Carlsbad Caverns National Park Album |
The entrance to the park is 7 miles from the cave. |
There were no colored lights in the cave. |
The Visitor Center is located 800' above the Big Room. It is accessable from the Visitor Center by elevator. |
The Big Room is 4000' long. We will only be in that part until we we do the 1.2 mile hike out the cave entrance. |
Joanne enters the Big Room near the elevator. |
The cave was very dark and needed time exposures to photograph. |
Our deepest penetration into the cave. We turned around at this point to take the path on the other side of the Big Room as we went back. |
Carlsbad Caverns is located near Carlsbad, New Mexico. The park has over 450,000 visitors each year. The main part of the cave is called the Big Room. It is 4000' long and at its widest 625' wide and at its highest is 255' high. The Big Room is located 800' below the Visitor Center. |
The largest columns in the cave. |
The only water we saw--being in the desert there was not even water dripping from above. |
This area is called "The Rock of Ages". |
We start the 1.2 mile, 800' vertical rise to the cave entrance. |
The path at times was very steep. |
We see light at the end of the tunnel--the cave's natural entrance. |
The entrance path out was quite scenic. |
The park has built a huge amphitheater for viewing the thousands of bats that leave the cave at sunset. The bats had mostly gone south in a normal migration and were expected to return in March. |
A diorama of the cave in the Visitor Center. |