We visited Carlsbad Caverns National Park today. I like caves, and have visited maybe about ten over the years. Every cave has its own sort of personality - Mammoth Caves National Park is quite good. I really did not expect many surprises from this one. What I think shocked me was the sheer size of the cave, and it was chock full of features. Not just size in terms of length, but breadth and height. The rooms were, well, cavernous. There was a tremendous amount of speleothems (stalactites, stalagmites, etc.), and some of them were huge. I simply do not have superlatives (or expletives) to describe what we saw. Like Karen said, there was a treat around every corner. We did the Kings Palace tour before lunch, then afterward we did the Big Room tour. Then we climbed OUT of the cave through the natural entrance (800 feet vertically - we got tired, but liked it). I do recommend that if you go that you bring a strong, small flashlight for a closer look at things, and we thought a laser pointer was useful to point things out to one another. Outside the visitor's center the Chihuahuan Desert was pretty great, with lots of bizzare-looking cati, and the road to and from the cave wound through a nice canyon. Much of the cacti we saw was burned in a large wildfire just about a year ago - which made them even more odd. However, we saw some nice, unburned areas. We finished too late and were too tired to make it to Guadalupe Mountains National Park. Another dusty near-miss with thunderstorms tonight.
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