Framedlight

 We reached the visitor centre at Carlsbad Caverns around 11.00 o'clock and we were excited to get down the elevator (or lift!) and view the caves. In deference to our infective state we wore masks, although, fortunately, there were not that many visitors when we were there.  We have 'done' lots of caves and some of them can be very tacky. But Carlsbad Caverns was what you might expect from the US National Park Service, and in the best of all possible taste. They were lit with warm, quite dim lamps. Those formations that were named had been given their names by a teenage boy, Jim White, who first explored the caves in 1898. There are drawings in the caverns from early native people but no one else seem to have used the caves until they were mined for bat guano in the 1800's. That was from a cave exit which is still home to thousands of bats. Not the way we went in!. The Guadaloupe Mountains lie across the Texas/ New Mexico border and were formed from deposits of sponges