Day 2 in the park was devoted to exploration of the Big Room. The Big Room is the largest cave by volume in the US. It is a little over 8.2 acres in size with a 1.25-mile trail for exploration. At its highest point, the roof is over 275 above the floor.
While it is clear that what is now known as Carlsbad Caverns was known in antiquity by indigenous peoples of the region and early explorers, the eventual development of the area began with a 16-year-old cowboy named Jim White thinking that he saw smoke while mending fences and chasing cows in 1898. The smoke turned out to be bats emerging from the cave. This discovery led him to a lifelong commitment to the cave including exploration, leading tours, mining guano and eventually fighting to preserve the cave as the first chief ranger of the park. He married, had a son and lived a short distance from the natural entrance to the cave in a house provided by the guano mining company with no running water and minimal electricity. He died in 1946. Contrary to what most people surmise that Whites City at the intersection of US Highway 62 and Carlsbad Cavern Highway was named for Jim, it was actually founded and developed by Charlie White an entrepreneur/developer not related to Jim.
We met Larry and Joy and went across the street from where their rolling home was parked to enjoy breakfast at the Cactus Cafe in Whites City. Nice place, good food, friendly waitress…. not open for dinner and not open every day…. From there we were off to the park, down over 750 feet in the elevator and began exploration of the Big Room. The average exploration time is 1.5 hours. We always apply the retirement factor of 2x to the time and spent about 3 hours sauntering along the trail. At every turn it was a Wow Wow Wow exploration. Consequently, the number of pictures was incredible with over 450 pictures between Joni’s iPhone and my camera. This was narrowed down to the 132 photos included in the slide show below. It should be good for 2 glasses of wine or 2 beers or 1 cocktail — sipped. Again, scale is generally missing from these pictures as described previously.
