62 Parks Travelerstarted with a simple goal: to visit every U.S. national park in one year. Avid backpacker and public-lands nerdsaved up, built out a tiny van to travel and live in, and hit the road. The parks as we know them are rapidly changing, and shewanted to see them before it’s too late.
Pennington is committed to following CDC guidelines during the COVID-19 pandemic to ensure the safety of herself and others. She’s currently on a travel break until the parks begin to reopen. In the meantime, we’ll continue to publish her previously completed parks to help you take your mind off the pandemic and plan for future adventures.
Driving through West Texas oil country at night felt like stumbling into some darkoccult ritual uninvited. Huge fireballs dotted the horizon in every direction, each one surrounded by a semicircle of bigchrome machinery. Floodlights blinded me in the pitch-black. My tires screeched to avoid hitting a lone coyote in the chilly 28-degree winterair. It was a rough entry into New Mexico.
The next morning, I drove through the Chihuahuan Desert in southern New Mexico to pay avisit to Carlsbad Caverns and was immediately struck by how developed the entrance was. Unlike most other parks on my list, the main attraction hereis the central cave itself, meaning that the ticketing window, restrooms, gift shop, restaurant, and elevator tothe cave are all housed together in one giant building that feels more like a scene out of Disneyland than a U.S. national park. I flashed my parks pass, paid for the ranger-led King’s Palace Tour, and stepped into the elevator that would carry me down, down, down, 750 feet below the surface.
At the bottom of the elevator? More Disneyland. Shiny glass doors and a silver roundabout marked theentrance to the cave itself, complete with an underground gift shop, flush toilets, and a cafeteria.
Thankfully, the tour lightened the mood a bit. I meandered through a series of enormous subterranean passageways with 20 other visitors, staring upslack-jawedat delicate calcite speleothems. A variety of rock formations—rippling draperies,pencil-thin soda straws,and melted chandeliers—hung high above our heads as we traversed a series of caverns just off the park’s famous Big Room area.
However, my initial upset about the nearby oil wells came rumbling back when our guide mentioned that all the lights from thesurroundingoil fields abovearethe primary reason Carlsbad Caverns isn’t yet recognized as a dark-sky park.
I was hoping for peaceand instead found civilization everywhere.
I had the afternoon completely free to wander, so I took the elevator back up to the surface and decided to hike down the cave’s 1.25-mile Natural Entrance Trail. With the park’s bat colony vacationing in Mexico for the winter and the lion’s share of park visitors arriving in March, I found myself descending the steep switchbacks into the cave in silence.
“Finally,” I thought to myself, “stillness.”
The farther I hiked down the paved pathway, the more I began to notice magnificent cave formations appearing out of the darkness. Much like with cloud-watching, my mind began to define each shape with a strange, psychedelic precision. I walked past a 20-foot-tall whale’s mouth, a spiny marionette, and a hoard of goblin fingertips reaching up and through the earth.
Winter is the slow season at Carlsbad, and I hadthe Big Room mostly to myself, save for a few international families and retired couples milling about. The silence was tremendous. It was exactly what I needed.
I found a bench with a 180-degree view of the cave’s Top of the Cross area and sat in the deep quiet for a long while. The trip may have gotten off to a rocky start, but this hushed tranquility was pretty damn perfect.
62 Parks Traveler Carlsbad Caverns Info
Size: 46,766 acres
Location: Southeastern New Mexico
Created In: 1923 (national monument), 1930 (national park)
Best For: Caving, hiking, backpacking, accessible trails
When to Go: Year-round. The temperature in the cavernsremains a steady and humid 56 degrees in every season, though surface-level temperatures can soar during thesummer months, hitting over 100degrees.
Where to Stay: Though no vehicle camping is allowed inside the park, Whites City offers convenient(though often crowded) . The town of Carlsbadis also home to dozens of affordable chain-hotel options, many of which havepools and offer free breakfast.
Where to Eat: is a sight for sore eyes in the barren restaurant desert of Carlsbad. Go for the pulled pork,stay for the coleslaw.
Mini ϳԹ:Take a self-guided tour of the park’s Big Room area by purchasing a general-admission ticket ($15) and ridingthe elevator or walking the Natural Entrance Trail down to the main caverns. About half of the self-guided tour is wheelchair accessible, and visitors can spendas much or as little time as they want inside the cave until it closes at 4:45 P.M. (6:45 P.M. in the summertime). In the warmer months, be sure to stick around for sunset, when hundreds of thousands of Brazilian free-tailed bats soar out of the cave’s mouth.
Mega ϳԹ: Go on the ranger-led ($15, five and a half hours) or the ($20, four hours). Don a headlamp and prepare to crawl, hike, and squeeze your way through a wild cave system that’s only permitted with a guide.