It's been 32 years since I last visited Carlsbad Caverns. This is Lou's first visit. They look pretty much the same to me. We hiked down the original entrance (top left picture) and through the big room. The total distance of a little over two miles took us around three hours. The Big Room is big! This cave isn't as nicely decorated as is Kartchner Caverns in Arizona. The lighting in the cave is rather bland as well. The size of the rooms may affect that. Sorry, my cave pictures rarely turn out well. The person in the bottom right picture is cleaning stuff from the formations on the floor by mirror lake. The debris came from older trail construction. Old formations are being exposed and debris will not end up in mirror lake. This project will take two years and she has been working on it , with volunteers, for 6 months. In the end 20 square feet of the floor will have been cleaned. What a project it will be to try to restore the entire cave?
There are several other cave tour options here that are more like real speleological adventures but we deferred those to possibly another time. Before we went into the cave we had lunch at the restaurant at the visitors center. A very nice lunch.
We continued South on Highway 180 into Texas and stopped for the night at Guadalupe Mountains National Park. $4 for the night with the Golden Access Pass discount.
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