Stop 7- Carlsbad Caverns & White’s City, NM

January 30th- February 1st, 2020

2010 Census put White’s City at a population of 7. Yep. 7. But there are about a half a million visitors that pass by each year. Why? Well, it’s 7 miles from White’s City to Carlsbad Caverns and you have to pass right through White’s City to get there. Talk about a captive audience. Town was a little silly and our campground was nothing more than a parking lot backing onto the main road to the caverns, but the people were kind and so hospitable and allowed us to take over a booth to do homework. Besides, the kids had plenty of inspiration to have a good time.

  • A horse tushie
  • These were hilarious
  • Double straws and good water! We desperately miss Bend water.

White’s City was started in 1920 by entrepreneur, Jim White, as a commercial resort to capture the tourists on their way to Carlsbad Caverns. Jim was the one who discovered the Carlsbad Caverns in 1898. He was 16 and working as a ranch hand and one day saw what he thought was a bunch of black smoke coming out of the mountainside. Fire and cattle don’t mix, so he went into high alert. As he came up upon the ‘smoke’ he realized it was actually bats ascending from a cave. While others knew of the cave, he was the only one brave and curious enough to descend the 60 feet in and in turn, lead him to the discovery of Carlsbad Caverns. It’s clear he was rather unnerved by everything he saw, especially based on his excessive use of words like ‘Devils and Witch’s’ to name parts of the cave. Using nothing but his memory and landmarks, he was able to discover over 3 miles of the 30 miles of caves, visiting it hundreds of times and taking folks in with him to explore and document different sections over the years.

Izzy, Clark, Ben and I walked the Natural Entrance to the caves. The pictures below represent this pathway in order. There are A LOT of pictures, but after not being able to take pictures at Kartchner Caverns, I suppose I just felt the need to go overboard. I will say that Kartchner had much more vibrant colors- all the result of being a more active and living cave. The preservation efforts there are over the top, but they learned a lot from other caves like Carlsbad. Things like closing the cave off and having guests walk through three sets of temperature control air locks, keeping the cave moist, making guests walk through sprinklers so we don’t naturally dry out the cave, not putting the parking lot over the caves, not allowing photography, no lights, only guided tours, etc.

Pretty remarkable to drop further into the Earth than the Space Needle is tall. ~750 feet down.

We basically walked everything EXCEPT the lower cave, which we understand is only available as a guided and reserved tour. It took us about 3 hours.

  • Look for the long clear tube and the building above it. The building is the visitors center and the tube a 750 foot elevator
  • The bat flight observation area. They weren’t there this time of year, but will be back in the summer.
  • We had convinced Izzy to hike out with us, but upon trying to get back to the Natural Trail, we were hit with this barricade. We were too late in the day to hike out and the caves would close before we would surface. A happy Izzy got to take the elevator afterall!

We wanted to hike back out, but we got started too late in the day (thanks to over 5 hours of school work), so the hike out was closed. We took the elevator back out, ascending 750 feet in 1 minute, going 25 feet per second. Wild. ENJOY! We certainly did.

Leave a comment