Our First Experience 02/18/20

Brantley Lake State Park, Carlsbad, New Mexico

Even a child is known by his actions, by whether his conduct is pure and right.  ~ Proverbs 20:11

Most of today’s pictures were taken in the dark! 

We drove the nearly an hour to Carlsbad Caverns National Park.  Funny thing . . . . it was warmer in the caverns than it was outside today.  😊

The caverns stay at a balmy 56⁰, while outside it was a cold 40⁰ – felt even colder since the wind was blowing pretty hard.

There are several options to choose from at this Park.  They have guided tours that you have to make reservations for, and believe it or not, they also have self-guided tours.  When we visited Mammoth Cave in Kentucky this past Fall, there were no self-guided tours.

At any rate, we were barely able to score tour tickets for an “away from this area cave” for two days from now.  Today, we did the two self-guided ones – roughly three miles.  How wonderful to be able to walk at your own pace and spend as much time as you want to look everything over!  And to be able to stand still and take pictures long enough for our phone cameras to focus in the dark – – most of the time.  Sometimes they just didn’t feel like focusing. . . .

This Park is sooooo different from Mammoth Cave!  We thought we remembered that the biggest difference is that Mammoth is generally a ‘dry’ cave, while Carlsbad is ‘wet’.  What that means is that Carlsbad is full of all kinds of formations from dripping water.  Beautiful and amazing things God provided for us to see!

Another remarkable thing about this place is that they actually have flushable, real public restrooms, two elevators and an eating area – – all within the cave, over 700’ below the surface!  How did they do that?  We were pretty surprised!

We decided to divide the self-guided tours in half – one before lunch, and one after.  We saved “The Big Room” for last, because you should always save the best for last, right?  😊

So, the first tour was the Natural Entrance trail. You enter by way of the natural entrance (duh!) instead of the elevator.

We had thought it’d be fun to eat in the “basement” inside the cave, but they only food they had were some drinks and a few (very few) snacks, so we rode the elevator back to the surface and ate the lunch we brought in the Jeep.

After lunch, we took a quick tour around the museum.

Here’s a timeline of events they had posted.  It was waaaay too long to take a picture of.

• October 25, 1923 – The US government establishes Carlsbad Cave National Monument
• March 20-September 15,1924 – Dr. Willis T. Lee, of the National Geographic Society, explores the cavern
• 1925 – The park installs a 216-step wooden staircase from the Natural Entrance to Bat Cave
• 1926 – The National Park Service constructs the first trail through the cave and installs electric lights
• 1927 – The Park charges an entry fee of $2.00 per person
• May 14, 1930 – Congress designates Carlsbad Cavern as the country’s 26^th National Park
• 1931 – Blasting begins in January on two elevator shafts.  The elevator opens in April
• September 28, 1937 – The park receives its millionth visitor
• 1955 – The park adds two more elevator shafts
• 1959 – The current visitor center opens
• 1963 – The bat flight amphitheater opens
• 1972 – The park begins self-guided tours of the cavern
• 1975-77 – The park replaces the original lighting system
• December, 1995 – Carlsbad Caverns National Park is designated a World Heritage Site
• 2007 – The park renovates the visitor center building
• 2014-15 – The cave lighting system is replaced

Following that, we took the elevator back down to check out The Big Room!

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Awesome-Possum!

Besides the caves, Carlsbad is also, and maybe most famously, known for its bat population.  Unfortunately for us, the bats are currently residing in their winter home in Mexico.  ☹ But in the Spring, they return to Carlsbad and put on a spectacular show every evening around dusk, as approximately 400,000 of them wake up and head into the night through a single cave opening.  What a sight that must be!

Here’s a few bat facts.  Some of them were really surprising!

1. Bats are not flying rodents.  In fact, they are more closely related to humans than rats and mice.
2. The age-old phrase “blind as a bat” is just an old wives’ tale.  Bats can actually see quite well.
3. They are incredibly clean animals and spend a lot of time grooming themselves.
4. The bones in a bat wing are like those in a human arm and hand, except that bats have extremely long fingers.
5. They can live up to 30 years.
6. The largest bat in the world weighs 2 pounds and has a wingspan of 6 feet! (wouldn’t you think something with a wingspan as long as Blaine is tall would weigh more than 2 boxes of butter?)
7. The smallest bat is only the size of a bumblebee and weighs less than a penny!
8. Bats can be found on every continent of the world except Antarctica. (that’s the one in the south, in case you get confused like I do.
9. One bat can eat up to 3,000 insects each night!  (that’s a lot of bugs! In case you’re not counting, in this place, that translates into 1,200,000,000 insects each and every night from mid-April to late October!)
10. The only bats that drink blood are the vampire bats and they only live in Latin America, and they don’t drink human blood.  They’re tiny and creep up to sleeping cattle to drink about one tablespoon.

Altogether, we spent nearly five hours in this incredible place, and we only took in a very small portion of all the miles of discovered areas within the National Park!

We ended our day by FaceTime-ing with the youngest three grandkids (and their parents, of course)!  Perfect way to end the day!

Tomorrow’s our domestic chores day, so there most likely won’t be much to share.  Then again, it seems there’s always something . . . .