, and colored with impurities. The first one you really see is called the Whale's Mouth:
It was really neat to look at--the whole thing is made of what is called Drapery and Flowstone, where instead of the traditional stalactite or stagmite formation, the rock "flows" into this veil or curtian-looking pattern. It's truly astonishing to see rock form such delicate shapes and patterns.
The next one I liked was called The Witch's Finger. Boy howdy did it ever look CREEPY! Like a skeletal finger pointing toward the roof of the cave. I didn't get a great shot of it, but the one I did I rather like...
How it kinda just gets lost in the haze and darkness always gets me :P
My absolute favorite one though, has GOT to be "The Lion's Tail". It's a stalactite with "popcorn" formations on the tip. Forgive the blurry, but I think you can see exactly why it was named what it was:
It made me chuckle when I saw that one :P
Further into the cave (about an hour in), you reach The Big Room. It's 14 football fields long (That's 660,000 feet!), and the ceiling is 300 or more feet from the base there. This huge room would make a Jumbo Jet look dinky! There were several lovely formations in there, including the "Hall of Giants", which included the Twin Domes and The Giant:
as well as "The Temple of the Sun"
I won't post every single picture here--but those are the neatest ones, for sure.
The whole self-guided tour took 2 hours, and it was just astounding! I really hope you all get to go, and I hope I get to go BACK!
If you want to see the rest, go the Photobucket Album and enjoy!