A Walk in the Park-Guadalupe Mountains: Carlsbad Caverns

Saturday

Carlsbad Caverns
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After a good night’s sleep and an early breakfast, we headed for Carlsbad Caverns National Park. After the 20 mile drive south of Carlsbad, we reached the entrance to Walnut Canyon and Carlsbad Caverns at White City. State Highway 7 to the Visitor Center wound around endlessly before it brought us to the top of the Capitan Reef. From there we had a good view of the length of the reef as it curved southerly all the way to El Capitan. I had not noticed this topography on our original trip to the Caverns in the 1980s. It was just a one-day stop on a family vacation, and at that time, we knew very little about the place. On this trip, almost thirty years later, we had acquired enough knowledge to prepare our minds to see these things in perspective, and it made the experience so much richer.

Inside the Visitor Center, we got a stamp on our Park Passport, and we would soon get another stamp after we arrived in the Big Room 750 feet below the surface. We took the elevator so we would have more time for the Big Room trail. On our original summer trip here with our daughters in tow (Katherine age 10 and Lauren age 8), we had opted to use the natural entrance to avoid the crowds waiting in line for the elevator, so we made the long one mile trek all the way down to the Big Room. As we began the descent, the girls were caught off guard by the overwhelming fragrance of the bat guano, but as the light from the cavern entrance faded behind us, their attention turned to the adventure that lay ahead. Mary Ann and I had to take turns carrying Lauren on the second half of the long trail, but never once did we hear the usual “Are we there yet?” or any other irritable comment from the girls. They were awestruck and almost hypnotized by dark and beautiful formations, and they looked forward to seeing what was around the next bend in the trail. The girls, now in their 30s, still say that Carlsbad was their favorite family vacation during their childhood. That’s a happy thought for any dad.

THE BIG ROOM

This time around, it seemed that we almost had the place to ourselves. The Big Room was dimly lit and quiet, and we peacefully embarked on our one-mile trek around its perimeter. The air was a chilly 56 degrees, a temperature that never changes in the depths of the Earth, but it was pleasantly fresh and damp. That dampness settled onto the sloping walkway, and the smooth silver handrail was cold and wet to the touch. From place to place we could hear the quiet dripping of water seeping slowly from the surface. The stalactite and stalagmite decorations in the cavern had formed thousands of years ago during the ice ages when much more surface water seeped in through the limestone ceiling. Today, the arid conditions above ground have slowed the decoration process to a crawl so that now most of the formations are considered inactive.

As we walked the seemingly endless path around the Big Room, we gradually gained a clearer perspective of its enormous size. Its area of over 8 acres could accommodate 6 football fields, and its high vaulted ceiling soars 350 feet above the floor at its highest point, never allowing you to feel the least bit claustrophobic. We kept a safe distance from the dark and mysterious black hole in the cavern floor called the Bottomless Pit. I liked the way the writer of the National Park Service brochure answered the question “Is the bottomless pit really bottomless?” After recommending that you skip the answer if it might ruin the sense of mystery for you, the writer says “The Bottomless Pit is (drumroll please) 140 feet deep.” Well, it would be easy to be smug and dismissive about this formation now that the mystery has been solved. But under the dim lantern light carried by the brave early explorers of the caverns, this vertical drop into the blackness could have reached to China for all they knew and it was to be avoided at all cost.

The cavern’s decorations displayed an endless variety of sizes and shapes that bore descriptive names—draperies, columns, soda straws, popcorn, flowstones, cave pearls. The most dramatic decorations were adorned with imaginative and sometimes inspirational names—The Rock of Ages, The Hall of Giants, The Temple of the Sun, The Caveman, The Totem Pole, The Chinese Theater. This reminded me of how the ancients named the constellations, imagining that they saw the familiar images of their age in the patterns of the stars. The rest of the cavern’s otherworldly and unnamed landscape was dotted with boulders and debris that had fallen from the ceiling and with ponds of water so clear and still that they were invisible.

I was awestruck not only by the size and beauty of the cave and its decorations, but by the thought that I was standing inside the core of a fossil reef created 250 million years ago by living things on the edge of a Permian sea. Over subsequent ages, the caverns were carved out by sulfuric acid created from the remains of Permian life forms. The resulting fluid-filled caverns were drained after being lifted up out of the Earth’s crust by the movement of the tectonic plates. They were decorated slowly in total darkness, unknown to any animal or other life form except for strange "rock-eating" bacteria that derive energy from minerals in the cavern's limestone surfaces. A few other caves have been found and explored in this reef, and scientists have uncovered evidence of over 300 such formations in the Capitan Reef, most still concealed in total darkness. The entire reef must be riddled with caverns like Swiss cheese.

The caverns and their decorations were beautiful to my eyes, and I wondered if these formations and unseen others like them were beautiful in the total darkness. It’s like the age-old question: does a tree make a sound when it falls in the forest and no one hears it? Are the caverns beautiful if no one sees them? I wondered what God was thinking when he made such things. If I were a literalist with regard to the interpretation of the Bible, I would say that God waited until the sixth day to create man so that He could enjoy what He made during the first five before man made a mess out of it. But I’m not a literalist, and I no longer believe that all this was made merely for humans to enjoy. The Earth is not an inheritance created for us to own and dominate. It owns us. We are a part of it and are therefore related to all natural things. As a species we are late comers who have entered during a brief scene of the enduring theater of creation, and as individuals we observe the creation during a mere blink of time compared to the eons in which it was made and is still being made. Nevertheless, I feel thankful and privileged to live and experience these things during my brief moment in time. Commenting on natural things, John Muir wrote over a hundred years ago that “…the blind question ‘Why was it made?’ goes on and on with never a guess that first of all it might have been made for itself”.

We occasionally met Rangers on the Big Room trail. Their mood reflected the quietness and atmosphere of the place. They would look deeply into our eyes and speak softly with a heavenly peacefulness just to ask if they could answer any questions. If I had not felt the same thing, I would have thought the Rangers had been smoking something. Visiting the Caverns was a calming and peaceful experience filled with wonder, as if we had been there for the first time.

When we emerged from the elevator back on the Earth’s surface, the first thing I wanted to do was to step outside and enjoy the warmth of the sun. We tried to eat our lunch at a picnic table nearby but were immediately and unrelentingly harassed by bees. Being forced to take refuge in the car, we ate on the road and felt some regret in leaving the quiet and peaceful experience of the Caverns behind us.

National Park Service photos of Carlsbad Caverns (Click on pictures to enlarge).