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Part
Three: Carlsbad Caverns National Park
After Roswell, we continued our trip
to Carlsbad, New Mexico. The main attraction for
this trip is Carlsbad
Caverns National Park.
The underground cave was discovered in 1898 and became a national park in
1930.
There are two ways to enter the cave. We can enter it via the
natural entrance or by the elevator. We chose to enter the cave via the
natural entrance since it is all downhill walk. It took us about 45
minutes to walk to the bottom of the cave. We took our time to explore
the cave and read the information along the trail. The temperature inside
the cave is constantly at 56 degree which is quite comfortable. On the
main floor at the bottom of the cave, there are cold sandwich shop, gift
shop and restrooms. From there, we can choose to take the self guide tour
to explore the Big Room or join the ranger led tours to explore other
deeper and more spectacular caves. We took the Big Room self guided tour
and also joined the ranger led King Palace Tour since this tour requires
the least physical fitness. Younger and more energetic tourists can take
more adventurous tours which will require crawling and rock climbing to explore
deeper caves. The Carlsbad
cave is so big that there are rooms and small caves still being explored
and studied. During the King Palace Tour, the ranger, at one point,
turned off the lights so we can experience the total darkness and dead
silence feeling of the cave. It was an awesome experience. I could not
even see my hand just a few inches in front of me. All I heard was the
sound of water dropping. After finishing our tours, we took the elevator
to go back up to the “civilized world” on ground level.
At dusk, we joined the bat flight watch program. The bat population
inside the cave has diminished considerably in recent years due to
climate change and disease. I was told in the past, the bats flew out of
the cave at dusk for food and they would blacken the sky easily. During
this trip, we saw only a handful of bats flying out of the cave one group
at a time. Jim White, the 16 year old cowboy first discovered the cave in
1898, thought he saw smoke but in reality, what he saw was a group of
bats flying out of the underground cave at dusk for food. Things have
surely changed in the past 100 years!
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