No Words. No Lights. No Elevator.

March 20, 2023 – Day 33

Today was a rest day so we headed off to Carlsbad Caverns National Park. The ride into the park through Walnut Canyon was spectacular, words cannot really describe it, but we’ll give a single photo.

Ok, two photos…

Once you are inside the Caverns words really fail you, pictures also fail you, but take a whole lot of them. and just spent about an hour winnowing them down to about 40 from roughly 400 photos that we took.

But before you get to the pictures, check your calendars, make plans, come see this place. It is amazing. You’ll probably want to get tickets in advance. Walk slowly through it. They say the part we did should take 1.5 hours. But that’s too fast. Walk forward a bit and soak it all in. Then look look backwards and soak it all in. It’s like having two tours in one. All told we spent about 3 hours, it is worth it. During those 3 hours hundreds of people passed us, and we didn’t pass a single person, even the guy with the cane passed us.

Here’s a slide show, use your left and right arrow keys to navigate through it.

Then the lights went out. Really, they did.

There were emergency lights every so often. Fortunately our eyes had become dark adapted. It was enough to walk by, especially given there are railings on both sides of the walkway. Everybody had a flashlight which ruins night vision, that’s the blue light above. Really, don’t bring a flashlight, the place is gorgeous without one. It was incredibly irritating to be enjoying the cave and then “whammy!” bright light in the eyes.

We missed the last 20% of the walk since it was so dark. But it was also magical. We were both glad to have experienced it. Used to be that a while back you could have a special tour where they shut the lights off. They don’t do that anymore and that’s sad. With the lights off your imagination can run wild.

Then we got to the elevators and the crowds, you see, they were without electricity as well. It was a 2 hour hike up, and a 750′ elevation climb. We decided against that and found a bench to wait. Other people turned tail for the “big climb” but I think we probably got out faster than they did. Fortune smiled on us as we realized our bench was really near the elevator line that formed instantly — after everyone clapped and cheered when the lights came back on.

We were trapped for only about an hour. And yes, the stalactites had fangs with venom. (susan here: yes the stalactites were dripping. Probably not with venom though I did get one drip right on my forehead. Maybe it missed.)

The ride out was just as nice but we took our time, stopping at most of the pull offs.

Really, go make plans to visit Carlsbad right now.