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Carlsbad Caverns New Mexico
Carlsbad Caverns is absolutely unique, incredible national
park of 23+ miles of underground caves, many literally thousands of feet below the surface of
the Earth
and you can walk it all. 56 degree continuous temperature means
a jacket for some. Caves are the size of a football field, formations 100 feet
high, and each evening hundreds of people sit in a giant amphitheater and watch
600,000 Mexican Free Tailed bats fly out of the mouth of the cave and off into
the sky. Each bat eats over 300 insects an hour each, flys up to 23 miles away,
and returns each morning in a second swarm to enter the cave. You can watch this
also if you awaken early enough. For those of you who think that everything has
already been discovered on this Earth and there is nothing new to find: note -
These caverns were discovered and brought to the worlds attention by a 16 year
old boy who refused to ignore the "black cloud" he saw every evening.
This same black cloud the Indians had seen and stayed away from. This same black
cloud hundreds of people throughout the region had stayed away from due to the
devastatingly remote, deadly, high desert conditions. This same cloud that was
finally discovered to be over 6 million bats. When they finally began mining the
cave for "guano", bat manure, to be used for fertilizer, they found
it 40 feet deep.





These caves were a lot of fun walking through; great escape from the heat. The bats coming out of their cave in the evening was spectacular. The part of the cave where you tour and the part where the bats live are separate. We didn't see any bats other than when they leave the cave at night. Don't miss Carlsbad Caverns, New Mexico. Travel info - Map location of Carlsbad Caverns, New Mexico - Carlsbad Caverns.
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