The morning was a cool 48 degrees but beautiful!
The entire 100 mile drive between Van Horn and Carlsbad Caverns is very desolate but beautiful. We passed one rest area and no gas stations.
We crossed into the Mountain Time Zone which was going to put us getting to the park an hour earlier but that was ok because we were hoping to get tickets to go on the first ranger guided tour of the day of the Kings Palace.
We climbed up the 7% grade on Hwy 62 from which we could see the majestic El Capitan, the tallest peak in Texas, located within the Guadalupe Mountains National Park. We will be coming back to Guadalupe Mountains NP tomorrow to do a little hiking.
We arrived at Carlsbad Caverns around 9 am Mountain Time and drove up the windy road to the top of the hill where you go into the caverns.
Carlsbad Canyon became a national park in 1930 and has over 400,000 visitors a year from all over the U.S. and the world.
After purchasing our tickets for the 10:30 Kings Palace Tour, we walked around the gift shop and bookstore for a little while before riding down an escalator 748 feet to where the tours of the caverns begin. In other words, we were going down as far on this elevator to Carlsbad Caverns as we had gone up to the Tower of the Americas in San Antonio!
We walked a little ways toward the Big Room because we had a little time before the Kings Palace Tour began.
We had only seen a little of the caverns so far and we already knew this was going to be the biggest cave in which we had ever been -- including Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. Mammoth Cave has a lot more miles in tunnels but Carlsbad has a lot bigger rooms.
After the ranger gave her brief description of the tour and precautions, we began going through part of the Big Room and then began a descent down to where the Kings Palace was located. The trails that we walked on were all aggregate-paved and had railings anytime there was much of a descent.
My pictures do not come anywhere close to showing the magnitude and beauty of the caverns. I did not use a flash hoping the natural beauty of the caverns would come through better than with a flash. Also, since I was not using a flash, the camera would make some the pictures look kind of green and the caverns were not green at all. In fact, they had very little color at all. We passed by this big set of stalactites that had broken off from the ceiling. That's why they are leaning rather than hanging straight down from the ceiling.
We enter the Kings Palace which was magnificent!
And this is the Kings Court inside the Kings Palace...
both of which were named by Jim White who discovered Carlsbad Caverns when he was a young boy around 16 years old working on a nearby cattle ranch. One day when he was looking for stray cattle, he saw what he thought was smoke but when he worked his way closer to it, Jim discovered it was millions of bats flying into and out of what is the natural entrance to Carlsbad Caverns. He began exploring the caverns and over the rest of his life he explored and promoted the caverns. He named many of the rooms and formations, like the Kings Palace, that we visited today.
There were thousands of stalactites hanging down from the ceiling, stalacmites rising up from the floor, columns or pillars of connected stalactites and stalacmites, and drapers which were big formations coming down from the ceiling.
A tunnel was made in a portion of the cave 82 years ago to provide a better path to the Kings Palace. A stream of water was struck when the tunnel was made and still drips today.
The water drips are creating more stalactites that are now about 1/4 to 1/2 inch long and 82 years old which gives some perspective on how long it takes these huge stalactites to form.
We continued through the caverns marveling at all the formations everywhere.
This was an unusual swirl formation on the ceiling.
Jim White would use burn marks from his lantern to mark his way through the caverns like these:
Some of the passageways were narrow and you had to watch your head in places also.
We entered the Queens Chamber room...
...where after we all had sat down, the park ranger turned out the lights so we could experience total darkness (I didn't take a picture of that). It's really weird not being able to see anything. And when she lit a single small lighter, the entire room lit up.
We continued through the tour and saw what looked like silhouette of Olaf from the movie Frozen to me.
And then we went by the Bashful Elephant.
While a lot of the caverns is much drier than it used to be, there are still beautiful little pools of water in some places.
As we finished up the Kings Palace tour, we could see the old wooden stairs where tours descended into the caverns years ago.
After we finished the Kings Palace tour, we continued on another self-guided tour through the Big Room. We went by the Boneyard,
the Rock of Ages,
...and through the many huge chambers of the Big Room...
The Big Room is HUGE. The Big Room is 8.2 acres in size and is the largest single cave chamber in North America. We could also see down to the Lower Cave where we could see the Lower Cave tour going on with everyone wearing their head lamps.
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| The those tiny little spots are people wearing head lamps. |
It was almost 3 pm when we finished the Big Room tour. We were all getting hungry so we decided to head back up the elevator and go back to the car to eat our lunches. We wanted to eat at one of the picnic tables but the wind was terrible so we ate in the car. Nice view!
On the way back to Van Horn, we stopped by the Visitor Center at Guadalupe Mountains NP to get recommendations on which hike or hikes tomorrow when we came back to Guadalupe Mountains.
After we got back home and ate dinner, we got back together at our place for a game of Spades and a game of Pinochle. The guys won Spades and the girls won Pinochle. Everyone finished the day a winner!
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