Hall of the White Giant Tour
October 8, 2005
If you don’t mind getting dirty, crawling through tight passageways, and climbing some slippery flowstone, you might want to try the Hall of the White Giant. Ladder climbing, slippery surfaces, and free climbing will be encountered on this trip. Highlights of this tour include tight, narrow passages including Matlock’s Pinch, and the White Giant formation. The prolonged amount of time spent in narrow cave passages requires a special attention to group communication and safety. This trip is not recommended for anyone afraid of tight spaces or heights.
Reservations are required for the Hall of the White Giant tour. To make reservations call 1-800-967-CAVE.
Duration: 4 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. Hiking boots or other sturdy shoes and 4 AA batteries are required.
Recommended: Soft knee pads, cotton or leather gloves, and long pants.
They aren't kidding about getting dirty. Here I am lathered up like a horse that just ran the Kentucky Derby.
This trip was just too traumatic to recall, so here's a couple of other peoples' accounts of the tour. (Either that, or I'm just too lazy to write my own story.) As you will read, this is not a typical tourist, sight-seeing jaunt. I was too busy not dying to take more than a couple of pictures. Think of this as a tantalizing tease to tempt you into taking the White Giant Tour yourself.
Text excerpted from: http://gorp.away.com/gorp/location/nm/spe_car2.htm
Will things open up past the popcorn? No. Welcome to Matlock's Pinch, a very narrow passageway named for the person who, in 1966, first explored this cave section. It's hard to imagine being first to venture into a place so dark and unpredictable. Admittedly, explorers like Matlock had experience—they knew how to read the formations, the air temperature, and breezes, all of which reveal hints about what they'll probably find next.
[At one point, you're crawling along only using your out-stretched fingers and pushing with your toes.]
"Large people will have to turn their shoulders sideways," Danny warns. I can feel the claustrophobia welling up.
Beyond the pinch, Matlock's 1966 footprints still dent the silt's calcified but very breakable crust. We steer clear. Here, we can actually walk for a few hundred feet, until we reach the rope. The rope ascends a fifteen-foot flowstone chimney. The red and white flowstone has a smooth face. It shines. And it's slippery as ice. You can't grab or push against it for purchase. Thus, the rope, knotted at intervals. You grasp it, brace your feet against the rock, and pull. By the rope's end, I'm starting to tire.
The word comes down the line, passed from person to person. "Hug the wall. There's exposure on the right." "Exposure," a caver's term for nothingness. A place where the cave floor disappears. This particular exposure looks like it travels forever, further than the rabbit hole that took Alice to Wonderland.
I lean my torso towards the rounded rock wall on my left, grasping with gloved fingers, placing each footfall with precarious care. Vertigo is setting in; my knees are shaking, which completely surprises me. I really didn't expect to be dealing with a fear of falling at 400 feet underground. Whatever you do, I mutter to myself, don't look down. And I manage not to. Not until I've reached completely solid ground.
[He's referring to the Pits. There are three of them in the cave. It's not the place for the faint of heart. We almost lost one of the group going over them, causing the rest of us to almost have a coronary.]
The return from White Giant passes more quickly, but not without its challenging moments. When we pop out of the rock and back onto the public walkway, a small group of tourists stands with mouths agape. We can see them wondering, "Where are these dirt-covered people coming from?"
We've come from down under. From a place where geological time and darkness rule. From a place where danger and challenge lurk at every turn. A place where it takes four hours to cover a mile and a half. And where the view of the earth's insides yields a good look inside yourself.
Text excerpted from: A trip deep into Carlsbad Caverns proves breathtaking, beautiful
Dec. 2, 2000, by Melanie Brubaker Mazur
CARLSBAD, N.M. – If crawling through dirt, climbing rock chimneys and seeing stalactites and stalagmites is your idea of adventure, then Carlsbad Caverns National Park’s guided caving tours are for you.
Off the beaten trail, however, Carlsbad Caverns offers even more sights. On Thanksgiving weekend, my husband and I ventured into the Hall of the White Giant. This ranger-guided tour is limited to eight people and features the White Giant, the cave’s second largest stalagmite (Those are the ones that grow from the ground.). It’s also the caverns’ most challenging guided trip. Our group had to squeeze through tight spaces I swore would be too small for a cat, not to mention an adult human, climb a ladder and rope, and shimmy along in tight spaces using our elbows and feet for propulsion.
At the beginning of our trip, we met rangers Kale Bowling and Rick Jackson, who handed us our lighted helmets. We’d been told to bring batteries, gloves and knee pads.
As we donned our gear, Bowling ran through a list of the cave’s challenges: tight spaces, mud, slippery footing, sheer drops, etc. We introduced ourselves to our fellow cavers, signed a waiver form and headed toward the natural entrance of the cave, winding down the paved path.
We rounded a corner of the regular tour, and Harding started climbing into an opening about the size of a pet door. If she hadn’t stopped, I never would have guessed it was a cave entrance. Other people heading down the path stopped to gawk.
"You’re going in there?" one woman shrieked. "You’re crazy!"
We all laughed. Yes, we’re crazy.
Harding had warned us that the first third of our spelunking adventure would be the hardest. We would be going uphill through the tightest spaces on the trip, including Matlock’s Pinch, named after one of the cavers who first mapped this route in 1966. And it was a pinch. Options ranged from crawling on your belly, arms extended in front, or pushing through on your back, scraping your nose on the rock directly above your face.
One of the interesting sights on the tour is seeing the footsteps accidentally left by the cave’s original explorers. After crawling through tight spaces, they arrived at a large chamber and understandably enjoyed standing and walking upright. What they didn’t notice was that they were shattering the thin layer of calcite crust they were walking on and sinking into the mud below. The footsteps, now 24 years old, look as if they were made yesterday. Today’s tours follow a path created by one of the original spelunkers, with orange tape marking the path’s edge.
We passed through the "no falling zone," a narrow pathway with a large drop-off a few inches away. Small shards of crystals, some resembling coral, grew underneath rocks. We also saw tiny bat bones, testimony to creatures who traveled too far back into the recesses of the cave and became lost.
We also saw two of the cave’s living creatures, a cave cricket, a white ghost of an insect, and a small beetle that eats the crickets’ eggs. At the top of the cave’s ecosystem are the millions of bats that live there during the summer, exiting the cave every evening to eat insects and returning at dawn.
Finally, after two hours of crawling, pulling and grunting, we saw our reward, the White Giant. This huge stalagmite probably has spent eons taking on its bulbous form. When we asked Bowling how old the formation was, she said stalagmites and stalactites are impossible to date because different water sources drip minerals at different rates into the ground, causing the slow buildup of cave formations. But to give us an idea, she said one hole blasted into the cave in 1932 had caused a slow flow of water to drip into the area.
[Note that hole above the White Giant is the origin of it.]
The stalagmites hanging from the cave’s ceiling were now a half-inch long. So if it had taken almost 70 years to create a half-inch formation and we were looking at a domed stalagmite more than a dozen feet tall, we were looking at one old creation. Beyond the White Giant is Guadalupe Cave, closed to all but researchers and volunteers who work on cleanup projects, brushing cave surfaces with toothbrushes to erase the footsteps left by past visitors.
[The ones hanging from the ceiling are stalactites actually, such as these. I guess her editor didn't know the difference either.]
Preservation is a key part of the work all rangers do at Carlsbad. The White Giant tour and others only take place once a week to limit the effects people have on the ecosystem.
Even with only eight visitors guided by two rangers, we were changing the atmosphere of the cave, Harding explained. In addition to creating moist air exhaled during our exertions, we were leaving skin cells, hair, and clothing fibers while treading on the fragile cave floors. Even though we wore gloves to keep our skin oils off the wall’s surfaces, we were wearing parts of the cave smooth.
[Talk about freaking anal retentive.]
Before starting back to the entrance, we sat in the cave, turned our lights off, and marveled at the total darkness. Then Bowling asked us to sit silently. The only sound was soft drips of water, slowly forming their beautiful cave creations.
At the end of the tour, we gratefully took the elevator to the surface. We were tired, dirty and sore. But we had reveled in the sight of this naturally created beauty.
[Me, too. I'm glad I went and so will you. ]
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