Carlsbad, NM

Carlsbad was all about the Carlsbad Caverns National Park, which we visited twice. Between the self-guided hike through the truly cavernous “Big Room” (nearly 4,000 feet long and 625 feet wide, per Wikipedia) and various ranger-led tours, you could spend several whole days here. Photography - even professional photography - doesn’t do the caverns justice, but of course we offer our humble photos as a taste of what’s down there. The enormous underground rooms are fantastical and breathtaking in their sheer scope and 360-degree panorama….an individual photograph can’t capture the awe of seeing endless varieties of speleothems (mineral formations) in the context of the entire cavern. The mind boggles at the vast eons – hundreds of millions of years! – that have produced this underground wonderland, waterdrop by waterdrop.

You can take an elevator down into the cavern, but we walked the 1.25 mile Natural Entrance trail that winds steeply downward into the cavern, where you’re ultimately about 800 feet underground. At the beginning of the trek, swallows dart about overhead; then daylight fades quickly in the descent, and the faint-stomached may grow queasy at the sickly-sweet reek of guano (bat poop) that accompanies the passing of the light. Fortunately this aroma tapers off quickly after the first several hundred feet of the trail.

Would we come back?

Absolutely! It's a great place and we love the southwestern deserts. Carlsbad is on the northeastern fringe of the Chihuahan Desert (it's true, I looked it up!), so that counts. If we were to visit the caverns again, we'd probably try to do less, spending more time appreciating small parts of it rather than trying to breeze through everything. The history of the popularization of the caverns is also quite interesting. Jim White chronicled his adventures there as he tried to convince the outside world of the fantastic place he'd discovered; his book is out of print, though available from used book dealers.

Would we live here?

Carlsbad seemed like an OK place, but if I had to choose a place in a southwestern desert to live, Carlsbad doesn't exert any particular draw. It's on the Pecos River and at least one of us really likes to say "Pecos River" for some reason probably rooted in his childhood. But, as this one person noted, one can say "Pecos River" all day long without actually living next to it.