A Day at Carlsbad Caverns with Kids: a Cave, Baby Raccoons, and a Whole Lot of Bats

Travel date: July 14, 2017

Carlsbad Caverns National Park has the prettiest caves we’ve ever been in.

There; I said it.

No offense to Mammoth Cave or Wind Cave or the lava tubes at Lava Beds National Monument–each of which has much to recommend it–but nothing comes close to Carlsbad Caverns for sheer beauty and fabulousness.

We started our day at the visitors center, where we got Abe’s Junior Ranger book, checked out the exhibits, and got our entrance tickets. Tickets to enter the cave are $12 for adults and free for kids 15 and under. An America the Beautiful pass will get you into the caverns, but won’t cover additional fees for ranger led tours. Abe was only old enough for one of the ranger led tours, and we figured we’d have enough to keep us busy with the self-guided ones, so we skipped them for this time. We did rent headphones to listen to the audio tour, though, and thought it was well worth it (I think we rented three pairs total and shared).

There are elevators down into the caverns (and back out), in addition to the natural entrance trail for walking in, but I knew that they’d been shut down for a long time in the recent past and that they still were in need of maintenance and weren’t operating at full capacity. So we asked at the visitors center to make sure they were running on this day, and the ranger’s answer was not comforting. “I wish I could tell you for sure that they’d be working,” he said. Hmm.

So the thing is, the natural entrance into the caverns is over a mile long and very, very steep. It goes down over 700 feet in a little over a mile. We were totally up for walking down into the caverns this way, but we fully intended to take the elevator back out. At least if it was working.

There seemed to be nothing for it but to proceed as planned and hope for the best, though, so we set off for the natural entrance. They want to make you understand what you’re getting yourself into:

Gus and Abe are being gargoyles or something:

And then we started going down:

And down:

And down:

And pretty soon we were on the other side of the gaping hole, still winding down, while the light gradually disappeared behind us:

The natural entrance trail is a way into the caverns, but also had plenty of amazing stuff to see (and hear about, if you have the audio tour) along the way. We took our time going down and gawking at stuff. There are occasional drop offs, and you want to stay close to young kids, but I never felt unsafe. Also, 1.25 miles feels really, really far when you’re going steeply downhill the whole time:

There were a lot of people making the trip down with us, but we passed very few people walking back up. We took this as a good sign that the elevator hadn’t quit working yet.

We finally made it down to the bottom and stopped for a snack. For there is a very mod looking snack bar/souvenir stand right there in Carlsbad Caverns:

Of course, if Carlsbad Caverns were being developed as a National Park right now, this stuff would never be put down here to interfere with the natural beauty and all that. And I can appreciate that. But since it is here, I have to say I found it a charming throwback to a different age of tourism.

There’s not a lot in the way of food here; granola bars and candy and bottled drinks, mostly. There might have been some pre-packaged sandwiches. And, of course, it’s all as expensive as you would expect it to be. Word is it used to be a full scale cafeteria with hot food, but those days are gone. We had a small snack for the novelty value more than anything else, and then continued on to our bathroom break.

Because there are bathrooms down here, too! Surprisingly well-kept, modern bathrooms. I don’t know how the whole plumbing thing works 750 feet below ground, and I’m not going to give it too much thought.

And then we moved on to our self-guided tour of the Big Room. The Big Room is aptly named. I should mention at this point that Carlsbad Caverns is an ideal cave for claustrophobic types to visit in general; the ceilings are high and the passages are spacious (at least everywhere we went).

So, yes, the Big Room is huge and ridiculously impressive. It is, according to the website, “the largest single cave chamber by volume in North America.” And it looks like no cave I’ve ever been in before. So wide open and packed full of amazing formations. Which are hard to take pictures of.

I wish I’d brought my wide-angle lens so I could have given a better impression of just how enormous this area of the cave is. The trail through it is 1.25 miles long and there’s something new and fabulous to look at everywhere you turn.

 

Incidentally, the website says to allow 1.5 hours to walk this trail; it took us….longer. Significantly longer. I would like to blame Abe, but I don’t think we can pin it all on him. So just give yourself plenty of time to stop and gawk at things (probably especially if you’re doing the audio tour).

And then we were ready to head back to the surface. We only had to wait a few minutes for the (working!) elevator, but we saw this sign, which apparently they need during busier days:

During the summer months, hundreds of thousands of Brazilian free-tailed bats live in the caverns, and every night people gather just outside the entrance in an amphitheater to watch them swarm out for their nightly hunt for food. After our cave tour, we grabbed some dinner in Carlsbad and then headed back for bat time.

From Memorial Day through October there’s a ranger on hand to talk about bats and answer questions while you’re waiting for the big moment. There are a great many Batrules to observe: all electronic devices have to be turned off (no pictures of bats for you!) and you have to be completely quiet once the bats start coming out. While we were waiting, someone in the crowd spotted a mother raccoon and her babies making their way up the rocks above the cavern entrance and it was adorable.

Waiting for bats:

And then the bats came out! Which was very cool to watch (although I’d like to do it again sometime without the pressure of keeping a 4 year old completely silent). I feel like that’s kind of anti-climactic. “It was very cool to watch.” But I wasn’t allowed to take pictures! But they wouldn’t have been any good, either, with my limited skillset and equipment. So you should google some pictures!

And that was it for us. If we’d had longer (and it hadn’t been July. Recurring theme for this southern portion of our trip), we would have like to spend more time exploring and hiking on the surface.

Carlsbad Caverns is only half an hour away from Guadalupe Mountains National Park, something we didn’t realize when we were planning the trip. Dave really wanted to head over there the next day on our way to our next stop, but we had a really long drive that day, and I wasn’t too keen to interrupt it with a day of really hot hiking. So another time!

 

 

 

 

 

 

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