On 11/18/18, Joey, JoAnna and I visited Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico. First, we took the elevator down 800 feet or so for a guided tour of the King’s Palace, the Queen’s Chamber and the Green Lake room. This was a guided tour, so I did not get nearly as many photos here as I had hoped.
One feature was the Royal Family, shown just right of center in this photograph. At first, that sounds cute, but above their heads is a cave blade, with plenty of jokes about the French royal family…
We returned to the surface on the same elevator, had some lunch. We toured the visitor’s center, where Joey crawled through a cave for children… a day after his 18th birthday:
We then walked down the natural entrance.
The natural entrance switchbacked through the caverns, and eventually met up with the underground big room where we had departed for the King’s Palace tour.
There was a feature called “Cave Popcorn” which was where evaporative minerals were deposited on the ground. Every once in a while, a stalactite would stop growing, but evaporative minerals would grow on the surface, like these:
One of the features in this area is the Boneyard, which I thought was pretty neat- there were lots of solution pockets in these rocks.
We then took a 1.6 mile loop tour, which took us past several of the famous landmarks in the cavern. There were so many things to photograph that I eventually became overwhelmed and probably stopped taking photos. The first few were from the Hall of Giants
There were slivers of “Cave Bacon” that was thin enough to have light show through. Sometimes, they would form these strange, organic-looking clusters:
There were also these broccoli-looking stalagmites as well:
There was also a really flat layer that had been dissolved out from below. It had little stalactites growing from it. I took this photo to show the surface of the flat layer; underneath were stalactites not visible in this photo:
One of my favorite features was the “Doll’s Theater”, and even though it was small, I thought it was really cool.
We were there late, and the park rangers were rushing us out the door, turning off lights behind us. I did get a photo of one of the small underground lakes, as this one had a foot bridge over top of it.
I highly recommend this park. At some point, it’s all such an alien landscape that your mind just gives up trying to interpret the shapes. You strain to find what these things look like- people’s faces, trees, vegetables, etc., but really, there’s no way to describe it.
An Engineer in the World 