I hate National Parks for all the right reasons, and I love National Parks for all the wrong reasons. I hate them because they’re overcrowded, super regulated, all paved; they take out all the adventure, leaving no room for figuring things out on your own. I LOVE National Parks because they are magnetic attractions for the masses of people that really shouldn’t be going into the woods on their own. Every person that’s in a National Park is one less person that we’ll meet while we’re out in the middle of nowhere. When we go outdoors, we want quiet, isolation, solitude, distance. Pretty much the last thing we want is to drive a really long time straight to a spot where we know there will be the maximum possible people packed into the tightest outdoors area possible—a National Park.
To be fair, the National Parks have grabbed up and protected some of the best of the best land in the United States. The tallest cliffs (Yosemite), the deepest canyon (Grand Canyon), the biggest trees (Sequoia/Redwood), even weird hot stinky alien-seeming pits that shoot water into the air (Yellowstone). Rightfully, our National Parks protect some truly world-class natural treasures, and I am glad that our government recognized the need to protect these places–protect them especially from the millions of people that overrun them every year.
Also, it is possible to get away from the hoards, inside the borders of a National Park, if one tries hard enough: If one chooses the least visited parts of the park, and gets all the right permits far enough ahead of time, and then fills out all the right paperwork and listens to all the necessary briefings, and then backpacks straight away from all the paved roads (which are the only kind of roads in NPs), then yes, absolutely, one can have a wilderness experience. But why work so hard to do that, when one can throw a dart at a map of the southwest and go somewhere without a single other person nearby? (Karen’s in the background retorting, “yeah, but there’s a reason no one wants to go those places”.) Granted, not every dart throw will turn up a good trip, but you get the idea.
We joined the hoards recently to visit Carlsbad Caverns. Carlsbad is extraordinary. It really is an amazing opportunity to go deep under the earth and see amazing caves, while staying completely safe—perfect with kids that you love and don’t want to disappear down a deadly hole. It’s almost like it was made for visitors with relatively limited fitness and short attention spans. Oh, wait, it was actually “made,” in the sense that tons of concrete have been poured down in that hole in order to create a 100% paved pathway, hacked out of the rock in places to make passages more comfortable. Thank goodness, though, because the more than 500,000 visitors that walk that path every year would have long ago worn it into an un-walkable groove otherwise.
I’m down on NP’s, but in this case it worked out really well. The boys were amazed by the experience, which was exactly what Karen and I were going for. The cave is enormous, and it breaks down nicely into two different portions: first is a 1.5 mile hike continuously downhill, starting from a large entrance in the desert (at the end of the paved path, underneath the concrete ampitheater of seats for bat-watching). Second is the “Big Room”, when at the bottom of the long descent, there’s another 1.5 miles of flat trail in a looping out-and-back figure-eight to experience the prettiest part of the cave. After the looping out-and-back, you finish up at the elevators that return you directly into the center of the visitor’s center (the elevator is 45 seconds, the boys timed it).
We spent the night at the Hyatt House in the town of Carlsbad (be forewarned the town of Carlsbad is a half-hour drive from the caverns). It was clean and perfectly fine. We checked three places to eat, all with a 30mins+ wait (CoVid regulations and it being New Years weekend), before settling on the Tokyo Steak House and it was… very surprisingly excellent. I didn’t have high hopes (Carlsbad is a pretty limited town) but, complete truth the appetizer calamari was the best I’ve ever had (large, plump, tender, perfectly cooked, crunchy on the outside, just amazing). And the rest of the food was tasty too, and the boys loved it (!?) so that was a lucky find. After the cavern experience, we stopped at YellowBrix for lunch and that was good, too. Cute place with a nice outdoor patio, kid-friendly menu, and decent beer.
In the end, we drove 6 hours each way to get to Carlsbad from Los Alamos, and spent a little less than four hours total experiencing the caves. But honestly, that four hours was just about perfect for the attention span of the boys. It’s best to get out at the right time, leaving them with good memories untarnished by fatigue and boredom. Besides, they liked the night in the hotel room as much as the cave, so… win?
Spending time in Carlsbad was, overall, a fantastic family experience, and it felt like the boys are at just the right age to get the most out of it. But once was enough. Neither Karen nor I feel any need to return anytime soon, maybe never. If the boys are interested in caving, there are plenty of real caves that aren’t pre-lit with thousands of lights (which actually made Carlsbad look really cool, admittedly). I guarantee that I can pick a cave in the middle of nowhere, some dark dirty hole that we can have entirely to ourselves—replete with adventure and, of course, commensurate danger. But isn’t that the point?
(Note from Karen: The trip to Carlsbad felt particularly relevant and timely with our current homeschooling topics. Last year, the kids loved reading the book Skunk and Badger about a rock-loving Badger and his friend Skunk. We just finished reading the second book “Egg Marks the Spot,” involving Badger’s search for an agate and their subsequently stumbling upon a spectacular cave. We used this book as inspiration for a visit to the Los Alamos Rock show (New Mexico geological society) over Christmas break and reading about various caves in a geography book. A trip to the caverns felt like the natural next step.)
