You drive 20 miles south out of Carlsbad the town through the Chijuajuan desert and hang a right at “White’s City” a tourist trap in which all the facilities at the intersection are owned by the same guy. But no matter, you immediately enter the National Park and it’s suddenly a beautiful scenic drive up through a series of gentle canyons filled with blooming cacti.
But: we got to the park at 3PM and they tell us they close entry to the the caverns at 2—at least the most interesting tour according to our guidebook, where you start at the natural entrance and walk a very long series of steep switchbacks down, down, the equivalent of 80 stories, into the blackness. What a disappointment. So, we take a short side trip to a picnic area called Rattlesnake Springs and it is such a pleasant surprise, a wonderful little spring that produces a cool oasis of majestic cottonwood trees in the middle of the terrible desert. And, almost immediately, we saw:
A vermilion flycatcher, apparently the signature bird of this place. Also saw a western kingbird, a turkey, white-crowned sparrow, grey-cheeked thrush. The birds are crowded here, just trying to get to the water: they have had a total precip of 2” of snow here since last September.
Then we went back to the cave mouth in the evening to watch the famous bat emergence: about a third of a million bats fly out, but almost none came out that night, something spooked them. So damn, no cave tour, no bat flight, if it weren’t for the birds the day would have been a total failure.
But we persisted. We drove back down again from town, this time in the the AM and took the walking tour.
You know--Carlsbad was not my highest priority for this trip. I figured it would be interesting and it was on the way. After missing it the day before we almost didn’t come back. Now Mary and I agree it was one of the most amazing, awe-inspiring places we have ever been in our lives. I have to say it should be on everyone’s bucket list. The scale of the place (the Big Room is the size of 14 football fields), the unimaginable variety and beauty of the formations, the way it has been lighted, the cool darkness of the place when you know the sun is blasting away up above…we are still, 8 hours later, processing what we experienced. It was also cool that my Nikon D90 handled the light conditions with aplomb (just used my pocket tripod and pointed the lens at wide-angle in the general direction of things, keeping the focus on infinity because the autofocus just couldn’t decide what to do).
Here’s a sample of what we saw:
That's Mary in the yellow jacket.
The colors are much more vivid than you could see with the unaided eye
You can see a handrail in the lower left and a blurred someone on the lower right...for scale
This is the "Rock of Ages" formation. Mary in yellow jacket is above it to the left in the dark
A small part of the Big Room
Seriously: between Big Bend and Carlsbad the whole trip has already been worth it. And we haven’t even made it to Arizona yet—not to mention Talin’s graduation…
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