In August, you can gather at the natural entrance to Carlsbad Cavern at dusk, sit in a stone theater, and watch the bats fly out of the cave. After more than 50 years, I remember that.
A park ranger at the time mentioned that only once, in all his time watching the bats emerge, had one flown into a person – a woman with a beehive hairdo. That might have been a joke, but anyway all the bats flew away in a surging torrent, the crowd quiet with awe, but the flapping of thousands of wings making a curious whooshing. Then a trickle of straggler bats came out. None interacted with any of us humans. Clearly, bats have better sense than that.
A Greek-theater inspired structure. It must have been. More work of the everywhere-all-the-time (for a little while) CCC. In February, the bats do not emerge at dusk, so isn’t something you can sit for at Carlsbad Caverns National Park.
But you can walk into the natural entrance of the cave, as we did on February 19. I blew $2 on reserving an entrance time, but it was hardly necessary. A fair number of other people were there, but not enough to form a distracting crowd.
It’s an Empire State Building down, step by step. Even so, you’d think that going down wouldn’t be too difficult, since gravity is doing most of the work. Turns out, gravity is just a mite too enthusiastic when it comes to doing that work, so you struggle to keep a measured pace, full of the stress of knowing that a simple tumble might put you against hard rock in a hard hurry. So the trip down was exhausting.
It doesn’t take long to get to the artificial light zone. Almost all of the void below, that is.
After a 30-minute downward walk, you arrive at the Big Room. “Within the Guadalupe Mountains there are more than 300 caves, and 119 known caves within Carlsbad Caverns National Park,” notes the USGS. “The Big Room in Carlsbad Cavern is the largest cave chamber in North America, with 8.2 acres of floor area.
A limestone phantasmagoria, to promote a word that not only fits, but needs to be used from time to time. The path through the Big Room takes about an hour. Towers such as these have names, but who could be bothered to remember them?
A parade of spectacular stalagmites and -tites and other unbelievably elaborate stone agglomerations, wet with millennia of cave building. In geological terms, about as permanent as an air bubble in a bank of mud, but for short-lived creatures with access to electric lights, a serious wow.
On the other hand, even a cave of superlatives such as Carlsbad begins — like fellow superlative attractions such as trails that wind endlessly through mountains or grand basilicas or giant art museums or even House on the Rock — to wear thin at the end. Wow, more spectacular stalagmites and -tites! More wet agglomerations!
But I quibble. Awesome is awesome, and I say that with the stress on awe.