Our last park for this trip was Carlsbad Caverns, about 45 minutes away from Guadalupe Mountains (the caverns are actually under a chunk of the mountains, but not inside the Guadalupe Mountains park boundaries). It was really cool to see all of the fossilized reefs that we'd been hiking through for the last three days flipped to a different angle and underground! Still recognizable but very very different.
One thing I would definitely recommend is taking the natural entrance down (just over a mile) rather than the elevator. It was really awesome to see how enormous the entrance was and how it changed as we moved deeper and deeper (it's very steep though, just FYI. I think the elevation drop is about 800 feet and while that doesn't sound like that much, some places are mostly flat and then some are STEEP).
Here's a few pictures of the switchbacks down to what I thought was the entrance. It's not. It went for another mile. ;-) My hips were aching so bad by the time we got to the bottom, a week away from my foam roller and they were definitely protesting (I also checked the stats on Apple Health and I hiked 90 miles over the week, so yeah, not surprising).
As of when I'm writing this (2023) the park still only has one ranger-guided tour open post-Covid (the King's Palace tour). We tried every day to get tickets, but with only 12 slots available, we unsurprisingly did not succeed. So we went with the self-guided Big Room tour, which is still awesome! (You do still need to get tickets for this in advance on recreation.gov, and take this seriously because they were sold out the day we were there.)
Honestly, it is really hard to take good pictures inside a cave, so I'll spare you the hundreds of bad ones I took and just include a few. The thing that was most spectacular to me was just the insane scale of everything at Carlsbad--the soaring domes just absolutely PACKED with formations.
I don't know what's happening in this picture (it's from Neil's phone), but hey look, there's Luke!
A photo that gives you some sense of scale...so huge!
Part of the original ladder that Jim White (credited as being the first white guy to find the cave; it was known to ancestral peoples long before but there's not a record of them entering the cave, which is established by looking for torch materials inside) used to enter the Lower Cave. This same ladder was used in 1924 when the National Geographic expedition went through to photograph and map the cave. Um, yikes.
Wish I had a perspective person in this photo for you, this one is 62 feet tall.
These cave draperies were Matthew's favorites!
Some pretty cute kiddos here (Neil's photo, his were so much better than mine!) You can get a sense of how huge the Big Room is in this photo, the trail around it is over a mile long.
Tons of cave popcorn everywhere.
Another photo from Neil...
My best tip is to rent the audio guides in the bookstore, these were so interesting! There are 50 different stations for the audio guide throughout the cave. We rented both the adult and the child versions--Matthew was VERY into this and told me he learned so so so much (when he heard something he really loved he would punch the numbers in again and hand it to me so that he could be sure I learned it too!).
The visitor's center is pretty extensive but we didn't really have much time there. Just a few photos!
I thought this one was so clever!
Every single one of us had a photo like this in our camera reel, haha! I guess we all found the cave bathrooms equally entertaining.
Okay just a couple more...
Such an incredible place!
After saying goodbye to Carlsbad Caverns, we drove into Carlsbad city and stopped at the highest-reviewed restaurant I'd found on TripAdvisor, which is one of those Chinese buffets that just has insane amounts of every kind of food you can think of (probably about Chuck-A-Rama quality). You know, the kind of place where you would normally be like eh pass but after a week of camping and having only eaten a Pop-Tart that day while you're packing up camp you're like HELLO FEED ME EVERYTHING. I ate a ton of sushi and just hoped that it had been refrigerated properly (and I'm still alive to tell the tale). Then we drove 20 hours through the night and got home in time to wash a thousand loads of laundry and go back to school/work the next day! Woohoo! It was such a fantastic trip and it went so fast...I was so sad to see it all end.
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