Into The Earth
Happy birthday to my dear friend Shevonne, I hope you enjoy being fifteen as much as I do, for it is a rather useless age. So you may have heard of Carlsbad Caverns. If you haven’t, well it’s your lucky day, for I am about to tell you all about them. We headed out at around 10:00am and arrived at the caverns’ visitors centre about an hour later, all ready to go. Dad bought the tickets, learned some
information about the caverns, and off we went, down into the depths of the Earth. The very bottom of the cavern (where they allow tourists anyway), where they have a café, is about 750ft down, quite a long way. I find caverns to be quite extraordinary and I tend to enjoy them more than walking through a forest, say, although the descent and the ascent is quite steep. There were a whole bunch of really cool formations to see on the way down, including one drapery called Whale’s Mouth, the
Boneyard, a little cave where the rock had been worn smooth, so the walls looked like old, bleached bones, and a massive piece of stone called Iceberg Rock, which fell from the roof and busted through the floor quite a while ago. As you may have guessed, it’s called Iceberg Rock because you can only see about 10% of it from above, although that 10% is quite huge itself. The other 90% can be seen from below, but we didn’t get to see the other part, unfortunately. And if we did, it wasn’t pointed out to us by a sign. When we got down to the café, we took a quick break to use the restrooms and to have a small snack before we were off again. The next section was the Great Room, the most massive of all the rooms they have explored as of now, although
they don’t actually know how far the caverns stretch. They haven’t gotten to the end yet, which basically tells me that the caves are massive. The Great Room was pre cool, a two kilometre walk to get all the way around. There were some neat formations in there too, such as the Lion’s Tail, a stalactite with little formations called popcorn on the end, and Fairyland, small stalagmites covered in popcorn so that it looked like a fairy city. At the end of the Great Room you could see down to the Lower Room, which was a couple hundred feet below the
Great Room. We also saw the remnants of a ladder once used to get down to the Lower Room and let me just say, thank the lord I wasn’t touring the caverns in the ’20’s because that ladder was not safe looking. We also stopped to look into the Bottomless Pit, which was very misleading, because it is not, in fact, bottomless and extends only about 200 feet down. Liars. At this point we were coming back around the other side of the Great Room and soon reached the base of the uphill climb out of the caverns. I really dislike uphill climbs because I start wheezing and such,
which is very irritating, but I did all right I guess. Isaac practically ran the whole way and was very proud of himself for it. After we reached the top, Dad and I caught up with the other two and we ate some lunch before going to explore the museum and the gift shop for a little while. I bought a pocket watch, my second, because when we
visited the Kartchner Caverns in Arizona last year, I got a pocket watch from there, so I decided to make a habit out of it. Plus pocket watches are cool. When we got back to the campground, thunderclouds had started to roll in. Dad and I headed over to the front office to order some of the campground’s barbecue and I stayed around a bit to post some blogs. It rained pretty hard while I was there but luckily stopped before I went back, so I didn’t get wet. Still, it’s kind of unfortunate the rain couldn’t have lasted longer. I rather like thunderstorms. Peace out m8s.
