There just aren't any old songs about stalactites.

On this day we visited Carlsbad Caverns. Just like every other cave you visit, this place had the stalagmite that you are encouraged to touch to get it out of your system. Its name was Fred, though Frederika may have been more appropriate.



We took the Natural Entrance self-guided tour, which was really impressive. It was uncrowded, and the sheer scale of the rooms and steep decent was interesting. If you click on the pan above, you will see a very tiny person on the path near the hole at the bottom... that's the ranger, spraying off the asphalt. That hole is maybe 40 feet tall.



The same area, from the inside looking back up.



Once again, the scale of the picture is huge, though its hard to tell. This is looking back up the way we've come, with the trail angling up to the left, then back and forth until it reaches the bright hole in the middle right, which is many stories tall.



Another view further on, this time looking down at the switchbacks of the trail. It descends around 750 feet in a mile.


From there we took the self-guided Big Room tour, which wanders past many impressive formations, with fanciful names like Hall of the Gods.



Pointy!



This is the Caveman...



...and the Chandelier glowing in the distance.



There were pools of water in the cave, and places where it was actively dripping, but you could tell that the water level had dropped considerably in much of the area, and there was even a stop on the trail with a sign talking about a pool that just wasn't there. We asked a Ranger about this, and he said that for decades they lost a lot of moisture out the elevator shaft (you can take an elevator straight down instead of hiking), though now they are trying to prevent that with baffles, etc.


This is the lunchroom, which is 750 feet underground. It comes a close second to the picnic area in White Sands on the list of Strange Places We Have Eaten At.