Carlsbad Caverns

Today we ventured to Carlsbad Caverns here in New Mexico. After a beautiful drive through the Carlsbad National Park, we bought some tickets to a tour and took off toward the caverns. There were two options to get down - an elevator and the "natural entrance." We took the natural entrance and you'd be stupid not to do the same. You are within the cave in about 5 minutes and the temp drops about 20 degrees instantly and all of the other tourists and such seemed to have taken the elevator. It's a pretty easy walk down a winding path into the cavern and it's kind of cool to see the transformation as you get deeper and deeper - there's about an extra hour of cool cave crap to oogle at on the way down to the "Big Room."

After a 700 foot decent (took about an hour) we started the King's Room tour with a guy that could be a gay version of John Hodgman. The tour added some "off-limits" rooms that weren't on the self-guided section of the "Big Room" and included two pretty crazy chambers. Saw some awesome stuff and eventually figured out how to use the camera (the trick is to set the camera on a rock and leave the exposure open forever). WIsh we had a tripod - it should be on the website as a required item if you plan on taking any pictures. We saw a bunch of people using flashes, which is pretty much useless.

Anyways, the pictures are in the flickr feed on the right. There is honestly no way you could capture the size and beauty of the place on film, but we tried to get as much of it as we could. They look so much brighter than it really was in the cave - you can see a lot more detail in them this way and they do look cool as they are, but don't think that it was like Disney World. It was more like Mordor, and in a fantastic way. It was definitely the most amazing thing I've ever seen in my life. We stayed for about 5 hours and could easily go back for another day (with a tripod this time) if we weren't on to San Diego.

Mike

please view more pics here