Many ancient civilizations believe that the Underworld is a realm of profane, twisted creatures, immortals dabbling in unholy practices, and beings with gaping, slavering jaws to devour your soul. The underworld is also attributed to the realm of faeries, the Other, and the sidhe. I had never been to Carlsbad Caverns, NM, but once I visited this unreal place, so many of the myths and legends surrounding the spirit realm throughout many cultures became suddenly illuminated. If you haven’t witnessed the spectacle which is one of the most remote National Parks in the US to visit, you need to check out Carlsbad Caverns National Park.
Leaving Santa Fe and Heading Towards Carlsbad, NM
On one of the coldest nights so far on my ultimate road trip through the southwest, I decided it was time to leave Santa Fe, NM. I departed from the National Forest dispersed camping north of town at about 8:00am. I fueled up in town and started out on I-25, heading towards Carlsbad, NM. It’s not very often I’m in this part of the southwest, and decided I needed a goal. The night before dropped down to the high 30s and I awoke to frost on the outside of my bus.
As I drove south, the landscape went from the usual dusty desert of Santa Fe to a strange crystal and silver world of frost. Soon that frost became ice as I climbed in elevation. Overnight, a freeze had set in and glazed everything in the area between Santa Fe and Roswell in ice. I kept pushing on, putting many miles between me and the winter I’ve been trying to escape. It was a toss up between White Sands National Park and Carlsbad Caverns. I decided to hit Carlsbad Caverns first and White Sands National Park on the way towards Tucson.
Roswell, NM
One of the first big towns you’ll encounter is Roswell, NM. The sign as you enter town says “Home to 30,000 Friendly Folks and 4 Aliens.” The town has really doubled down on the whole alien crash site and cattle mutilation trope. Other than the prominence of UFO related kitsch through town, it is kind of a strange place. The town is low and flat, based on a gridwork that stretches for miles. It features city parks with green lawns and football fields. It feels very much like a small town, but I felt like I was driving across it for nearly an hour.
After returning to the highway, the next town I encountered was Artesia, which was marked with a large refinery and a shallow river that was actually running through the middle of town. Fuel in Artesia was nearly a dollar per gallon cheaper than Santa Fe, NM. At $2.71 per gallon, it was the first time on this trip that I had gassed up for less that $3. I kept pushing on south towards Carlsbad, NM.
What it’s like in Carlsbad, NM
New Mexico has different vibes. Santa Fe is probably the most Southwest you are going to find. Farmington is an oil field town that feels more like Utah or Colorado. Los Alamos and Roswell are very strange with their obvious military (and very hush-hush) attitude of what goes on there. The further south you go, the less Santa Fe style you get and the more it becomes like Texas. Carlsbad is very Texan. The people of Carlsbad are friendly and out of the many places I’ve been so far, they are the most welcoming to outsiders.
I had videos to upload and work to post online and between the library and Starbucks everyone was more than willing to help. Carlsbad has a small town vibe I haven’t seen since my visit to Cody, WY. It was Halloween and little kids were dressed up, going from house to house in their costumes. The library had closed early for the holiday and everyone working there was in costume.
I decided to camp outside town on BLM land between Carlsbad Caverns National Park and town. The internet signal wasn’t so great on the National Park Highway, but it was at least quiet and level. Compared to my night in Santa Fe, it was almost tropical. My next neighbors were camping out in conversion vans about a quarter mile away. Recent rains had left large mud holes and washboarded roads.
Checking at at Carlsbad Caverns National Park
To visit the caverns, you have to sign up for a time online. It costs a couple dollars to do this in spite of having an Annual National Parks Pass. During peak season, I would imagine it is hard to keep up with the number of visitors to the park. I drove out to the park, realizing I was just a few miles out from the nearest accommodations at Whites City, a couple hotels and gas stations at the turnoff.
The road to the caverns is a winding climb through scrublands at Rattlesnake Canyon filled with prickly pear cactus and towering desert plants. And probably rattlesnakes if the name holds true. Yucca and creosote bushes turn the landscape into a thorny labrynth of spines and blades. A simple bluff is what marks the plateau overlooking Texas to the south.
I checked in at 10:30 am with just a few minutes to spare and opted for the self-guided tour. The paved path takes you down to the mouth of the cave we all read about in history class in elementary school. The famed story of a young rancher boy who found the mouth of the cave by the cloud of bats that would leave it every night. I suspect that the indigenous people already knew about the cave long before the namesake of Whites City saw it.
Entering Another World at Carlsbad Caverns National Park, NM
The natural entrance opens up just below you with switchbacks leading down in the mouth of the cave from the amphitheater. At peak season, visitors to Carlsbad Caverns National Park gather at dusk in the summer months to see the Brazilian swallowtail bats that fly out by the hundreds of thousands.
The path downward takes you to nearly 800 feet below the surface. The further you get from daylight, the deeper into a strange and alien realm you find yourself immersed in. The rock and mineral deposits are illuminated by artificial light, bringing out their details in somber tones of amber, orange, and black. Eons of dripping water infused with sulfuric acid went to create this crystalline labyrinth.
Spires rise up to meet the needle points above from the ceiling. The structures are all somehow organic, evoking images of strange creatures, massive and indescribable. Lovecraftian in their grotesque misshapen, slouching form. They resonate with the deepest primal thoughts of sharp teeth and things to fear in the dark, while simultaneously inspiring. It’s a tableau of the profane, a hellish world that would have conjured thoughts of Malebolgia in the minds of poets. It goes beyond the dry theory of what you might have heard about this place in school. It’s a cathedral of the Underworld, a place beyond time. A collection of shapes and figures that can be thought of as regal at the same time as being terrifying.
Down here in the dim, man-made light, I thought of the time of year. I think of Halloween and the folklore that surrounded things people needed stories to explain. I wonder how many ancient civilizations stumbled across cave formations like these and resurfaced with tales of ancient creatures and beasts with slavering fangs holding court in the darkness.
Places like Ireland, Southeast Asia, Central Europe, and anywhere else water slowly dripped through the layers of limestone and calcium and sediment to form these organic shapes. The strange, alien concept of faeries and creatures of the underworld hold a tight grip on the imaginations of these ancient cultures. Had anyone gotten this deep, I ponder, I cannot imagine the stories of strange medicine the indigenous people would have brought back up with them.
A Shameful Page from Our History
The caverns are awesome in every sense of the word. Inspiring. Terrible in their majesty. To think that during the 1930s when America had fallen in love with the automobile and dynamite, they wanted to blast a tunnel for cars down to the depths of the caverns. It was right around the same time they had demolished the side of a mountain in the Black Hills to immortalize four of our US Presidents.
It was bad enough they built a snack bar down here in the depths of this place. Like putting a Sizzler Steakhouse in the middle of St. Peter’s Basilica, I think. I only took photographs and due to the lighting even those are weak attempts to capture the spectacle of this place. Forget about video. None of those turned out. Sorry, YouTube channel. Carlsbad Caverns National Park was just too distracting to be thinking about making YouTube videos.
The Carlsbad Caverns NP Tour
There are two ways to get to the bottom of the caverns. You can do the self-guided walk down and ride the elevator back to the top, or you can ride the elevator down and back up again. For those with disabilities or simply not inviting the stress on knees and ankles, the elevator trip works best, but you miss the gradual descent into this mad world from the surface.
Throughout the tour, you’ll catch the names of places the cave explorers first encountered, giving them names to reflect their own take on what they had seen. The Rock of Ages, the Chinese Theatre, the Great Hall, the Iceberg. Dangling ropes hung down from where expeditions had taken climbers into upper chambers forty years ago or more. Much of the network of caves remains unexplored. It goes deeper and spreads out further. Helium balloons were used to get lines up into balconies and terraces. Conservation put a stop to future exploration, which is a sea change from the days of wanting to blow it up to fit a Studebaker down into the tunnels. Carlsbad Caverns National Park would have been destroyed in the name of tourism.
Back up at the surface, you’ll find another snack bar. This time of year, they were out of nearly everything. There was no wifi and no wireless signal. And no chili for chili dogs. I sat and ate my plain hot dog and drank my Pepsi staring out across the desert into west Texas through dusty windows. It was hard to believe what I had seen below ground. Incredible. Bewildering. Like something out of a dream.
Outside, I struck up a conversation with a couple about my age who were traveling to Costa Rica in their boondocker with their dog. They suggested I should do the same. For the first time on the trip, I felt like something stopped me cold. I had never even considered something like that. I would have to think about it, especially with the situation in Mexico not feeling exactly stable right now.
Bat Flight at Carlsbad Caverns National Park
I returned at dusk to the mouth of the cave to watch the bats emerge at sunset. A few dozen people were lined up to watch the bats fly out. This was perhaps the most frustrating part of the experience. Not the fact that the majority of bats had already migrated south back to Brazil, but because of the level of entitlement and flat-out stupidity I witnessed.
I have never in my life seen a group of adults so incapable of sitting still or shutting up for longer than just a few seconds in my entire life. You see, every noise made in the amphitheatre can spook the bats. Rather than fly out and risk being eaten by predators, they will just stay in the cave. Especially at this time of year when insects aren’t as plentiful.
In spite of the Park Ranger’s insistence that people refrain from talking or walking up and down the stairs, the visitors fidgeted and jabbered worse than third-graders jacked up on Mountain Dew. One man gave his wife a play by play of everything he watched fly out of the mouth of the cave. Of course nearly every animal he classified as a “swallow” was in fact a bat, which flew up in a spiral out of the cave, sometimes swooping within inches of our faces. She was looking at the same cave as the rest of us, and yet he had to narrate everything he saw like Chris Collinsworth jabbering on and on during a Broncos game. I found myself hushing him more than a few times. Eventually, they got frustrated there were no bats and once the bats really started to come out, they stood and stomped out of the amphitheatre. If I didn’t think it would have scared the bats, I would have applauded.
Visit Carlsbad Caverns National Park!
We only saw about a hundred bats rise up from the caves. Between migrations that had already been underway and an depletion of bat populations due to fungal parasites, it was not the cloud that we learned about in history class.
Still pretty cool either way. If you want to visit and see the bats, the best time to do it is late summer. Most of the bats have already migrated to Mexico and Brazil by the end of October. I was just disappointed in how thoughtless and childish adults have become. It disgusted me to be honest. I could only hope the were headed up to Yellowstone next to pet the fluffy cows.
Anyway, 10/10 for Carlsbad Caverns National Park. Even with the shortage of food on the menu, bats, and surplus of ugly tourons. I stayed a few more days on the BLM before heading west towards Alamogordo. You don’t have to be a boondocker to enjoy Carlsbad, NM. You can find lodging and accommodations in Carlsbad by using Booking.com. So far, my Annual Parks Pass had already paid for itself and there was still more to come.
2 thoughts on “Descent into Madness at Carlsbad Caverns National Park”