Day 29 – Carlsbad Caverns and Guadalupe Mountains National Parks

Palace Room

Our first stop today was Carlsbad Caverns. We were originally scheduled for a 9 am King's Palace tour, but the Park Service changed our tour to 11:30 about two weeks ago. This complicated the day a bit because we already had two parks on the docket today, so we had to make the best of it. So we watched the film first and took an abbreviated self-guided tour of the Big Room, then took our tour.

Large Piece of Drapery in the Queen's Room

We really liked the cave but the tour size was a little too large to be comfortable. It was still worthwhile as you see parts of the cave that you can't do on the self-guided portion. 

The cave itself was amazing and if you only see one cave, this is the one. The size of the rooms is absolutely amazing. The Big Room is twice the size of the US Capitol Building and in general all of the rooms are much bigger than we have seen in any other cave. You can look up maybe 100 feet in spots.

One other interesting feature of the cave is that is is currently drier than others that we have visited. That means that the cave features were mostly created during the ice age and not so much recently, relatively speaking.

Cave Bacon

The tour takes you into the deepest part of the cave (830 feet) and the Palace Room and the Queen’s Room were beautiful and loaded with cave features such as drapery, popcorn and cave bacon. You may notice that the quality of my cave photos is significantly better. One reason is that they had just installed new, improved lighting in the cave about a month ago. However the main reason is I have a new cell phone which take great shots in low lighting. Much better that the 35mm.

Guadalupe Mountains 

Guadalupe Mountains National Park is only about 35 miles away from Carlsbad, but you cross into Texas to get there. There are no roads in the park and thus it is mainly geared for hiking and backpacking in the high country. We took a short nature hike in the park and visited the old Frijole Ranch, but didn’t have time for much more as we still had a long drive to Pecos left. The mountains above are beautiful the park contains the highest point in Texas, Guadalupe Peak, at 8,751 feet.