Travel Haiku - Carlsbad Caverns (New Mexico) Poem
By John Tiong Chunghoo
Carlsbad Caverns
a jigsaw puzzle every inch
of the way
Carlsbad Caverns
the nook and corner of times
for adventure
Carlsbad Caverns
we enter a world beyond
the dinosaurs
The 30-mile-long Carlsbad Caverns, designated a World Heritage site in 1995, lies under the Guadalupe Mountains and is one of the most extensive underground cave systems in the world. A Permian-age fossil reef, it contains plant and animal fossils from a time before the dinosaurs when the southeastern corner of New Mexico was a coastline similar to the Florida Keys. Tours range from self-guided, easy walking tours through the Big Room (a massive 25 stories high and a third of a mile wide) to caving trips that require you to crawl through small rock formations and scale ten-foot walls.
