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Start at 1. Walnut Canyon picnic area

Start while parked. Narration waits until you arrive at each stop.

Free audio tour2 stories

Carlsbad Caverns entrance road, New Mexico

The seven-mile park road every visitor takes, from the gate at Whites City up through Walnut Canyon to the visitor center. A fossil reef and the lagoon behind it, agave roasting pits, a guano bucket, a cowboy nobody believed, and the bats.

10 min of audio · 7 miles · Read the transcript

Your route

N ↑12

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    Getting started

    1. Start in the right placeThis tour begins at Walnut Canyon picnic area. Start while parked; the first story plays when you arrive.
    2. Let's hear itSelect this phone as the car's Bluetooth audio source and set a comfortable volume. Download the tour while you still have signal.
    3. Stories meet you thereYour phone's location starts each story automatically. Music flows straight into the narration. Keep this page open; it keeps the screen awake for GPS.
    4. You're ready to explorePress Start in Whites City as you turn off US 62/180 onto the park road (Carlsbad Cavern Highway, NM 7); the welcome plays on the way up Walnut Canyon. The paved road is the only way in; the park, roads included, is closed on Thanksgiving, December 25 and January 1. Entrance is $15 per person 16 and over, paid at the visitor center, and entering the cavern needs a timed-entry reservation from Recreation.gov ($1, strongly recommended). The separate gravel Walnut Canyon Desert Drive loop has been closed since the 2022 flood and is not part of this tour.

    Drive it in a Tesla

    Connect your Tesla account, then approve Plantrip in the Tesla app. Start sends the whole tour to the car's navigation while you're parked; narration plays from this phone through the car.

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    Facts from Carlsbad Caverns National Park (NPS) pages, park brochure, chronology and fact sheet; geology from the New Mexico Bureau of Geology Walnut Canyon road log (Peter Scholle); history from New Mexico Magazine. Music: Mussorgsky, Pictures at an Exhibition, Catacombae (Sepulcrum romanum), Musopen recording (public domain, via Wikimedia Commons). Narration is AI-generated. Not an official National Park Service product.