Tuesday, October 04, 2005
Alphabet Soup
Let's see...where can the "C's" take us? Cairo? No -- never been there. Cancun? - boring! Wait, I know -- Carlsbad Caverns! This is a National Park, well known, but only moderately visited. Mostly because it is out in the middle of nowhere.This used to be known as the largest underground "room" in the world. Not true anymore, bigger caves have been found, but it remains one of the most accessible and one of the most lovely.
It's the formations however that make this place truly spectacular. It sort of defies description. Stalagtites and stalagmites everywhere -- kind of like wandering through a rock forest.
These are called "the giants" and they very much dominate the entire main room, no matter where you go in there, you can see them. Needless to say, the dramatic lighting throughout the cavern adds tremendously to the experience, but what may be the coolest part of the whole cave happens not in it, but at the mouth, and it happens every night in the summer.
It's the nightly BAT FLIGHT! About halg tha bats in all of Mexico roost in this cave int eh summer and they all fly out of it, every evening, over the course of an hour of so. It is literally millions of bats. From the sidelines it looks very much like a bat tornado. It's way coolAnd now, let's turn to one final picture. What does it look like in the cave if the lights are turned off? Well, like this:
