To reach the park, follow the narrow, twisting seven-mile road that leaves US-62/180 at White's City , twenty miles southwest of the town of CARLSBAD . This ends at the visitor center - part of a complex that includes a restaurant, a gift shop, a day-care center and even a kennel - where you can pay entrance fees and pick up details of the day's schedule of tours (daily: June to mid-Aug 8am-7pm; mid-Aug to mid-Oct and mid-March to April 8am-5.30pm; mid-Oct to mid-March 8.30am-5pm; tel 505/785-2232, ).
Almost all park visitors confine their attention to the main cave, Carlsbad Cavern itself, and the standard park fee of $6 per person for three days covers access to this cave only; note that Golden Eagle passes are not accepted. Direct elevators drop to the Cavern's centerpiece, the Big Room , 750 vertical feet below the visitor center (summer first down 8.30am, last up 6.30pm; rest of year first down 8.30am, last up 4.55pm), but you can choose instead to walk down via the Natural Entrance Route (last entry summer 3.30pm; rest of year 2pm). This steep, paved footpath switchbacks into the guano-encrusted maw of the cave, taking fifteen minutes to reach the first of the formations and another fifteen to reach the Big Room. All visitors are obliged to ride the elevator back out.
Measuring up to 1800ft long and 250ft high, the Big Room is festooned with stalactites, stalagmites and countless unnameable shapes of swirling liquid rock. All are a uniform stone gray; the rare touches of color are provided by slight red or brown mineral-rich tinges, improved here and there with gentle pastel lighting. Most visitors take an hour or so to complete the reasonably level trail around the Room's perimeter. Whatever the weather up top - summer highs exceed 100°F - the temperature down here is always a cool 56°F, so dress warmly.
Adjoining the Big Room, the Underground Lunchroom is a vast formation-free side cave paved over in the 1950s to create a diner-cum-souvenir-shop that sells indigestible lunches in polystyrene containers, plus Eisenhower-era souvenirs like giant pencils and Viewmaster reels. To modern eyes, this strange installation seems absurd, but moves to close it down have been stymied by its place in popular affections.
The main appeal of walking down used to be that the trail meandered through beautiful side caves such as the King's Palace , filled with translucent "draperies" of limestone, but these are now open to guided tours only, which start from the Big Room (summer daily 9am, 10am, 11am, 1pm, 2pm & 3pm; less frequent during rest of year; $8). Longer tours explore less accessible, more demanding caves within the complex such as the Hall of the White Giant (Sat 1pm; $20) and Spider Cave (Sun 1pm; $20). It's also possible to take a two-hour tour of Slaughter Canyon Cave , 25 miles southwest of the visitor center (usually summer daily 10am & 1pm; call for exact schedule; $15). To get there, drive five miles south of White's City on US-62/180, then eleven miles west on Hwy-418, and finally hike the steep half-mile up to the cave entrance.
The recesses of Carlsbad Caverns are the summer home of around a million Mexican free-tailed bats . Each evening, at dusk or a little later, having slept all day suspended from the ceiling of the imaginatively titled Bat Cave - to which there's no public access - they emerge in cloud-like spirals, and disperse across the desert in search of delectable insects. Park visitors watch the spectacle from the amphitheater seating that faces the cave mouth, while rangers give a free and informative "Bats aren't as bad as you think" presentation.
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