Day 33 - The Cave

Unfortunately it rained during the night and some of our stuff got a little wet. Nothing too bad but it did put a damper on our camping time. What we had to look forward to in the morning was seeing the caverns, but in order to get there was had to travel all the way back to the car. I won’t lie; we all got pretty winded now hiking mostly up the trail with all of our stuff.

The caverns were a-mazing. Because I had the annual pass for all the national parks, we all got in for free! I knew what stalactites and stalagmites were from science class but I had never seen them in person. I was excited to say the least.

The entrance to the cavern was very eerie. It was much steeper than expected with the pathway doing tight 180 degree turns for a while. It was somewhat bright out but we read signs saying after walking about 20 minutes down that we would be walking in complete darkness had it not been for the artificial lighting. It was really cool seeing all the different structures that were formed over millions and millions of years. The whole trip down took us about 90 minutes. It was much larger than I could have even fathomed. This cavern isn’t just a straight shot down but has even larger rooms throughout the area with paths going all around the cavern. If you are considered “in the neighborhood” of Carlsbad, I would strongly recommend taking a drive there and seeing the caverns. They were absolutely incredible.

We left for Albuquerque around noon and just got settled into the hotel room and started planning what we were going to be doing for the next day.

I’ll leave you all with a question to think about though. Do you know the way to Santa Fe?

Aramis

Posted in: Timmy