The Carlsbad Caverns is located 754 feet below the surface of the desert. Discovered by Jim White in 1882, the limestone cave was formed not by water erosion but by sulfuric acid corrosion. Deep below the limestone cavern are petroleum reserves. As hydrogen sulfide seeped up through the earth it reacted with dissolved oxygen in the ground water and formed sulfuric acid. The acid dissolved the limestone and formed the caverns.

The caverns are accessible two ways. Visitors can slowly descend 750 feet into the cavern via a naturally formed opening with more than a mile of switchback trail or via elevators that were first installed in 1932. Because we planned to visit on two consecutive days we did both.

Here is the view of the natural opening, which the bats also use.

Below is the “map” from Sue’s iPhone showing the descent before she lost connectivity.

According to our Apple devices we walked close to three miles on our first visit. We spent nearly 3 hours in the cave ending up in the Big Room. The views along the way were absolutely amazing.

Will Rogers described the cavern as “It’s just the Grand Canyon with a roof over it”.

Its interesting to note that stalactites and stalagmites grow approximately one inch every 100 years.

Do you see a face in the image below? Sue calls him the “Guardian of the Cavern”. We saw faces everywhere we looked!

We used the elevators on our second visit to descend directly into the Big Room, which is the largest single cave chamber by volume in North America. The room measures 4,000 ft (1,220 m) long, 625 ft (191 m) wide, and 255 ft (78 m) high at its highest point. The trail through the Big Room is 1.25 miles.

It is difficult to provide scale in these photos without including photos of us. Truly, the images cannot convey the cavern’s enormity and depth.

The cave is still “alive”. Water is constantly dripping from the ceiling slowly adding new layers to the formations.

Carlsbad Caverns National Park is located 20 miles outside Carlsbad, NM which makes for a long drive to the park. There is one RV campground at the entrance to the park but we choose to stay at an interesting place called the Washington Ranch just a few miles beyond the park entrance.

The Ranch (4,000+ acres) is owned and operated by CARC, Inc whose primary mission is serving children with developmental disabilities. Half the Ranch is dedicated to providing education and training for the children. The other half is available as a wedding or event space. In addition, there are three RV sites.

We were almost completely alone in the desert with a beautiful view of the sky, especially at night. Orion and the Big Dipper hung directly over our van with Venus and Mars close by. Skies like we never see in the East.

On to Alamogordo next…..