We saw two adjacent National Parks on Saturday. Both are in the Guadalupe Mountain Range with one in Texas and one in New Mexico. We got to the Guadalupe Mountains National Park in Texas in the morning and viewed its impressive El Capitan peak (seen in picture), long used as a landmark by the Butterfield Overland Mail Stagecoach line. 
Guadalupe Mountains National Park also has the highest mountain in Texas, Guadalupe Peak, at 8,749’. In reality, this area is kind of equivalent to calling the entire Sierra Nevada Mountain range a National Park. It was impressive to see the big peaks, but after our time in Big Bend, we were ready to drive on instead of hike.
During the afternoon, we continued another forty miles to Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico and bought tickets to take the tour of the giant subterranean chambers and cave formations. This walking tour lasted over an hour and took us 1.25 miles on paved paths through the caverns. This system has the largest known limestone chamber in the Western Hemisphere at 600,000 square feet (the size of fourteen football fields).
At 5:30 PM, still at Carlsbad Caverns, we found a seat in the amphitheater near the mouth of the cave to watch ‘The Bat Flight’.
Here, hundreds of thousands of Brazilian free-tailed bats fly out of their bat cave (which is 200 feet below the surface) each evening from early spring through October. We were fortunate because their migration south had not yet happened in total. It was impressive to see clouds of bats fly out of the cave, circling around the opening of the cave, then darting-off in groups for a night of feasting on insects, and especially moths. Taking photographs during the bat flight wasn’t permitted, and the photo is of the entrance to their cave prior to their flight.
It was a great day and a wonderful drive. Our National Park count for these two parks brings us to #40 and #41 out of 59 total National Parks to see.