Carlsbad Caverns

Right as we're winding down our trip, starting to feel a little road weary (well the kids & Anissa are, but Joey wants to become a professional vagabond and spend the rest of his life traveling), "finishing up" the last few national parks, keeping an eye on the calendar for the date Joey has to report for duty and continually rechecking the atlas to see how far we actually still are from home, God WOWS us with the breathtaking enormity & awesome wonder of the largest cave in the Western Hemisphere!!!!! I felt the same weight of God's majesty inside that cave, feeling as small as I did looking out at the Grand Canyon 4 yrs ago! My smallness, His greatness! He created all THIS yet he knows the exact number of hairs on my head!!! Anissa of course was moved to tears, but not the Sea World dolphin show kind of tears....the Psalm 8:1 kind of tears "oh Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!"
***The iPad wouldn't take any pics in the low light, so I took some photos of postcards to post for you (and of course those aren't that great either) so you can at least have a general idea. But if you have time and really want to get a better idea of what it looked like, just google it. As always, though, no photos do it justice or give you a true perspective of its hugeness...you just need to go there to see it for yourself! We've been to a lot of caves through the years and nothing even comes close; I'm telling you, it's like the Grand Canyon equivalent of caves!***
I always love the human-interest stories and fun historical trivia....well the caverns were discovered by a 16 yr old boy, Jim White, who saw a thick black cloud coming out of a hole in the Guadeloupe Mountainside and thought it was volcanic smoke (it was bats!) He explored 19 out of the 27 miles of the cave by lantern and home-made ladders. The sad part was no one believed the descriptions of what he saw; they all thought he was exaggerating and no one had any desire to go exploring and check out his claims! It took him almost 7 yrs to convince a photographer to go down there w/ him (imagine the old fashioned equipment they had to drag down and using flares to light the cavern for each shot)! After the pictures were printed in 1915, it took a long time for them to reach Washington DC, and it wasn't until 1923 the govt sent an inspector to the caverns. Here's the msg he sent back to Washington: "I am wholly conscious of the feebleness of my efforts to convey in words the deep conflicting emotions, the feeling of fear & awe, and the desire for an inspired understanding of the divine creator's work which represents to the human eye such a complex aggregate of natural wonders." That same year it was declared a National Monument.
and in 1930 it became a National Park. Jim White became the first park ranger and led tours right up until he died in 1946! Can you imagine the emotion he must've felt when electricity was run into the caverns and being able to flip the first lights witch on???
So we did the 1 1/4 mile self-guided trail thru the "Big Room" (about an hour & half) then went on a different 1 1/2 hr guided tour thru the "King & Queen's Palace". Incredible rock formations!!!! The grand finale of the day was waiting for the mass exodus of 200,000 bats to fly out of the cave at dusk. Unfortunately it wasn't as great a showing as they normally get (July & Aug are usually their thickest mths because the babies start flying out to eat too); there was no dark cloud, no spiraling formations, no influx all at once, just lots & lots of bats trickling out over the course of an hr. Although we were disappointed, we just focused on the amazingness we had seen inside the cave! Definitely one of those must-see-before-you-die places!!! AND added bonus, its cold 900 ft down! So it's actually a perfect place in the desert to visit in the hot summer mths!