As a bear who plans to have an epic bear cave one day, I looked forward to visiting Carlsbad Caverns.  It’s not the biggest or deepest cave out there, but it’s supposed to be cool and it’s along the way so off we went.

There are two options of exploring the caves – down the elevator, or taking the natural entrance walk.  Of course we took the walk so I could check out the caves in more detail.

We paid $5 to get one of those audio tour wands.  I thought it’d be worth it to hear more about what these caves are about.  There are 50 recordings in total on our walk.

Aside from being a really big cave, Carlsbad is known for the millions of bats that fly out.  Unfortunately those bats are all down in Mexico right now.  It’s cold here.  I don’t blame them.  if they WERE around, here’s where you’d hang out to watch them fly.  They’re supposed to start coming back next month.

Anyway, after a ranger gave us some dos and don’ts we went down through that entrance.

Oooooh.  Caves.  I like the size, but I want my cave a bit more high tech than this.

As we went down the path, it was pretty neat to see all the formations.

Of course we stopped to take pictures of ourselves too.

About an hour later, we got to the main Big Cave complex.  It got a bit more crowded there but it was still cool to do the loop.  They are still mapping out and exploring caves in this complex!

And then I got hungry.  Since you’re not allowed any food inside the cavern to avoid luring animals in, we took the elevator back to the surface and went to look for food.  Cool cave!