New Years Eve Day at Carlsbad Caverns

As many of you may already know, for Christmas this year, Heather's family all gathered together in Texas. They do this every two years, and it is always a lot of fun. Now that Heather has retired from teaching (for now), we thought it'd be fun for her to spend some extended time back in her hometown, so she and Elliana stayed in Lubbock for three weeks. I had saved up my annual leave and so I was able to take off almost a week and a half. So we had a great time spending both Christmas and New Years at the Carr house.

Even though we've both been home for over a week, we're still trying to get caught back up and putting our life back in order, as I'm sure many of you are, too. So this won't be a full Christmas blog report; Heather will do that piecemeal later. But I did want to share some pics of our trip to Carlsbad Caverns.

For a long time, now, I've always wanted to go to Carlsbad and see the world famous caverns.

While they are close to Heather's old home, it still is over a 3 hour drive to get there, and so we just never got around to it during our previous trips. But this time, we made it happen. So for New Year's Eve Day, we took a day trip to the caverns, and it was pretty amazing. All the pics below are courtesy of my brother-in-law Chris, who took some amazing pics with his brand new camera.

The caverns are located in the middle of what looks like a wasteland; there's just not much there but hills, brush, and stubby little cacti. As you walk along the National Park path, suddenly a massive hole opens up in the side of this hill, like a mouth. And that's the beginning of the caverns.

We walked in the natural entrance, which is almost a mile and a half down to the bottom of the main show cavern floor (which is about 800 ft down). The central cavern is called the Big Room and is 8.2 acres in size: 4,000 feet long, 625 feet wide, and 350 feet high. It's the third largest chamber in North America and the seventh largest in the world.

One other interesting tidbit: just inside the natural entrance is a massive fork called Bat Cave. During the summer, some 40,000 Mexican free tail bats live there and come out every night to feast. They migrate during the winter, so we didn't get to see it.

Here are some pics of the formations we saw in the Big Cave.

The scale and immensity of space in the caverns at times really was very astounding. Unfortunately, photos can't really capture that very well, so I guess you'll all have to go one day and check it out yourself.

It was a great trip, and I was especially appreciative of Heather's family for going because most of them had gone at some point in their life already. Thanks, guys!

Here's a pic of Gracie standing beneath a stalactite. She was trying to become a stalagmite. I don't think it worked, though.

And here are some more pics of the rock formations.