I have been to a number of caves, caverns and lava tubes across the country. At the tail end of our National Park tour Deja had the Carlsbad Caverns listed. After the Grand Canyon we were both pretty close to exhausted with the scene at the national parks, still we discussed skipping it, but in the end we decided to pull up our big kid pants and go check it out.
Like most national parks they have very vanilla names like “the grand room” or “the giant pilar.” Deja and I have joked that we are going to begin a renaming campaign for them instead of “The grand room” we will call it “The Taj Ma Hole” or “100 Elephant Stables” (because you could fit 100 elephants in the room, provided you made a bigger elevator). Really almost anything is better than “the grand room.” I digress, even though I have been in the ground in a number of other parts of the country, in less than 2 mins of being underground, I was very glad we made the stop. The caverns are more massive and offer better colors than I have seen in my travels. The colors or and bright whites that make up the unique pallet of the Carlsbad caverns are a result of the local minerals. Spring through Fall there are sunrise and sunset viewings of an enormous bat population that resides in a separate part of the caverns. I have a special love of bats, as they consume a huge number of mosquitoes. Mosquitoes have long been one of my least favorite insects, so it is kind of a “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” sort of love.
On our way out of the caverns we passed through the gift shop and they had a collection of postcard reprints of a marketing campaign for the National parks in the 1940s. We grabbed one for each of the parks we hit on this trip and plan to make some sort of arrangement with photos from our travels.
~Jake
