Gloria was up before the sun this morning to head out on her hike. As I write this I regret having not gone with her. She speaks of an easy walk through some amazing, open topology to watch the sun rise in the desert mountains. This is all she could come back with:
I almost sent her back to the mountain to make it right. But I let it go, we packed our stuff and we were off through the park and on to our next destination.
The drive north is pretty and quiet in mostly flat land littered with some very tall mountains. The road is noisy as hell as it’s partly made of this rocky asphalt as you can see in the photo below. I don’t know what else they make the roads out of down there but they are wicked loud. I had my noise canceling headsets in my ears a lot of this trip.
As we came up from the park we ran into the border guards checking to make sure people traveling the road are US citizens. They are on all the roads north of the border there. They asked a simple question of citizenship without checking any ID. Then we asked for restaurant recommendations anywhere near Alpine. They had a bunch of idea.
We ended up eating a very late lunch at the Reata Restaurant where the food was fine but I really don’t think the young wait staff was interested in us being there.
As we went further north it was very clear that the new oil pipeline from Canada is creating not just traffic but oil industry jobs all up and down Texas and New Mexico. Through Pecos, in particular, the traffic was very thick from then on out. This was the only time that the traffic on the back roads was so full that we could not get around it.
We took a “back road” from NM route 285 over to the “National Parks Highway” and on into the Carlsbad Caverns National Park.
It was our intention in the park to see the bats leave their cave around 8pm but we got there so early that we decided to go through the caverns. It was about 5pm when we arrived. We were literally the last people to go into the caverns. I could see that if there were a ton of people in the cavern it would make that experience totally different. Only 2 elevators that hold maybe 10 people each. They said here could be an hour wait to go both up and down.
We rented those little teleprompter devices that you can punch in a number and get a self-guided tour of the caverns. They are absolutely enormous and it takes over an hour to go through them. I only took this one picture towards the end of the tour. It was with my iPhone which has the poorest optics of all of my cameras. But it’s what I had.
The caverns are not that pretty but the hole in the ground is massive and expansive at over 30 miles long. If you have seen a stalagmite in one cave you’ve seen them in this one. But the main room is something like 14 acres so it’s quite large. We only saw a fraction of the cave system while we were there.
After the cavern we tried to see the bats but a massive thunderstorm arrived at the same time as the bats were going to leave. They didn’t want to leave in the rain any more than we wanted to stand in the same. We did not get to experience them. We’ll have to come back.
Although we have no real “plan” things have worked out well for this trip. We have had no problems getting hotel accommodations, finding places to dine, grocery stores and food to eat otherwise. It’s been an easy and relaxing time so far (ignoring the poison ivy, of course).
We left the national park and head north to Artesia where we spent the night. Like most every other night, Gloria is asleep first and I fight it to the end.