For sheer scenic beauty, Carlsbad Caverns is unbeatable. There are colossal chambers, huge quantities and a wide variety of formations, and incredible tours both guided and self-guided. The other cave-based national parks (Mammoth Cave and Wind Cave) are also amazing in various ways, but can't compare to Carlsbad's overwhelming beauty.
The guided tours are amazing, but you can enjoy Carlsbad Caverns with the self-guided Big Room tour. Just hike into the gaping natural entrance, down hundreds of feet past beautiful formations and pools. The path is lit and there are signs explaining the formation of the cave and the kind of animals who live here near the entrance. A half mile of a steeply descending, winding path brings you into the Big Room, a chamber whose name is an understatement. There are restrooms here and elevators back up to the visitor center. You can also hike around the Big Room, a mile walk. That doesn't sound like a long hike, but it is one of the best in the national parks - the scenery is eerie and almost unbelievable. Sure, you can go back up the elevator, but for a bit of exercise, try hiking back out!
Lower Cave Tour
I first visited Carlsbad Caverns with my family in 2001, and the highlight of that trip, for me at least, was the Lower Cave Tour. This is a semi-wild cave kind of tour - you do wear headlamps which are your only light and go off the tourist trails, but with the exception of one tunnel which requires crouching and ducking, the whole thing is a walk. The massive rooms and overwhelming formations of Carlsbad are even more impressive viewed only in the limited light of headlamps. I also recall this tour being an illustration of how much fun a good guide can make a tour. Our guide, whose name I have long since forgot, was a young woman who immediately made us all feel like old friends and had everyone give themselves a silly nickname. We then went by the nicknames for the entire tour. I remember someone choosing "Elvis", another "Indy" (as in Indiana Jones, I suppose), and one person went by "Orange". What kind of nickname is that?
I decided to visit Carlsbad Caverns again in 2012 and try the adventure tours. The Lower Cave Tour was available one of the days I'd be there, so I decided to give it a try again. The entrance to the lower cave is just off the self-guided Big Room tour, and begins with the toughest part of the tour – backing down a slippery slope on a rope, then descending about 80 feet of ladders. We walked a fairly easy path around the beautiful lower cave area, which alternates surprisingly between desolate, bare chambers and chambers like the Ice Forest, which is completely full of white, delicate formations.
Along the path shortly after the Ice Forest, we came upon the Rookery. The Rookery is not a place of stunning scenic beauty like much of Carlsbad Caverns, but contains fascinating formations called cave pearls. There are little depressions in the rock, in which sit smooth, perfectly round mineral stones. Some depressions held several small pearls, some one larger one. Cave pearls form from dripping water gradually depositing minerals - in much the same way an oyster pearl forms, but much, much more slowly. Sometimes I'm as fascinated by sights like these even though they're not vast and impressive - imagine the time it took to make these little stones!
We were able to see the railing at the end of the Big Room tour high above, and ended at Colonel Boles’ formation, a column named for an early park superintendent. He used to tell people that the column held the ceiling up, then removed the middle part (which had naturally broken off at some point) and watched the group squirm. (Of course, the formations grow after the room is already there, so, no, formations do not support the ceiling.) Colonel Boles also took Amelia Earhart on a tour of the Lower Cave, and she was so enthralled by the beauty of the cave that she asked to get a job there exploring the unexplored regions. She was hired and filled out the paperwork, intending to start after her flight around the world. As any history student knows, she never returned from that flight.
Here a neat picture of the Fallen Giant, a huge formation-encrusted boulder which fell off the ceiling sometime in the distant past:
The Fallen Giant didn't land flat, so, as you can see, its formations are angled and make a great photo background.
There’s a wall in this lower cave area which I am very surprised was not named by our guides. The wall looked like the front of a cathedral, a huge flat face with a big archway in the middle and a skinnier door to the side. It was so striking I couldn’t believe it wasn’t pointed out. Through the skinny side door we went, into a thin tunnel which occasionally forced us to duck. We sat down and did the obligatory blackout, which is not at all to say that I don’t enjoy them. After the blackout, we could do an optional crawl through a small tunnel about 20 feet long, which was fun, and probably a good warm-up for the tougher tours. By the way, this short little crawl REALLY made me appreciate knee pads. We didn’t have them, since this was the only time we’d crawl, but it does get painful fast without them. We soon returned to the series of ladders and climbed right back out of the Lower Cave.
This tour is perhaps a good balance of adventuresome but still pretty comfortable. Its difficulty is maybe a 3/10. If you aren't sure that you're up for the more difficult Hall of the White Giant or Spider Cave tours, this may be a good place to start.
Left Hand Tunnel
This tour wasn't one of the main reasons I visited Carlsbad Caverns, but I wanted to see as much as possible and it turned out I could fit it in before the Hall of the White Giant tour. The Left Hand Tunnel caught my attention because it is a tour by lantern light only. We'd be seeing the cave as Jim White and the other early explorers saw it. This tour was almost an afterthought on this trip, but seeing the cave by only lantern light is spectacular. Each of us had a lantern, and not an electric lantern, just a single candle in a clear-sided box. The light diffuses in every direction, but is much weaker than that from a headlamp. The alien environment is much more spooky when you can’t quite see to the walls of the room you are in, and rocks and walls slowly loom out of shadows. Also, lantern light does not reach downwards very well (the candle and bottom of the box are in the way), so every pit looks very, very deep. It’s wonderfully, pristinely eerie. To add to the feeling of stepping back in time, flashlights and photo flashes were not allowed on the way out to the end. (We came back the same way, and were then allowed to shine flashlights and take photos.)
The Left Hand Tunnel was named by teenage cowboy James Larkin White, one of Carlsbad Caverns' first explorers, and the name has always bothered me. He named it because it was on his left when he found it, but doesn't he know that that's not universal? It could be the Right Hand Tunnel, Straight Ahead Tunnel, or Behind Me and a Little to the Left Tunnel. We actually had to turn right to get into it.
The path took us by some ancient fossils (all the limestone in the caverns is an ancient coral reef from the days when this part of New Mexico was an inland sea), and some cool popcorn formations, and even one fantastic bush of koosh ball-like formations. As we advanced further into the tunnel, the scenery went from bleak to intricately decorated. The trail ended at a placid pool of water so clear and still it was nearly impossible to see in our weak light where the surface was. While we stood there, a single drop of water dripped in from above, sending out ripples which disturbed the surface for a minute or so. Smaller tunnels branches off deeper into the cave, covered with formations. In the dim light of our lanterns, the tunnels looked like the intricately decorated walls in Versailles.
That gentleman isn't wearing a headlamp: I think my flash just got a reflection off his cap. Notice all the popcorn all over the rocks. Here's a rock that looks like shrubbery with all of its fuzzy-looking formations:
On some tours, in order to discourage you from touching formations (which will both stain them and stop them from growing), they'll have a broken off piece which you can touch. They will also point out that cave formations, no matter how neat looking, are just rocks and feel like... rocks. When you see formations like these which look like they have wild textures, it's easy to forget.
There is an area in Left Hand Tunnel called Russel’s Runway, which is nothing but a straight part of the passage, but it has a great story behind it. A cave guide named Russel accidentally caught his clothes on fire by his candle, and instead of doing what we all know to do (lay down and roll to smother the fire), he just ran up and down the tunnel, panicked, fanning the flames, until someone tackled him and smothered the fire. So, that area has been called Russel’s Runway since that incident.
A few more odd bits of trivia about the Left hand Tunnel: During the Cold War, the government began stocking food and supplies into the area, thinking it could be used as a fallout shelter. However, they missed an obvious fact. Did you ever notice you can breathe in a cave just as easily as outside? That's because caves "breathe", constantly drawing air in and out. They're not remotely airtight. Any fallout that fouls the outside air will quickly be drawn right into the cave, making it just as radioactive as outside. There is a big hole in one of the walls near the beginning of the tunnel, about the size of a department store window, which our guide pointed out. Scenes for a made-for-TV horror movie called "The Gargoyles" had been filmed in the area. To minimize impact on the cave, they were only allowed to film in a tiny area here around this window, so they had to use creative angles to make it look like there was more space. Mystery Science Theater 3000 fans may be interested to know that the cave parts of It Lives By Night were filmed in Carlsbad Caverns (not necessarily Left Hand Tunnel) as well, and Earth vs. the Spider used the cheap effect of photos of Carlsbad Caverns as backdrops when they didn't get permission to film in the cave.
Left Hand Tunnel is a very easy tour. I'll give its difficulty a 1/10. You just walk up and back a flat tunnel, so if you're looking for adventure it's not the one, but it is exceedingly beautiful.
Hall of the White Giant
This is one of Carlsbad Caverns' two adventure tours, and those two tours are the real reason I drove all the way out to the park from Tennessee! The rangers at Carlsbad claim this is the most strenuous tour they offer, edging out Spider Cave, and I would tend to agree. The Hall of the White Giant is a path that was discovered in the 60s, 40 years after the cave area became a national park. What’s fairly amazing is that the entrance to this hall is on the natural entrance trail! Every single visitor that walks into the cave down that passage walks right by the entrance to this tour. But, it’s a passage several feet up a wall, and small enough that you need a belly-crawl to get in it. It’s not at all obvious.
The opening belly crawl had us climbing up the wall (right there on the trail) and sliding through the Corkscrew, a twisty, vaguely coil-shaped passage that drops you into a small room. It was hard to get a picture of the Corkscrew, but here's kind of what it looks like:
From there, it’s up and up through narrow passages and lots of slippery flowstone to the White Giant.
A short belly crawl (seen below) brought us to a very tight passage where we all waited to ascend a frightening ladder. Our ranger somehow managed to squeeze by all of us in the tight hallway to climb up first. If a ladder doesn’t sound scary, you haven’t seen this ladder. First, we had to chimney up some rocks to get to the foot of the ladder. This thing is too narrow to climb normally – each rung is just as wide as one of my boots, and near the top you have to turn yourself sideways to fit between the rocks… all the while climbing a ladder one foot at a time!
And soon after that, you have to climb a flowstone slope aided by a knotted rope.
Flowstone is very slick, and even boots with good tread slide off it like it’s oiled. The path did at last widen out, and we had to skirt the side of a cliff:
This path soon brings you to the White Giant – an enormous, perfectly white stalagmite in a huge room filled with lovely white formations.
I was under the impression that they didn’t always take group up into the room to see the White Giant close up, but we were able to go up two at a time. I say “up” because you have to climb a steep slope on another knotted rope to get to the Giant. Behind the Giant, the room slopes back down, and leads to the Guadalupe Room, the second-biggest room in the whole cave. (This tour doesn’t go there, because apparently the slope is very tough to get back up.) After a short break next to the White Giant room, we returned the way we came, having to climb back down all the tough stuff we had climbed up. The rope and flowstone was the hardest part – unable to see footholds, I pretty much climbed down the rope and ignored the stone until I was back on the ground.
We walked back out the natural entrance, and caught this stunning view of the afternoon sun blasting into the cave:
There's an incredible professional black and white photo of a small girl standing in that sun ray which you can see in the visitor center. My photo certainly isn't going to win any prizes, but it's an amazing sight to see. As an aside, see those glowing orbs in this photo? This isn't the only cave photo I've taken with those appearing. Some people see these in photos and believe they're supernatural... actually, it's just dust and humidity screwing with the camera. Caves are both dusty and humid (especially a cave like Carlsbad which has plenty of dripping water), so naturally you'll see those circles in photos.
The Hall of the White Giant is a fun adventure tour. There's not a ton of scenery besides the colossal final room, but plenty of great fun challenges. While difficult (I'll say 7/10), this tour is not very long. It's listed at four hours, but that seems to be a distant outside estimate. From the time our group met until we were all back at the visitor center, it may have been two hours and 45 minutes. The time spent actually in the wild cave area was perhaps an hour and a half. As intense as this tour is, that's probably a good length!
Spider Cave
During our briefing before this tour, the guide said with a straight face that Spider Cave was named for all the huge tarantulas which crawl all over the entrance tunnel. He was kidding, but probably enjoyed watching our reactions. I was actually kind of interested to see them. In fact, there are usually harmless daddy longlegs hanging out inside the entrance, and that is where the cave gets its name. The other tours I took at Carlsbad were in the main cavern, but Spider Cave is a separate cave. (Well, separate for now. It’s believed Spider Cave links to the main cave due to air studies, but the passage has not been found, and if there is a passage it may well be too small for a person to crawl through.) We drove, following the rangers, down a gravel road near the visitors’ center and stood at the top of a canyon. The entrance of the cave was at the bottom of the canyon, which seemed rather far down, but we did hike down to the bottom. Spider Cave’s entrance had once been a muddy tunnel at the very bottom of the canyon, but the cave would flood when water flowed through the canyon. To preserve both the cave and the people who explore it, a sort of chimney had been built over the entrance, and also fitted with a locked grate so you can’t just climb in on your own. We climbed down a ladder into a tiny room, and took a belly crawl through a 30-foot tunnel leading to a slightly larger room where we could all sit. During this opening crawl, we saw a few of the namesake daddy longlegs, who, oddly enough, bounce on their legs when fixed in a headlamp's glare. Here's Chung-Kai while we were both still in the opening crawl:
YOU try holding the camera straight in a tunnel too small to sit up in! And here, I've made it into the first little room and am watching some else emerge from the opening crawl:
Spider Cave is like no other I’ve seen. First, it is colored strangely. Rather than being formed out of limestone like the main cave, it’s limestone in the lower layer but sandstone above. The sandstone ceiling and higher walls were all red, orange, and brown in odd patches. So the passages were odd colored. But even more than that was the shape of the cave – our guide compared it to Swiss cheese.
Spider is a claustrophobic cave. There are no big rooms or wide avenues, just cramped passages, crawls, and small chambers. And wherever you look, throughout the whole tour, dozens – hundreds – of passages lead off every direction. To call Spider Cave a maze is to understate how complicated it is. It isn’t a very large cave, but explorers have gotten hopelessly lost, endlessly returning to the same room. With a tour like the previous day’s White Giant tour, I possibly could have found my way out alone if some emergency had necessitated it. Once past the entry room in Spider Cave, I would have had absolutely no chance.
We clambered over a ledge into a smooth stream passage and from there had to get on our bellies and squeeze through the awkward Castration Rock. (Every cave seems to have a spot by that name.) To get through, you have to crawl with one leg up on a tiny ledge and the other down in a trough which is too thin for both knees. So the corner of the rock ledge is right in your crotch. Men especially, be careful! Another caver crawling over Castration Rock:
We stepped over a whitish formation in the shape of a Y which had been named the Flux Capacitor, dating those of us who grew up with Back to the Future and were old enough to know what it was.
One room contained a gigantic white stalactite which had eroded into a warped, holey, dizzyingly distorted shape. It was called “Gnome Dome”, and had originally been a normal stalactite shape.
We slid across a deep canyon (called “Little Grand Canyon”) with our butts on one side and feet on the other. Soon after, we had to cross the Big Grand Canyon, by leaning and stepping carefully. What is with these names? The word “grand” means roughly the same thing as “big”, right? Did they not realize that “little grand” is contradictory and “big grand” redundant?
As we advanced deeper into the cave, we began to see incredible formations, pure white and textured in such a way that they looked like silly string and shaving cream. Puffy mounds, twisty coils, and gnarled branches of white rock were everywhere, stunning and bizarre. I have never (before or since) seen formations like these.
That's not shaving cream. Those are rocks!
The most picturesque spot on this tour is the placid Cactus Springs (really just a pool and not truly a spring), surrounded by formations that look a bit like cactuses. Our guide told of an early group exploring Spider Cave who were trying to get out, but every path kept bringing them back to Cactus Springs.
This isn't the most flattering picture, but this isn't a modeling portfolio. What a neat backdrop!
The Mace Room had a big sheet of wild white formations, including the mace itself, a soda straw which had once reached from floor to ceiling, but the top part had broken off (naturally – soda straws are extremely delicate). But, the lower part had a big, bulbous growth on it, all on one side, yet was still standing. Touching a soda straw, I’ve always been told, will break it, yet this one is standing and supporting a lot of off-center weight. There’s a very good chance that next time I go there, it will no longer be there.
That's the mace in the bottom left. Notice also that the lower part of the formations is stained brownish, while the top is pure white. The cave used to flood periodically, and the standing water stained the bottom parts but never reached the top. And yes, our guide did look like Will Ferrell. (The other guide - there were two - bore a striking resemblance to another comedian, Brad Sherwood, familiar to every "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" fan.)
There was a room called the Medusa room, full of helictites and even very rare helicmites, growing from the floor. Helictites (-mites) are formations which grow in winding, spiraling patterns rather than straight. How? Formations form slowly by dripping water, so they should only form straight from ceiling to floor or vice-versa. No one is sure how helictites form, but a theory this guide mentioned which I hadn’t heard before is the influence of microorganisms who live in the dripping water. Some of these rooms, including this one, are overwhelming in their tangle of formations. The Medusa Room:
The end of the tour took us back to a room beneath the eerie Ghost Room. We went up a few at a time to see the Ghost Room (not big enough to hold all of us at once), which involved a climb up a few ledges into the next level of the cave. The Ghost Room contained a big wall full of crazy white shaving foam formations, including a small one in the middle which looks uncannily like a man kneeling. (You can't see it in the photo.)
If you take one tour at Carlsbad, make it this one. Spider Cave is one of most breathtakingly beautiful and bizarre places I have ever seen. Nothing else looks like it. The tour is not as difficult as Hall of the White Giant (though it is close: I'll give it the same 7/10), but is far and away more wildly, uniquely scenic.