Jason and I have both wanted to visit Carlsbad Caverns but they were always too far away from Washington to drive to visit, but now that we live in Arkansas it was an easy day and a few hour drive! We arrived right when they opened on a super cold, windy, rainy day and had the whole place mostly to ourselves, which was magical! We didn’t have a lot of spare time to really just amble around because the snowstorm was now slated to hit Carlsbad, NM with a sheet of ice but we were able to see most of the cave and enjoy it!

We did a mile hike down into the cave but the way back to the surface is a high speed elevator! Once back to the car we needed to get out of the mountains quickly because the storm was moving towards us otherwise we would have loved to explore Guadaloupe Mountains National Park as well.  The mountain range looked like a stunningly beautiful area and I would have loved to get a hike or 2 in! Unfortunately, we only got a thick layer of fog before heading towards lower elevations.

Since we had to change our plans and couldn’t stay in Carlsbad anymore, we set our sights on Tucson since it would have a lot of indoor activities since Saturday was set to be rainy pretty much everywhere but we also didn’t want to add like 3 more hours to our total drive.  We ended up in Las Cruces, NM instead!