The best place to start your tour of Carlsbad Caverns is at the Natural Entrance.  This large opening formed when part of the cave’s ceiling collapsed thousands of years ago.  In the late 1800s, cowboys discovered the cave when they noticed billowing clouds of black smoke emerging from the ground.  Upon closer inspection, the cowboys realized the smoke was actually swarms of bats leaving the cave at dusk in search of their nightly meal.

This Bat Flight Amphitheater was constructed at the Natural Entrance to enable visitors to comfortably watch the bats at dusk in summer and early fall.

The bats can number in the millions, though the count has dropped over the years due to insecticides and damage to the bat habitat before the cave was protected by the National Park Service.  Today the bats live a section of the cave that’s closed to tourists.

A well-graded, paved walkway lines the 2-mile downhill path, and most visitors take the elevator back to the surface.  Imagine what it was like before the park was established.  Early visitors had to rappel hundreds of feet into complete darkness, then climb the rope back out under their own power.

The first few hundred feet of the cave is called the Twilight Zone, which receives a daily dose of light from the outside world.  For a few days each year in late summer, the afternoon sun aligns perfectly with the Natural Entrance to create a dazzling tube of light.  Beam me up, Scotty.

Once you descend past the Twilight Zone, the cave plunges into complete darkness.  Fortunately the National Park Service has lit the cave with over 1,000 bulbs and 20 miles of wire, hidden from view.  The Park uses only white light to reveal the beautiful natural colors of the cave.

The surface above the cave was once a lush, tropical rainforest, quite different than the Chihuahuan Desert that’s there today.

Every formation in the cave started as a single drop of water carrying a tiny piece of calcium carbonate.  When the water evaporated, it left behind the minerals, which collect and build over thousands of years into these exotic formations.

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