Trip to Carlsbad Caverns

Good morning awesome grandchildren!!!!

Here are the photos of our trip to see Carlsbad Caverns. I have been trying to get Grampa Marty to the Caverns for several years and he kept saying, 'What's the big deal, I have seen caverns before." After having entered the cavern through the natural entrance he was totally impressed.

Here is the natural entrance.

Here I am walking down into the cavern. I have to use a cane now so I won't loose my balance and fall.

 Looking down at the switchbacks we have to walk down to get into the caverns.

Looking back up to where we just walked down.









See the tiny black spot in the blue opening? This is a Cave Swallow. There are hundreds of these swallows that circle the entrance to the cave during the daytime. They go way up high and then dive into the cave entrance and quickly turn themselves around to land on the ceiling of the entrance where their nests are. They do this all day long.

Good-bye natural lighting

 

I am not sure why a lot of the formations have 'devils' as part of their name. The man who found the caverns, Jim White, was the first man to enter the cavern and explore it in depth. He had only ropes and a helmet with a headlamp on it to go into the darkness.

You can barely see this, but there is a pool of water at the bottom of this photo. Throughout the caverns if there is total silence you can hear what sounds like raindrops. This is water that has found it's way into the cavern and forms pools and continues to change the shapes of many of the sights within the caverns.

 The photo above was just magical. It looked like drapes hung closely together.

 

Here is a formation called the Whale's Mouth and it really did look like one.

 This looks like natural light but it wasn't.
There were miles and miles of cables that brought light through the caverns. People who do lighting for movies came into the caverns and  decided the best way to show off the formations.

Here Grampa is looking up into a very long crevice. There are some guided tours that you can go on where they take you into places where you have to crawl through.

Here are two formations that were just huge!!!!
Can you guess if they are stalactites or stalagmites?





                            
Can you see the stalactites on the ceiling?

                                                      

Here are two types of passageways that are prevalent throughout the caverns.

Here you can see what is referred to as 'popcorn' on the wall. They really do look like popped corn. It is pretty cool.
And speaking of cool, it is always 54 degrees in the caverns, all year round.

Here are stalactites and stalagmites  forming.

There were just so many beautiful formations.

 This one was very pretty, like a fairy castle













Here is the entrance to the bathrooms.

We are now 830 feet underground. That is like having 2 1/2 football fields on top of us lengthwise.

Just acting silly! I love to just have fun!

Just more photos of the beauty

Here is a formation called The Lion's Tail. Does it look like one to you?

 It is nice to know that there has never been a stalactite that has fallen on a person since the caverns were discovered.

This is called 'The Rock of Ages." They used to stop the tour here and sing the song "Rock of Ages", a Christian hymn, but they don't do that anymore because there are other religions that visit the caverns.

These are more stalactites

There are all 'chandeliers' on the ceiling throughout a lot of the caverns

 With people standing in front of the beautiful scene.

 Same scene without the people

Here is another place where spelunkers can go exploring, but not the general public.

Sometimes the lighting would appear different colors based on what rocks they were shining on.

I called this one a mushroom, it was formed just like one.

Here is more 'popcorn'

Again, I am glad that these things don't fall!

These columns were almost identical

So beautiful

Another fairyland

Do you see the stalagmite and the stalactite that have almost touched each other? It will take a few thousand years before they do.  It is formed drop by drop of water.

We are at the end of our tour

 The tours now days are given by a hand held device which you punch in the number that you come to on the tour. That way you can spend as much time as you want at each scene. It took us 4 hours to walk through.