A cave is a cave, right? I guess at some point I picked up that mindset after visiting several natural cave areas over the year. There was Wind Cave in 2014, Carlsbad Caverns with Elizabeth in 2018, Meramec Caverns with my family in 2021. And maybe these visits were spaced enough apart that I didn’t notice the little differences between all of them, or maybe I was just a kid who didn’t pay much attention to stuff. There’s probably more than a little truth to that. Whatever it was, the back-to-back trips to Mammoth Cave in November 2025 and Carlsbad Caverns again in March 2026 helped me finally realize that no, a cave is not just a cave.
My visit with my parents was on the final day of our trip across the Texas/New Mexico desert region on March 25 of this year. Like much of the rest of the week, it was unbearably hot for this time of year with temperatures reaching well into the 90s even at 4,500 feet at the Visitor Center. Actually, when you think about it, there was finally a redeeming quality to all of that heat. No matter what’s going on outside, even in the middle of a historic early-spring heat wave, you can count on the middle of a cave to be comfortably in the mid-50s and humid. It basically becomes a little oasis.
Our plan was for a one-shot visit to the park on the 25th, but a chance encounter at the Guadalupe Mountains Pine Springs Visitor Center changed that. While eating our lunch in the meager shade outside the center, my dad and I reviewed the available “programs” in the NPS app for the next day to figure out what cave tours were available. We saw the nighttime stargazing program that Elizabeth and I had enjoyed so much in 2018, but it wouldn’t start again until closer to summer. The more surprising thing on there was a reference to the sunset bat program, including that very night. That had to be a mistake as everything I’d read said the bats don’t arrive for another month or two. But someone else sitting in the shade near us overheard the conversation and confirmed that actually, bat programs had begun the night before. He had been there. The bats had returned because “the bugs came back early”. As magical as the bat flights were in 2018, I immediately encouraged my parents to go.
It wasn’t much of a sacrifice to do so, as it turned out. Guadalupe is not a national park that you spend an entire hot day in unless you’re a turbo-hiker. We were back at the hotel in Whites City by mid-afternoon to give my dad some time to work remotely and my mom time to catch up her blog. We had several hours of relaxation (and one more god-awful Wal-Mart dinner: for me it was something alleged to be ramen) before the sun began to sink on the western horizon. We got back in the car that I’d spent a ton of the last week in and made the 15-minute winding drive up to Carlsbad Caverns National Park.
The Visitor Center closes and everyone has to be out of the cave by about 5:00 pm in mid-March, because the period beginning right before the roughly 7:00 pm sunset belongs to the bats. Carlsbad is unlike my previous visit to Mammoth Cave in at least one major way – the main entrance is also the only public entrance. There are a couple of other ways into the cave, but the bats know the main entrance as their primary egress just as the humans do. The last thing you want to do is scare the bats away permanently.
All of that means that there were only a few cars in the parking lot when we arrived. More people would funnel in to see the bats emerge from the cave at dusk, but they had chosen (sensibly) to wait a little longer instead of having to kill time in the park. My parents and I… had to kill time in the park. There are far, far worse ways you can spend your Tuesday evening than wandering a nature trail atop the great Capitan Reef, watching the entire desert below glow in a hazy yellow-orange sunset. The nature trail had yuccas and soapberries and chollas, all things that I mentally catalogued in my new pursuit of being a plant expert. Most importantly, it did not have any snakes. One snake was enough for me for the day.
The main entrance at Carlsbad Caverns is a big, yawning opening that seems to emerge from nowhere. A hundred or so yards to the west of it, the NPS built a little amphitheater that can probably squeeze a few hundred patrons in on a busy night. This certainly wasn’t that; despite it being Spring Break (a ranger at White Sands had told me that Spring Break marks their busiest time of the year), word had only gotten out about the bat program to maybe 60 or 80 people. All of them gathered on the fringes of the amphitheater nearest the cave entrance to have the best view of the bats awaking from their diurnal slumber. At one point, the crowd was startled into oohs and ahhs by the dive-bombing performance of dozens of cliff swallows who nest in the twilight zone at the mouth of the cave each night. They dropped straight out of sight with no warning; only screeching in the cavern below left a hint that they’d ever been there.
Around 6:30 pm, a ranger walked down the stairs and picked up a microphone. He introduced himself and then begged approximately a half dozen times for everyone to put their phones and cameras away. We do not want to scare the bats so they stop using Carlsbad Caverns. We do not want that. I’m sure 95% of people have no problem picking that up after the first once or twice, but in a public park like this you really have a hard time policing the remaining 5%. Anyway, our ranger friend welcomed us into the bat program. Why had it begun so early in 2026? This was not the native bat colony; it turned out that a migratory colony of Brazilian free-tailed bats was using this as a temporary roosting place on their way somewhere, and the regular colony would be several weeks behind them. The NPS had decided that if the bats were here and emerging from the entrance, why not start the bat program a little early? He did warn, and then warned again, that there was no guarantee the bats would come out again tonight. They’re bats, they sort of defy tracking.
And then the assembled guests got to learn about the Brazilian free-tailed bat! What a marvelous little species it is, a veritable vacuum of insects and other gross vermin. As a migratory species instead of a hibernatory species, the free-tailed bat has had no trouble with White Nose Syndrome. They sleep all day in the aptly named “Bat Cave” just off the main entrance and emerge in a spiraling tornado of vertically flapping bats every evening to feed, drink, and do other bat-type things. As the interpretive ranger wound on, he started taking questions from the crowd. The sun had set by now; there was a pale pink twilight behind, and I realized that he thought the bats weren’t going to come out tonight. This was a filibuster until we could be sure that we were going back empty-handed. I tried to figure out how to break it to my parents and set a give-up point to go back to the hotel.
Then someone on the other side of the crowd spun their index finger in the air, the pre-arranged signal for the ranger (who was facing the crowd, not the cave) to stop talking and turn the show over to the little flying mice. He fell silent immediately and turned. There was something darting around above the cave, but was it just a late cliff swallow? Then there was another. And then another. And then the bats came pouring out by twos and threes, and then in a steadily increasing stream that never seemed to end. Into the gathering dusk the bats flew, all of them zigzagging about until they had their bearings straight and then heading west-southwest over the visitor center toward Rattlesnake Springs, the nearest water source.
We watched this procession for about 20 minutes, until it was almost too dark to see. By twos and threes, the crowd began slipping away quietly so as to not disturb the stars of the show overhead. We conferred quietly with the ranger about getting entrance passes into the cave – Elizabeth would be horrified to know that we didn’t have any yet, having assumed we’d just get a reservation to a guided tour until discovering none would work with our schedule – and then made our way back. This bat sighting wasn’t quite as spectacular as it was when Elizabeth and I first visited in 2018, mostly because the bats had waited until so much further into the sunset to pop into sight. But that was more than offset by the fact that none of the three of us had expected to be here even 12 hours prior, and an experience like this is all the more pleasant when it’s a surprise.
The next morning – Wednesday, March 25 – was my last day on the road with my parents. We had a hard deadline of being in Midland in time for my evening flight back to OKC, so getting into the cave as early as possible was paramount. It would open up at 9:00 am this morning, and thanks to our friend the park ranger the night before, my parents and I were armed with the knowledge that the park sells some entrance reservations day-of each day on a first-come, first-served basis. He might have overstated how early we needed to be at the Visitor Center juuuuuust a little bit, since our arrival at 8:00 even preceded the janitorial crew.
But on the other hand, the Whites City Inn wasn’t exactly a paradise. The sink backed up when I tried to drain my remaining Cinnamon Toast Crunch milk down it, and the bathroom door got jammed from the inside multiple times. After 20 seconds of jiggling and jamming, my mom finally let out a resigned “Help”, forcing me to open the door from the other end. It was pretty funny, although you probably had to be there. Any which way, waiting for an hour at the front door of a national park Visitor Center didn’t seem so bad when that hotel room was the alternative.
The doors to the Visitor Center opened promptly at 9:00 am and Rich was the first person through the maze to get to the front counter. Our early-bird nature paid off with a 9:30 reservation to go down in the caverns, the earliest of the day. We used our intervening half-hour to do some gift shopping, of which I have two points: first of all, Elizabeth should be proud of me for redirecting us to the NPS bookstore instead of the huge vendor gift shop. Second of all, my parents buy a lot of gifts at an NPS gift shop. Since this was my second visit, I contented myself with a replacement sticker for Elizabeth and no more.
It was already sweltering out at the bat amphitheater where people were gathered to await the 9:30 opening of the cavern. A ranger had to get out a giant box fan to help keep people cool, but it only helped so much. Eventually they gave up trying to maintain order and let everyone start walking into the cavern a few minutes early. The first few switchbacks were far steeper than I remembered.
Even wilder were the cave swallows hanging out within the twilight zone. They made a vortex of screeching, diving, and pooping little missiles that darted unnervingly close to your head. My older sister, who is terrified of birds, would have hated it.
Now that was a spectacle I was unprepared for!
After a couple of minutes of walking and chatting with an old couple making their way down the pathway as well, my parents and I emerged from the Poop Zone into the darker, quieter part of the cave. I was almost instantly struck by the realization that this part of the main entrance had been lost from my memory at some point in the last 8 years. Carlsbad was much larger and grander than memory held almost instantly.
The path down into the deeper section of the cave switchbacked so that we passed by the entrance and the screeching birds and entered into a long, downhill pathway that wound through multiple chambers. This was a little more like I remembered: steep and a little damp, with each curve passing by some new cave formation.
But what really staggered me was just the sheer size of it all. The ceiling of each chamber was a couple hundred feet above, and each room felt like a whole sports stadium could fit inside of them. And every way you turned – stalagmites, stalactites, draperies, flowstone, popcorn, the whole nine yards. My parents wanted to stop and take a picture every few steps. My ingrained nature wanted to be frustrated at this, but how could I be? Everything was grand and unusual and I wanted to stop and take a picture too. The whole walk down is only a little over a mile and steeply downhill, but it makes a lot of sense why the NPS tells you to prepare to spend over an hour on the trail.
It was, in all fairness, a bit of a nightmare to walk down the slope for that long if you’re someone with a bum knee like myself (or my dad). But it was worth it all to hear them softly exclaim about the cave in the sort of hush-whisper you use at a funeral or inside a church. “I can’t believe how big it is!” was a constant refrain from my mom.
We eventually reached the bottom of the Natural Entrance trail and emerged at the aptly named “Big Room”. It’s another 1.25 mile trail that fortunately didn’t carry as much slope as the Natural Entrance, but promised to be another hour of oohing and ahhing. With that in mind, we took a quick break at the sort of quasi-cafe at the bottom (currently closed) and used the bathroom that is charmingly carved into the wall of the cave itself. I’m not sure why “in-cave bathroom” was what triggered the most unlocked memory of my 2018 visit, but I suppose the brain works in myserious ways.
The Natural Entrance had felt like descending down some giant rock ogre’s digestive system, with each new room like a new stomach. The Big Room itself was more like a cathedral. It was huge. This is where that contrast to Mammoth Cave comes in. Elizabeth and I had been there so recently that I could remember our tours through the bone-dry passageways, so perfectly eroded over millions of years that they looked like subway tunnels. Not so in Carlsbad. Water lives and drips in the Big Room. It’s constantly in motion. Instead of smooth and steady, each turn in Carlsbad is chaos. There were those classic stalagtites.
And here were the dripstone pillars.
And there was something I’d never seen before. In low-lying areas along the trail, water levels fluctuate sometimes over the millennia. Mineral deposits at the edge of those ponds in the high-water periods lead to the development of little, narrow shelfs of rock that stick out over open air when the water recedes again. Lily pads, these are called.
After a while you get so overwhelmed looking at each individual thing that you have a couple of options. You can try to take pictures of everything. We all did a little of that. You can try to take the whole scene in. This is pretty overwhelming too, but I tried. Or… you can start coming up with silly names for each feature as you walk by. That was my favorite method of enjoying the trail. The Alien. Russian Nesting Dolls. The Football. Maybe my parents were amused, maybe not. I know I was amused.
There was one feature on the Big Room trail that my dad and I were excited to see. It was the so-called Bottomless Pit. In a cave full of huge proportions, what could a bottomless pit possibly even mean? Would it descend all the way to the core of the Earth? Alas, perhaps we oversold ourselves on the Bottomless Pit (a very Meister trait). It was just a pretty big hole that you could in fact see the bottom of. In a national park that astounded repeatedly, this was one of the only flops.
Near the end, I managed to take a picture that somehow came close to capturing the overwhelming scale of Carlsbad Caverns. It was from a spot on the trail that dipped, and then opened back up into sort of a broad swale. There were cave features everywhere, and this was by no means an aberration.
In a way I’m glad that as usual I have managed to procrastinate my blog posts from this trip. At the time, my mom asked me what my favorite cave was. My initial reaction was not unlike a parent who was asked what their favorite child was (I’m the favorite child, by the way). How could you possibly choose favorites between such unalike features and wonders? Mammoth Cave has an astounding length of passageways, Meramec Caverns has the flow of underground rivers you can walk along, Wind Cave has the bison right above it. But a month later, I can look back and confidently say that nothing quite astounds as much as Carlsbad Caverns, in a way that 20-year-old Nolan didn’t appreciate enough in 2018.
As disappointing as it was to realize, this was about the end of my weeklong trip with my parents. We took the elevator back up to ground level to the Visitor Center and had a lunch at the park cafe that could alternatively be described as “meh” and “heavenly” after several days of subsisting on prepackaged Wal-Mart meals. Then we headed back out into the blistering early-afternoon heat, got into my parents’ car, and started the several-hour drive across the Permian Basin to Midland.
I’ll save the over-arching review of the trip for the final post covering our day in White Sands National Park. In its place, you can get my review of the city of Midland (one of the worst places on Earth), the Midland Airport (meh), and Southwest’s new assigned seating system and boarding process (kill me). Good-bye with my parents was temporary since they would be heading back through Norman on the drive home in after spending two nights in Fort Worth. As much fun as life on the road can be, I was glad to be back home with Elizabeth and Scipio, where the weather had finally cooled off a little bit.
But still: nothing beats the cool, damp air you get inside of a cavern.
