Carlsbad Caverns
Originally uploaded by Tokyorosa
One of my favorite places in New Mexico is Carlsbad Caverns, so I was really happy when Katsu and Naomi said they'd like to see it. (It's not the usual place to take out-of-town guests, simply because it's a nine hour or so round trip drive from Albuquerque.)
My first trip there was when I was about eight. Then, the decorations in the cave, the stalagtites and stalagmites and draperies, were garishly lit with red, green, and blue lights (make no mistake: it was a thrill for the eight-year-old me) and many of the features were named with little plaques. Still, I remember my mom's reaction to the unnamed cave decorations: She could see animals and other creatures wherever she looked. I could see them then too, but now I see different things.
Recently however, the displays have changed. The cave features are no longer lit up like Christmas trees. The new lighting is demure, soft like candlelight. The old signs have been removed from everything except the most famous decorations in the cave like The Hall of Giants and The Rock of Ages. Too, much of the cavern is now off-limits except by ranger-guided tours. (I agree with this change as the half-million visitors a year were becoming less respectful generationally and were doing things like snapping off small stalagtites to take home as souvenirs and leaving behind graffiti on the walls.)
We began with a two-hour tour of Left-Hand Tunnel, a tunnel not open to the public. Intended to evoke the feeling of the earliest explorations by Jim White, the 16-year-old cowboy who is credited with discovering Carlsbad Caverns, we carried candle lanterns (ours had glass sides, his was made from a coffee can). The tour guide asked us to refrain from taking pictures or using flashlights if we did have them. We moved along the trail without speaking.
Unlike the other trails in the caverns, the Left-Hand Tunnel trail is not a loop. We went in as far as was practical for a group of non-spelunkers. (The trail continues to a section where one must rappel down a cascade of rock to reach the lowest part of Carlsbad Caverns. There is an underground lake there called The Lake of the Clouds above which a second species of bat roosts during the day). We then turned and followed the trail back out. At one point in the tour, we all sat and, one by one, blew out the candles in our lanterns. The darkness pushed in on all sides. The ranger asked us to be silent. And then the silence sat down on our heads. 
Before we blew out the candles, we had been talking about bats and how they use echolocation to navigate in the darkness. After experiencing the darkness firsthand, it seemed an even more impressive feat. Still in darkness, the ranger broke the silence to suggest an experiment related to echolocation. "Everyone click your tongues," he said. We did. "How many fingers was I holding up?" he asked. We laughed. He took out his flashlight and said, "Echolocation is like this--" he rapidly flashed his light on and off, moving it so that each time it lit up a different part of the cave "--only using flashes of sound instead of flashes of light."We stood up, and he and a second ranger lit our candles using cigarette lighters. While he did, he told us about the bats that fly every night to the deepest part of the cave, down, down, down in the darkness, through the twists and turns, past the lunchroom and the elevator shafts, past the gift shop and bathrooms, down to the Lake of the Clouds. "I've been there," he told us. "The water is so blue that when I turned my flashlight on it, it felt like all the color receptors in my eyes were blown out."
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