A travel day, Socorro NM to Carlsbad NM via Roswell NM, 240 some miles, a short trip. I had wanted to stop in Roswell to check out all the flying saucer and alien museums but my overreaching goal is to make it to my sister's in FL for Thanksgiving. So I bypass any stops in Roswell and keep on going. Once you get off the Interstates in the west, you'll find most of the secondary roads pretty nice with little or no traffic and high speed limits. It looks like the universal speed limit once you get out of a town is 70 mph. I put the motorhome on cruise somewhere between 65 and 70. From Roswell to Carlsbad (NM 285) there were places where I could see five miles in front of me and five miles behind me - and I was the only one on the road!
I check into the RV Park and get set up by 2 pm so take a reconnaissance trip to Carlsbad Caverns National Park, about 20 miles to the south of the city of Carlsbad. I checked out the visitor's center and picked up a few brochures before starting back to Carlsbad for dinner.
Dinner was at a nice little local Mexican Restaurant - good food and good beer. For you beer aficionados out there, there was one beer on the menu I had to try - Roswell Alien Amber Ale. A very nice local beer but I a little on the light side for an Amber Ale. There was a nice Alien on the label though! I stopped in the local Eckerd's and bought a six-pack.
The creation of Carlsbad Caverns began some 250 MYA with the creation of a horseshoe shaped, 400 mile long reef in an inland sea that covered the region. The reef was formed from the remains of sponges, algae and seashells. Eventually, the seawater evaporated and the reef was buried under deposits of salts and gypsum. A few million years ago subterranean geologic activity lifted the area and erosion began to uncover the reef. Rainwater, slightly acidic from the air and soil, seeped down into cracks in the reef and slowly began dissolving the limestone. At the same time, hydrogen sulfide gas from the huge petroleum deposits under the reef percolated upward and dissolved in the ground water coming from the surface and formed sulfuric acid. All of this corrosive activity created the caverns seen today. The decoration of the chambers by stalactites, stalagmites and other formations began only a half million years ago - long after the chambers had been carved out.
Since I'd be photographing underground, I didn't have to worry about getting up early enough for sunrise - but I thought it prudent to start early to avoid any crowds. The morning proved to be nicely crowd free.
There are two self-guided tours of the caverns and several guided tours available. One of the self-guided tour, the most popular, starts with a 750 foot elevator descent from the visitor's center to what's called the Big Room. Then follows a pretty easy one mile, level hike around the largest room in the cavern network. Part of this hike is even wheelchair accessible. After the hike, you just take the elevator back to the surface. At the "rest area" where the elevator lands, there are restroom facilities, a restaurant and a gift shop. The second self-guided tour starts at the natural entrance where you hike into the natural mouth of the caverns and descend the 750 feet down a very steep trail where after a mile or so, you come to the "rest area" and can then hike around the Big Room. I decided to take both of the self-guided tours and then take what's called the Kings Palace guided tour - another hike of a mile or so into rooms you wouldn't otherwise see. On this tour, you start at the rest area and descend another 80-100 feet to put you at a depth of 850 feet under the surface - interestingly, still about 3500 feet above sea level.
Touring the caverns was an interesting visual experience - unfortunately, the experience is very difficult to capture with a camera. If you choose not to use flash, as I did, the lighting is such that you need to use very fast film, something around ISO 1000, or an equally high speed setting on your digital camera. You might still want to use a tripod or a monopod as I did. Now you have to worry about color balance - do you use a tungsten film or a daylight film or an equivalent setting on your digital camera? I used a tungsten setting because I was told that all the lighting set up by the park service was natural, white lighting so the formations would appear normal - there are no displays lit with colored lights. For your eyes, that was true - all the lighting gave the displays a natural look. For your film or your digital camera however, that was not true. What the park service used was a combination of "natural" lighting - tungsten, halogen, fluorescent and everything in between. If you use daylight film or setting, your shots will have an orange cast when lit with tungsten, a little less of an orange cast when lit with halogen and will have a green cast when lit with fluorescent lights.
Here's a picture of the trail leading down to the natural entrance to the caverns. This initial descent is about 300 feet. For scale, that's a young lady in the green jacket. This was shot with a daylight setting.
Here's a formation lit mostly with tungsten and some fluorescent. This shot was processed with an tungsten setting so the color of the deposits are near normal. Much of the reddish color is from minerals that were deposited as it was being formed. There's some fluorescent lighting as you can see some green in the shadow of the column. A stalactite forms on the ceiling and grows down while a stalagmite forms on the floor and grows up. When a stalactite and a stalagmite grow together, connecting the ceiling to the floor, it's called a column or a pillar.
This is near natural color - also processed with a tungsten setting but there is less color in the deposits. This is a waterfall formation.
A view into a side room lit with a variety of lights.
This stalagmite is called Giant Dome. My guess is it's about 40 feet tall and 12 feet in diameter. The growth rate of these formations is unknown for sure as it depends on the amount of groundwater seeping in from the surface, the amount of minerals carried by the groundwater, evaporation rates, etc. Since the surface today is a high-steppe desert with virtually no surface water, the growth of most of the formations in Carlsbad has stopped or slowed significantly. In one area where a tunnel was bored through the formations to connect one large room with another, there are some small stalactites forming from the ceiling of the tunnel. The tunnel was bored in the 1930's and the stalactites, after 70 some years of growth, are about three-eighths of an inch long.
A view into a side room lit mostly by tungsten.
Although most of the significant formations have been named by various people over the years, this one has no published name. Hmmm, I wonder why?
Again, a variety of lighting gives this scene some color.
Close up to one of the major stalagmites.
This is a don't miss visit if you are in the area. The formations are amazing and the shear size of the caverns is incredible. The park service and the Civilian Conservation Corps (in the 30's and 40's) have done a splendid job of making the caverns easily accessible. There is even a stretch of trail in the big room that is wheelchair accessible. If you are a spelunker, there are guided tours to really hard-to-get-to areas where you can use all your skills and get as dirty as you wish. These areas are all unlit so bring lots of batteries for your headlamp.
Most of my pictures were taken with a white balance of 2850° (tungsten) with a ISO 1250 setting. For many of the shots, I used a monopod. I used a 28-135mm Image Stabilized lens. Overall the results were disappointing. The high ISO setting gave me a lot of noise in the shadows - the digital equivalent of grain - and the low light, even with the monopod and IS lens, left me with many blurred shots. Next time I'll try a flash on the camera. But my guess is then I'll have many shots with a reasonably lit featureless foreground and a totally black background.