February 16, 2017 – Carlsbad Caverns

I don’t know why, but for the past few years I have had an urge to go spelunking.  When I took inventory of life experiences, I noted I have never been in a real deep cave before, and thought that is something I would like to add to the bucket list.  When I saw that my trip, and the storm related detours, would take me close to Carlsbad NM, I got very excited.  On Wednesday I fulfilled my wish.  After the experience, I can tell you, going to Carlsbad Caverns for your first deep cave experience is like telling a European; “You want to learn about American Football?  Lets have you play in the Super bowl”…

The experience will stick with me forever, because it was quite literally, going to a different world.  Who knew God/Nature was making intricate and surreal abstract art beneath our feet for centuries.  A trip to this cave should be a mandatory for every graduate student in geology or earth science.

I arrived at the park in early to mid morning.  I guess I had just missed a guided tour and the elevators were down for repair, so my experience was very personal and visceral.  The way the National park is laid out, the visitors center is located directly above the main chambers of the caverns.  These are the caverns that have the most spectacular geological formations.  If the elevators were working the whole experience would have been a much more Disneyesque.  Go to the visitor’s center, get in line, cue into elevator… close doors…open doors…fantasyland!  Instead the only way to reach the caverns was through the mouth of the cave, which is outside about a half block away from the visitor’s center building.  The walk down to the main caverns is over 1.2 miles long and starts as you steeply descend a narrow self guided pathway that zings and sags down and down away from the light  as daylight disappears the path winds through narrow gaps in the uneven rock descending ever deeper.  The total decent is ~800 feet which makes the experience all the more visceral upon the return (I will not need to go to the gym today)

It is hard to describe what it’s like once you reach the main chambers, and pictures do not do it justice.  Every surface is uneven, organic and fascinating.  Intricate details fill all the spaces around you like little dioramas everywhere in three dimensions.  Lights are set up that dramatically highlight many of the main geological formations, but as you stand in the main chambers you’ll notice that no surface is ordinary or untouched.   In the main caves, nature’s artistry has taken advantage of all spaces, and only the surface of the water pools are flat, everything else is dripping or oozing, being dissolved or deposited with calcium, or fractured into shards by thousands of years of shifting cracks.

Life is not in abundance here, and that stands in sharp contrast to the park improvements that are designed to shuttle thousands of visitors through this space each year.  I felt very lucky to have come at this time of year, when there were not many visitors present, and to have been by myself.  There were many moments when I was the only person in this cathedral of geology and my contemplations were at my own pace.  The most memorable and transcendent experience came for me when I descended to the farthest reaches of the caverns only to find myself standing on a precipice of an even larger space high above an even deeper and larger section of the caves that was still being explored.  My swelling sense of vertigo conflicted with my cerebral cortex, which was trying to process the fact that I was over 800 feet beneath the surface of the earth… in a cave.