New Mexico Adventure November 4-11, 2006

Guadalupe Mountains, Carlsbad Caverns, Roswell, White Sands National Monument, Valley of Fire Nat'l Monument, Albuquerque, Santa Fe, NM

We left Austin around 11.30 and hit the road. Stayed overnight in Fort Stockton, Texas and then headed to Guadalupe Mountains in the morning where we planned to camp. We arrived around 2.30 Mountain time. We’ve entered a new time zone! Which makes it more difficult to get a hold of people at home, we are discovering. The drive from Austin was the definition of a beautiful Sunday drive (minus the slow crawling)! We saw ranches, mountains and a lot of desert life. It was gorgeous, we stopped a couple of times to take pictures, but they really don’t do it justice. For most of the drive we were the only car on the road. Josh said the nearest town was 100 miles in either direction. Wow! There is so much undeveloped land here out West.

We stopped in the town of Van Horn for lunch and had the most authentic and best Mexican food I’ve ever eaten! The salsa was SO HOT and I’m sure the owner was laughing at how much water I had to drink to soothe my tongue. It was very tasty though! The best part was that 2 lunches cost $8 total.

We were greeted by the largest mountain in Texas, Guadalupe Peak upon on entrance to Guadalupe National Park. We stopped in to the visitors center and then took our car to where we would camp. We had an unbelievable view, and our tent site was great! It was $8 to camp but the site was worth it. Guadalupe gets our vote for the best camping accommodations for your dollar so far on this trip. There were real bathrooms and water. No showers, but we don’t care! ;)

We didn’t get there early enough to hike on one of Guadalupe’s 80 miles of trail, but hopefully next visit we could hike and camp in the backcountry. There are caves and canyons to explore in addition to the desert hiking. We spent the rest of the afternoon looking at our guidebook and relaxing. Made some dinner and went to bed around 9 p.m. It was a full moon that night so there was a little bit of light outside our tent to cast on the amazing mountain above us. Though, as I read more about Guadalupe Mountains I found out that the peak in front of us was actually coral. When the water from the sea that used to cover a lot of the southwest washed away, you’re left with a coral mountain.

Next time we’re at Guadalupe it would be cool to hike out to the backcountry and spend more time there.

The next morning we woke up early and headed to Carlsbad Caverns. Carlsbad Caverns is the world’s deepest limestone cave. I’ve never been in a cave so this was really exciting! Carlsbad is really a “cave of wonders.” Every turn we took in our visit exposed new interesting rock formations. Some of the geological explanations were a little above my head but my smartie companion is used to explaining things to me. If you want to learn more about how the limestone cave was created by sulfuric acid, go here http://www.nps.gov/arch/. 100s of thousands of free tailed bats call the Cavern its home, and the cavern has a developed amphitheater where you can see the bats leaving at night for their feeding.

The pictures we took at Carlsbad don’t do the natural beauty justice. We’ll have to rely on memory and postcards to keep the true amazing beauty of the caverns alive.

If you stand in a place in the cavern where not many people are around you, you hear nothing except the periodic drip of rainfall. Utter silence. It’s very calming. The developed path had lights, but if those lights were not there, you could not see your hand in front of you.

There are a few small pools of water in the Cavern, and it really angered me to see that signs were posted to not throw coins in the water. AHHHHHHHHHHH. It’s upsetting to think that one of the world’s natural wonders that is available for people to see is destroyed by people throwing coins and touching the caverns.

I think Carlsbad is going to be one of my favorite places we saw on this trip. It has been unlike anything else I’ve seen in my life. We'd really like to come back again in the future to check out more parts of the cavern and take a guided tour to the "unpopular" parts of the cavern.

I’m inspired to take up splelunking after our visit to Carlsbad!

We left Carlsbad and headed to Roswell, NM, the site of the alleged government cover up in the 1940s when aliens landed on earth (must have taken a wrong turn). We visited the UFO Museum in downtown Roswell and there was definitely some convincing evidence that the supposed alien spacecraft did crash in the desert. The museum was a very bare bones exhibition, sort of looked like a group of 8^th graders put it together, which made it more amusing. The town definitely plays to the alien connection – alien heads, pens, pencils, magnets, alien dolls, you name, it, you can buy it. This stop was more for my mother than us. She is obsessed with ghosts, aliens, etcetc, and so I took her along with us. Overall, Roswell is just another little town.

A huge thanks to our friend Jeff Lupardo for encouraging us to visit White Sands National Monument. These great wave-like dunes of gypsum (which we also learned about at Carlsbad) have swallowed up 275 square miles of desert, creating the world’s largest gypsum dune field. The white sand is blinding and the dune fields are like a big sandbox, and Josh and I acted accordingly.

On our way to Albuquerque we stopped by the Valley of Fires National Monument.

http://www.geo.utep.edu/loca/Volcanos/VALLEY.HTML

Santa Fe - November 10, 2006

More later....I'm pooped!