Mike's Southwest Travels: Carlsbad Caverns Lower Caves

Main Index

Lower Caves Tour
October 4, 2005

Excerpt from: Lower Cave
National Geographic expedition members in 1924 wrote about the wonders of Lower Cave. Visitors today can see the evidence left behind from these and other explorers. Highlights of this tour include The Rookery, with countless nests of cave pearls, the Colonel Boles Formation, and an incredible diversity of cave formations that compete for your attention almost everywhere you look. Ladders at the entrance to Lower Cave sometimes cause participants to back out. If you have a fear of heights or difficulties with ladders, you may wish to consider visiting Left Hand Tunnel instead.

Duration: 3 hours

Requirements: Ages 12 and over—anyone under 16 must be accompanied by an adult. Participants must be physically and mentally able to safely negotiate cave passages containing fragile formations without harm to the cave, yourself, or others. Good sneakers or hiking boots and 4 AA batteries are required.

Recommended: Cotton or leather gloves.

I snapped the picture on the left while waiting for the tour to start.  The name on the sign worries me.  A rainbow greeted us outside to finish the tour.  See, it's not all just about the caves.
Text Excerpted from: Experience the exquisite beauty and wonders of the Lower Cave!

The casual visitor to Carlsbad Caverns can experience many of the cave's greatest wonders on comfortable, paved, well-lit trails: the Big Room, the natural entrance, the bat flights, the King's and Queen's Palaces, etc. For the more adventurous, the Park Service offers several ranger led, "off-trail" tours. One such tour is to the magnificent Lower Cave. Here one walks on the dirt and wears a helmet with flashlight. The trip starts with a fifty foot descent into the darkness down a steel ladder. (This is quite an improvement over the National Geographic expedition of 1924 which reached Lower Cave by descending a ninety foot pit on a free-hanging, wire ladder, the remains of which are still visible today!)  

[It didn't show up well in the picture, sorry.]

Because many parts of the Lower Cave are highly moist, many of the formations are active and growing. These "fresh" formations are often white and glazed with the look of sculpted marble. In many places one can see drops of water hanging on the tips of stalactites. This creates an extraordinary sparkling effect which cannot be seen in any of the well-lit main rooms. It is not that easy to get good pictures of these phenomena: on a short tour like this there is only time for quick flash photos. (However it is possible to do time exposures in the main rooms, such as the Big Room, which are backlit.) The ranger guide does a good job of explaining the science and history of the cave as well as pointing out highly unusual and beautiful formations.  

[The Water Chamber is supposedly drying out, but it was actually raining inside the entire time.  The little spots on some the pictures are drops of water.]

One of the most unusual is called the "toothpick."  This is a huge stalagmite which stands perhaps eight feet tall and is several feet wide at the base. Several years ago a core sample was taken from it, and scientists guesstimated its age at about 300,000 years! (In contrast a man-made tunnel drilled adjacent to King's Palace in 1932 has several stalactites growing from the ceiling, none of which is as long as one inch!)

[I thought it was more like 50'.  I should have measured.  The Upper Cave is up there in the dark.]
The Lower Cave tour is described as "moderately strenuous". The only part which might make some people uncomfortable is the initial descent.  

[I would have taken a picture of the rope pull down the greasy, steep slope or the two severely inclined ladder crawls over open space, but getting a hand free to do so might have cost me my life.  Go there and see it for yourself.]

These structures are pure calcite.  One of the rangers held his flashlight to one and then turned out the light, and the cave glowed.  One of the more interesting stalactites held a bat embedded inside it.  I wonder how it got there.  I wonder why I forgot to take a picture.  (And also of the Keyhole Entrance and the Chili Pepper structures.  Once again, go see it for yourself.)
 

 

This is called the Rookery, because it's where cave pearls are born.  Back in the day when old Colonel Boles was running the show, he'd bring dignitaries down here, like Amelia Earhart, and hand out cave pearls as souvenirs.  Today, not only will they beat you and leave you for dead if you try to take one, but volunteers come down to scrub the individual pearls and even pick up the lint left behind by the tourists.  I miss the good old days.

I've had complaints that I don't take enough pictures of people and that I don't show the scale of anything in the cave.  I took this picture to kill two birds with one stone.

Here's most of our group: ten eager tourists and two nervous rangers.  Meanwhile, 150' above us, people taking the main cave tour could see us and waved.

Twenty or thirty thousand years ago, a rock dropped from the ceiling.  A big one.  It cracked the Lower Caves and left this.

The Pit, 50' to the bottom.

 

Here's a couple of other cool structures.

I feel nothing but respect and unbridled jealousy towards the the park rangers, such as the one in the this picture, however... 

The Lower Caves haven't been totally explored and for some reason they didn't take my suggestion that we go into the unknown areas.  Wimps.  However during our crawl through the Narrowing Tunnel, they did turn out all the lights, so we could all experience complete blackout conditions in a small, confined space.  Weasels.