Carlsbad Caverns

If M had figured we were headed for Carlsbad, she didn't let on. She was reading Nora Roberts when we passed all the billboards for White's City and the Caves.

I looked for Schlumberger trucks as we drove south from Artesia (I spent the fall of 1981 in Midland, a couple hours away, in well logging school) but the closest I came was a whole bunch of oil wells and a convoy of Halliburton frac trucks warming up outside of town.

I had been concerned that we would arrive at the Caverns too late and have to give up one of the tour options since we had to be on the road by mid-afternoon to our next stop, but it all worked out fine. We spent more than 3 hours underground, exploring the Big Room on our own and then taking a guided tour of some other parts of the cave. Carlsbad's sheer scale, and the abundance of pointy-up and pointy-down things, more than made up for our jaded whining about some of the other less than adequate caves we've visited in the last few years!

I don't normally attach this many photos to a post, but I guess there's really no reason not to! Photography is a little shaky in the low lighting, but it's amazing how many came out okay (well, its also amazing how many I actually took in order to get a few that worked).