Holy Bat Cave

Carlsbad Caverns National Park, at the edge of New Mexico's border with Texas, is the summer home of a colony of Mexican free-tailed bats.

Our first attempt to see the bats take off from the cavern on their nightly flight ended in disappointment.

The boys were getting restless after sitting for an hour, through a ranger presentation and then a long wait for the bats to emerge. So we cut our losses and left.

Usually, to keep the boys from being boys (and to stop people whispering to each other about our terrible parenting), we whip out the iPads (which actually gets people talking about our terrible parenting, but for completely different reasons).

Unfortunately though, the bats are affected by electronic devices and so we had switched everything off (including the camera) on entering the bat flight observation area.

This is what the bats look like when they're roosting.
This image is from the NPS brochure -
you aren't allowed to use cameras near the bats.

The next night, after a day spent exploring deep inside the cavern below, we skipped the ranger presentation and were just getting to the jumping beans stage when the bats (thankfully) decided to emerge.

Seeing those hundreds of thousands of bats circling upwards and outwards in swarms across the twilight sky was an unparalleled experience for all of us. (Sorry we don't have pictures to share with you!)

They looked like a flock of little swallows, with their bodies the size of an adult thumb and their wings the size of a pair of hands.

A bit of the warm stinky air from their guano-rich cave wafted up on their wings. Apparently the guano (bat poo) in their cave is metres and metres deep.

Our day-time exploration of Carlsbad saw us hiking from the Natural Entrance deep down through the mouth and into the enormous caverns below.

As the last bit of natural light dissipated behind us the trail continued down and down, through limestone formations with names like 'Devil's Spring' and 'Witches Finger'.

With a kids-oriented audio guide to help us, we admired stalactites and stalagmites and columns and draperies and popcorn and soda straws and all of the amazing formations in this labyrinth of limestone.

Continuing on to the 'Big Room' loop walk, now at almost 800 feet below the surface, we came to the highlight of the self-guided rooms.

There are still further rooms you can view on ranger-guided tours, but they don't allow children as young as ours.

The word 'room' is a massive misnomer for these caverns.

The 'Big Room' alone is 8.2 acres.

After walking for almost four kilometres, we thought the boys deserved to catch the elevator from the rest area straight up to the Visitors Centre, instead of forcing them to walk all the way back out of the cave. How civilised!

I'm sure there's a strong lure for visitors to avoid the descent via the Natural Route altogether and to simply catch the elevator up and down.

But for me there was magic in the transition from strongly-lit day to dark netherworld below and I think it helped the kids to better understand the creation of the caves and their formations and the drip, drip, drip continuing today.