Just a few miles across the Texas border, in the southeastern corner of New Mexico, lies one of the most beguiling attractions in our National Parks system– Carlsbad Caverns. Perched high above the northern Chihuahuan Desert, Carlsbad Caverns National Park is home to a network of over 100 limestone caves that plunge as far as 1600 feet below the surface, contain rooms bigger than the Notre Dame cathedral, and can extend up to 120 miles in length. What’s even more extraordinary is that you can descend into these caverns on foot, hike down over 750 feet below ground, and then spelunk your way into the fifth largest cave in North America– the Big Room.
When you arrive at the Carlsbad Caverns National Park visitor center, you’re greeted by a spectacular panorama of the surrounding Chihuahuan Desert and the Guadalupe Mountains. El Capitan, which punctuates the southern end of the Guadalupe Mountains, beckons but also deceives. What you’re looking at here are not really mountains, but instead the remains of an ancient fossilized reef. 265 Million years ago this area was covered by Capitan Reef which, when it receded, left behind a thick 1800 foot layer of limestone rock. That limestone rock now sits directly beneath the park and, after millions of years of erosion, is what made Carlsbad Caverns possible.
The Descent
After you make your way through the visitor center, you have two options to explore the caves. The first is to make the 750 foot descent via elevator which opens up directly to the start of the 1.25 mile Big Room Trail. Your other option is to descend via the Natural Entrance Trail, which switchbacks down 1.25 miles and over 750 vertical feet to the Big Room Trail. I highly recommend the latter– the descent on foot is just as thrilling as exploring the caves. Don’t worry, you can still take the elevator back up!
The Natural Entrance trail slowly transitions from light to dark through a section appropriately named, The Twilight Zone, until the only illumination comes from the network of cave lighting installed by the National Park Service. The temperature drops to a cool 56 degrees Fahrenheit. The big highlight of the descent is the 200,000 ton Iceberg Rock, a mammoth chunk of limestone which broke away from the cavern ceiling. Iceberg Rock looks much like its namesake, seemingly floating upright in the cavern as the trail winds its way around and then underneath it.
The Big Room
Once you make it to the bottom, 75 stories below the surface, you connect directly with the Big Room trail, a 1.25 mile tour through a stunning cavern full of speleothem formations. Pictures don’t do the Big Room justice. At nearly 4000 feet long, 600 feet wide, and up to 255 feet high in places, this is one of the most thrilling geologic wonders I’ve ever experienced. You really have to come here and see it for yourself to understand how dramatic and surreal it is.
One of the first big stalactites (formations that hang from the ceiling) to greet visitors is the Chandelier. Speleothems, like the Chandelier, form as water and ice melt mixes with carbonic acid and slowly erodes the limestone rock over time.
There are also a number of large stalagmites (formations on the floor of the cave). Crystal Spring dome is one of the largest, and still active, stalagmites in the cave.
Giant Dome, standing over 60 feet tall, is actually not a stalagmite or stalactite, it’s a column because it touches both the floor and the ceiling of the cave.
The scale, drama, and accessibility of the caves at Carlsbad Caverns make for a remarkable adventure that is surely worth the extended journey it takes to get here. From the El Paso airport, plan on about 3 hours driving to get to the park. Guadalupe National Park and White Sands National Monument are both nearby, so you can easily make a long weekend trip out of this quiet corner of West Texas and New Mexico. Plan for about a half-day at the caverns if you want to do the full walking tour and visitor center– longer if you want to explore one or more of the above ground trails in the park.
