January 24, 2005 - Carlsbad Caverns, New Mexico

Due to being awake occasionally during the night, I slept in a bit and that turned out to put us in a time crunch to get to Carlsbad Caverns by 9 o'clock for the tour we wanted. We rushed breakfast but Monika insisted we wash the dishes before we left, and that consumed some valuable minutes. I hurtled across Texas at a legal 75 mph and into New Mexico well above their legal 55 mph, which put us back on schedule. The drive inside the park was a slow, winding road up a valley and out onto the plateau above, and that slowed us up again. To save a couple minutes, I dropped Monika off at the door and drove around to find a parking space. When I ran into the Visitor Center, Monika was the next person in line to purchase tickets and got them with about 1 minute to spare, which gave us barely time for a bathroom break before we took elevators 750 feet down into the caverns where we started our tour.

The tour we took that morning was called the left-hand tunnel tour because we were exploring a secondary passage to the left of the Big Room (more about that later). Part of the charm of our tour was using candle lanterns to light our way rather than any electric lighting. That tunnel not only had no lighting, but it also had no paved walkway. Instead, a pathway across the dirt and debris was marked by orange colored tape on each side. Since the pathway was dirt, it was uneven and when wet it occasionally became slippery. Keeping our footing was a challenge as the light cast by the candle lanterns was pretty dim, (about 1 candlepower-Hah!) and did not illuminate the uneven surface very well.

But despite the challenge of the walking, we enjoyed the morning tour tremendously. The scenery was quite superb and seeing it without electric lighting made us feel that we were seeing it more the way the original explorers might have seen it. We saw some combination of stalagmites, stalactites, columns, curtains, cave popcorn, and soda straws, in pretty much every chamber. We occasional came upon a pool of very still water, so still in fact that I couldn't really see very well where the surface was and at first mistook it for a dry hole.

After the tour we had a chance to look at a map of the cavern complex, which is very extensive, and decide what else we wanted to do. I tried to sell one of the "crawl on hands and knees through mud and constricted places" tours to Monika, but in the end we opted for another normal tour of the King's Room at 2 p.m. In the meantime, we decided to walk over to the original entrance of the cavern and down a twisting trail past the Big Room where we could have lunch at the small lunch counter in the caverns.

The entrance to Carlsbad Caverns is really, really big, and the path down just snakes back and forth down into the progressively darker depths. After you get down a couple of hundred feet into the really black section of the cavern, the Park Service has installed electric lights so you don't need a flashlight, and you start encountering the amazing formations of the lower cavern. The walkway was paved, lined with rocks, and had stainless steel pipe railings at pretty much every curve or drop off, so it was about as safe as they could make it and was, for us, a Cadillac type of trail.

The nice part about walking down from the natural entrance is that we could relax, stroll along, and take as much time taking pictures as we wanted. We met one Park Ranger on the trail and we were passed by 3 teenage girls and 1 Canadian with a camera, but otherwise we were completely alone on the trail for an hour and a half. It's one of the few times I've ever been alone in a big old cave and allowed to take all the pictures I wanted, so Monika and I both had a blast.

Another Ranger at the bottom of the entrance trail welcomed us and directed us to the lunchroom, where we each had a ham and cheese submarine sandwich with a bag of chips and Oreo cookies for desert for $5. The lunchroom is set up to accommodate a couple of hundred folks, and it was about as spooky to sit by ourselves in this lunchroom and eat as it was to be walking in the cave, where we at least expected to be alone. We kind of bolted our food because we both wanted to get back to see the Big Room, and after lunch we immediately hurried back on the path to it.

The Big Room is just huge and quite hard to describe. It is, I think I read, 16 acres in extent and maybe 100 feet or more from top to bottom in the middle. Compared to your average, garden-variety cave, that is orders of magnitude larger. I had kind of expected a big chamber of some kind, as Carlsbad Caverns is famous as a big cavern, but really had not expected anything that enormous. The Big Room was also cluttered here, there, and everywhere with the variety of formations similar to what we had seen on our morning tour, but many of them were absolutely huge in size.

We had to cut short our circuit of the Big Room to get back for our 2 p.m. Ranger led tour, but we hoped we'd have time to return to it before closing time. Our afternoon tour was a section of trail through several big chambers to one side of the Big Room. I remember going through a King's chamber, a Queen's chamber, and then a couple of others, and the formations were once again just spectacular. Some of the curtain type formations, in particular, were larger than we saw anywhere else in the caverns. One formation reminded me of the wings of an angel, but the wings were at least 40 feet tall and very thin-I just couldn't see how that much stone that thin could even hold itself up, but there it was.

Some of the formations had formal names, like "the bashful elephants" or "the lion's tail". Usually you could kind of see the resemblance-the bashful elephants, for example, looked like two elephants seen from their posterior side and the lion's tail had a bushy end on id rather like the tail of a lion. Some formations did not have formal names but surely resembled something distinctive to our eyes, at least. Monika thought one stone formation looked like a bird feeding a baby chick and after looking at it I had to agree with her.

Toward the end of the afternoon tour we saw the Green Pool, which was, in fact, green. The Ranger mentioned that the water levels in the pools were recovering a bit from a decrease in the last decade, possibly due to 24 inches of rain in the last year. We also saw a kind of lacy bridge of stone between two large stalactites that just hung suspended in the air. Even the Ranger had no good idea how that one had formed, although he told us that all of the stalactites were started from the basic soda straw formations.

Since we were able to sit several times on the afternoon tour, after it ended we felt rested enough to once again tackle the Big Room. This time we made the complete circuit, trying to take pictures of all the new things plus any of the ones we had taken before but weren't really sure of.

We finally limped back to the elevators and took them back to the surface shortly before the caverns closed for the day at 4:45. Then we crawled back into the truck-it had, after all, been 7 hours of walking with only a few rests-and drove back to the Guadalupe Mountains and our campground.

The wind was cold and quite gusty when we arrived back at camp, and the winds progressively strengthened during the night until it was howling and shoving the trailer around by midnight. It was, apparently, the passage of a strong front, but a dry one as there were no clouds or precipitation. The wind blew so strongly that the stove vent, although fastened down, made a "flrrrrpppp" sound as if some giant was giving us a super-sized raspberry. That by itself would not have been so bad, after all, I can easily ignore raspberries given by imaginary giants, but the trailer was also being jolted as if a giant was playfully cuffing or pawing us around. The jolting was considerably more disturbing than the howling and frrrrping. To paraphrase the old saying, "Cuffs and jolts may break my bolts, but frrrrrps will never hurt me!" As a result, I was discomfited and Monika was downright alarmed, neither of which was conducive to getting a good night's sleep.

Monika was alarmed partly, in retrospect, because of those pesky wartime bombing memories where big booms and shaking walls meant dire consequences to both the buildings and the people inside them. She learned very early that you couldn't just ignore those events and turn over to go back to sleep. Old traumas aside, it is also possible that she just didn't like the earthquake-like feeling of having your house move around underneath you.

I suppose I could have been alarmed, but I have not had traumatic experiences with being bombed or enduring really severe earthquakes. I figured that the design factors for the construction of the trailer would be able to at least withstand towing speeds of up to 70 mph, and therefore the structural integrity of the basic box was not in question. The possibility of being blown over to leeward still remained, but the gusts never actually picked the windward side of the trailer up off the stabilizers, so I figured that wasn't a real danger either. Besides, even if it did happen it would be like a "knockdown" on a sailboat during a storm-we would just be tumbled over onto the lee side of our cabin; disturbing and certainly bad for the resale value of the trailer, but not dangerous. Those reassuring thoughts left me with the simply unpleasant feeling of being in a small airplane in severe turbulence, which can be excruciatingly uncomfortable but not dangerous as long as the designed g-factors are not exceeded (and the seatbelt holds!). Of course it was, to be sure, a passing strange event to experience aircraft turbulence phenomena in our portable house and it made relaxing enough to go back to sleep difficult.

Nothing on this scale of buffeting to the trailer had ever happened to us before, so I knew the winds were unusually strong, gusting somewhere over 50 mph. A Ranger later informed us that the wind gusts in the Guadalupe Pass where we were camped had peaked that night at around 70 miles per hour! Fortunately we were cocked slightly headfirst into the wind and a medium sized RV was parked right next to us, both of which reduced the direct impact of the wind. Even so, the shuddering of the trailer as each blast of wind hit it kept us both awake for long periods during the night, so we were pretty groggy in the morning