CARLSBAD CAVERNS, N.M. — Visions of Dante's descent or Jules Verne's "Journey to the Center of the Earth" fill the mind with each advancing step closer to the darkness below.
Ingress into this subterranean realm is along an occasionally steep, one-mile paved decline from the cavern's natural entrance. Minimal lighting, intended more to highlight than illuminate, along with metal handrails running its length, provide visual thrills, while protecting against any white-knuckle detours.
Such wasn't the case nearly a century ago when a strapping, young cowboy, claiming discovery of the cave as a 16-year-old, fired up some kerosene lanterns and started conducting tours into the underground labyrinth.
Merely entering the cavern in those days was a profile in courage, requiring that visitors muster sufficient gumption to make a 170-foot drop in a large bucket originally installed for harvesting bat guano.
After that, movement around was often — literally — by the seat of your pants. Sometimes it required using rickety ladders (still visible in some parts of the cave), or impromptu steps built by stacking sacks filled with bat dung.
Despite the cave's lack of amenities and remote location in the parched desert Southwest, its notoriety and popularity grew, finally drawing the attention of the U.S. Department of the Interior, which declared it a national monument in 1923. Jim Larkin White, the youthful cowboy turned spelunker, was named its first chief ranger. A National Geographic Society expedition the following year boosted awareness even more, leading to Carlsbad Caverns being elevated to National Park status in 1930.
Today, the less adventurous, or those dealing with physical limitations, can forgo the natural entrance trail by descending 755 feet into the bowels of the cave via four high-speed elevators. They are also the preferred mode for most visitors returning topside.
Only a few paces from the elevator shafts stands a snack bar, which over the years has been a cavern fixture in numerous incarnations. Various proprietors have tried trading on the uniqueness of people grabbing a bite to eat hundreds of feet beneath the Earth's surface, which maintains a constant temperature of 56 degrees and about 90 percent humidity.
Manmade improvements aside, the main draw will always be the beauty and breadth lying deep within the subterrane.
Discussing its sheer size and scope begs for a Thesaurus. Words such as "gigantic," or "enormous" come up lacking. Even squishing both words together to make "ginormous" feels like descriptive limits are being tested.
The Big Room, the cavern's most visited area, is that and more. Measuring 8.4 acres in size and 325 feet at its tallest point, it's the second largest cave chamber in the world. That makes for a lot of dissolved limestone, which is what caused all the fracturing and faulting several million years ago responsible for the current chambers and rooms.
The self-guided, one-mile loop trail, portions which are wheelchair-accessible, takes you past many of the cave's most notable features, including the Bottomless Pit, which drew its moniker because early cavern explorers were unable to determine its depth when they dropped rocks into it. In reality, the pit's bottom is only 140 feet below, but a sandy bottom muffled the sounds made by landing rocks.
Stunning eye candy throughout, including the Giant Dome and Twin Domes, Totem Pole, Rock of Ages, along with smaller stalagmites and stalactites, draperies and soda straws, are the result of slow-drip artistry by calcite mineral crystals. Most of this interior decorating took place about 500,000 years ago during a wetter, cooler climatic period.
A one-mile, ranger-guided tour, ticketed separately ($8), takes visitors into the Kings Palace and several other ornately adorned chambers. At 829 feet below the Earth's surface, Kings Palace is the deepest portion of the cavern reachable by paved trails.
Much of the cave's early exploration was the result of searching for untapped supplies of bat guano for use as fertilizer. For centuries, a colony of Mexican free-tailed bats, currently numbering in the hundreds of thousands, has split its summers at Carlsbad Caverns and winters in Mexico.
From early spring into October, the bats create an unforgettable sight at dusk, exiting the cave en masse by circling to create a swirling vortex to gain the desert floor above. The bats then spend the evening hunting and gorging on insects, primarily moths, before returning to their darkened abode (a cavern room restricted to the public) in smaller groups the next morning.
e-mail: chuck@desnews.com
If you go:
Carlsbad Caverns is reachable via U.S. 180/62 from Carlsbad, N.M. (23 miles to the northeast) or El Paso, Texas, (150 miles to the west). A seven-mile road leads from the park gate at Whites City, N.M., to the visitors center and cavern entrance.
More than 100 smaller caves are found inside the park's nearly 47,000 acres. Few are open for viewing, although daily tours ($8) are provided at unimproved Slaughter Canyon Cave, located 23 miles west of the park's visitors center.
A $6 cavern entrance fee, which is good for three days, includes use of the natural entrance trail, the Big Room loop and elevators.