Carlsbad Cavern Left Hand Tunnel Tour

April 25, 2008
Up with the sun and off to Carlbad Caverns once again. Left Hand Tunnel Tour is a lantern-lit guided adventure on unpaved trails. We saw formations; cave pools and Permian Age fossils. Our Rangers, Barry and Mark, beelined us to the end of the tour with just our lanterns lighting the way. Seeing the shadows cast from the formations had their own beauty. On the way back we used our flashlights and lanterns, stopped to see every nook and cranny, explore formations and learned history of the cavern.

It all began about 250 million years ago with the creation of a long reef in an inland sea formed from the remains of sponges, algae and seashells mixed with the calcite from the water. The sea evaporated and the reef was buried under salts and gypsum. Just a few million years ago erosion and uplift uncovered this buried reef. Then drops of water seeped downward through cracks and at the same time hydrogen sulfide rich water migrated its way upward from vast oil and gas fields. These two waters mixed forming sulfuric acid that dissolved the limestone and that is what opened faults and fractures into the large chambers. The decoration with stalactites, soda straws, draperies, flowstone, columns, cave pools, cave pearls, popcorn, helictites, aragonite crystals, rimstone dams and stalagmites and began over five hundred thousand years ago. It happened slowly drip-by-drip and is still forming today.

Jim White, a cowboy of 16, fence builder by trade, discovered the cave and stayed throughout the next seventy-six years of his life. Story goes he was out one night and saw black in the sky, rode his horse out to investigate. He watched as millions of bats came out of the hole in the ground. He went home and built himself a seventy-five foot fence and brought it back the next day and climbed down into the hole.

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