Apr2 Saturday Day 2 - going 750 feet underground - again

Apr 2 Sat Day 75 Hot, hot, hot. Into the 90’s F, that’s over 30 C!.

After breakfast, we drove into town to check out the River Walk public area by the Pecos River. Sheila waded in with the thermometer & found the water coldish – 66F, that’s 19 C. They have a nice area for swimming & a nice beach with sand. They also rent kayaks & peddle boats & run 1 hr. river cruises in a small paddle wheeler from there. Unfortunately we did not have time for any of the above. After that, we drove back through town stopping for lunch @ the Dragon China Buffet before heading down to Carlsbad Caverns again. I should be used to it by now, but we keep getting amazed at restaurant prices here. Our Chinese buffet lunch was $6.85, minus a 10% senior’s discount. Supper is $8.25 minus discount. However those prices don’t include beverages (between $1 & $2 extra). It was a large buffet with very many dishes including a roasted crab casserole dish that was different & delicious, and they had a lot of sushi plus good desserts. We arrived at the Caverns in time for our 2 pm Ranger Guided tour of the “Kings Palace” room. It was easily the most spectacular room we’d seen--all kinds of stalactites, soda straws, draperies, & popcorn hung from the ceiling with almost no room between them, quite impressive. As I mentioned before taking pictures is hard because of the huge space & distances that a flash just will not fill. Two movies that were filmed here were the original “Journey to the Centre of the Earth,” (with Pat Boone), & “King Solomon’s Mines.” The tour was just over an hour long in that one room, and at one point the Rangers turned the lights out for several minutes so we could experience total blackness & total silence. There were questions on how long it takes for one of the big stalactites to form. The answer is they don’t know because the climate has everything to do with it, how much rain & snow falls up top & how much of that seeps down into the ground. The Ranger said that it can take 8 months for water from the surface to seep down 140 feet to a cave. There is an example of some very small stalactites forming on the ceiling of a tunnel that was blasted to gain access 70 years ago; they are now maybe ½ an inch or less.

At the end of the tour, Sheila went off to explore the part of the “Big Room” we did not get to yesterday while I went up the elevator to see some Ranger presentation films in the Visitors Centre up top. There was one on the Mexican Freetail bats which live in the caverns below: I learned that: they eat two times their weight a day in insects, such as mosquitoes. Yea-a-a! A cave full, several million of them, can eat 2½ tons of insects a night! Sheila is now thinking of having some bat pets to take with us whenever we go into mosquito country. Their feces, called guano makes good fertilizer. It was mined here from 1935 to 1969. One square foot of ceiling can hold as many as 200+ adult bats! They sound like a very snuggly animal.

When we got back to the car at 5:00, the dash temperature readout was 33C, (91.5F). It would get some heat from the car metal sitting in the sun but once we were driving it only came down to 30 or 31C. On the way home, Sheila told me about her tour around the back section of the Big Room loop. She said it was a bit ‘spooky’ because they closed that section just after she entered & she was the only one walking the dimly lit trail in complete silence with the rock formations casting ghostly shadows all around her. “Dum de Dum, Dum!” It was a welcome relief whenever she came to a lighted decoration, (column, stalagmite, etc.) & it’s sign post. They were few & far between, however, since that portion of the Big Room doesn’t get as much water seeping down from above—hence there are less speotherms, or ‘decorations’ as they are called. She did see the Bottomless Pit, so named because when the caverns were first explored, they didn’t have lights strong enough to see the bottom of the hole. Later, they discovered it was a mere 140 ft. deep. However, because there is a very high rock dome over the hole, it creates the highest ceiling in the caverns—370 ft. from pit bottom to domed ceiling. Another, interesting fact: The caverns are dimly lit by 19 miles of concealed wires & 1000 bulbs, & fluorescent tubes. Theatrical lighting experts were hired to do the spotlighting of the speotherms.

Back home, we made a light supper & watched a DVD rental movie that came free with our campsite. It was a romantic comedy of the “When Harry met Sally” vein, called “Alex and Emma.” It was quite fun to watch.