Carlsbad Caverns

I'm visiting my parents in New Mexico for 10 days so we decided to take a weekend trip to Carlsbad caverns. It is about 4 1/2 hours from Albuquerque so we drove down Friday afternoon and then hiked the cave on Saturday morning. On Friday evening after the drive we drove to the caverns to see the bats come out of the cave. Between 400,000 and 500,000 Brazilian bats come out of the cave every evening. It was really cool to see them come out. It literally looked like a tornado of bats that never stopped. We only lasted about 20 minutes of watching the bats before we had to go because Claire was really tired. Apparently it takes an hour for all the bats to get out of the cave. These pictures I have here are pulled from the internet. You aren't supposed to take pictures of the bats because it disturbs them.

The next morning we headed back to the cave. Here is Papa and the kids in the visitors center before going into the cave.

Here is the entrance of the cave

The hike through the cave was approximately 3 miles. There are shorter routes that you can take but we decided that we wanted the full experience since we aren't able to get to Carlsbad very easily. For those of you who don't know where Carlsbad is, it is in New Mexico, 85 miles from Texas and 165 miles from Mexico. The kids did really good throughout the cave. Luckily we were able to borrow a hiking backpack for Claire from a lady in my mom's ward. All I can say is thank goodness we had the backpack because we would not have made it with Claire walking. Carrying 40 extra pounds on my back made for a bit of a workout but it was worth it. I got my workout for the day. The first part of the hike was pretty steep getting to the mouth of the cave. The kids did NOT like the smell going into the cave. It did not smell very good with 400,000+ bats living in there. I'm glad it did not smell that way the whole time. All the kids were covering their noses and Claire kept saying "Stinky!"

Once we got down to the bottom of the cave, which was down 750 feet, I let Claire out of the backpack and took a rest for a minute. I let Claire walk for about .5 miles before she went back in the backpack. She actually asked to go back in. We were able to see a bunch of really cool rock formations. I was able to teach the kids what the difference was between stalagmites and stalactites. Maelyn's favorite was the popcorn and the bacon. She thought that was funny that they had food names. The Big Room at the bottom of the cave was quite impressive. Apparently it is the second biggest in the world. I was able to get some pictures of the cool formations but between my battery going dead (it doesn't last very long anymore) and the fact that my camera isn't the greatest with dark things, I was only able to get a few pictures. The ones I did get are kind of cool, thank goodness.

This part was called the "Doll house". Maelyn wanted a picture with her in it because she thought it was cool. She also liked the name :)

I was quite impressed with how well the kids did. It was a really fun experience to do with my parents and kids. After we toured the cave we took an elevator up 750 feet back to the visitor's center. We went up 75 stories in the elevator in about 1 minute. I wouldn't want to get stuck in that elevator. After we were done with the cave we drove back to Albuquerque. We were all exhausted at the end of the day. It was worth every sore muscle that I have today.