First stop today was Carlsbad Caverns NP. Its a 7 mile drive up into the mountains from the flat, desert highway 180. The weather continues to be great; the wind has finally settled down! We felt lucky that we were visiting the caverns at a slow time of the year. You can yell from the way this facility is designed, they handle a LOT of people during the summer. The Visitor Center sits at about 5500 hundred feet; the elevator into the cavern goes down 850 feet in about 60 seconds.
You enter into the "Big Room". Even before you start your hike, you see rest rooms, gift shops and a snack bar! The self-guided walk takes you through the "Big Room"; its about 1 1/4 miles around just this one room! Its very dry, unlike most caves you tour which have water everywhere. The sheer size of this room is beyond description! In a word, Spectacular!
One can also take a number of different ranger-led tours through other areas of the cave, including a special evening tour to see the bats fly!
From the Caverns, we drove about 25 miles down the road to Guadalupe Mountains NP. Beautiful mountain scenery with some great hikes for the adventurous with a day to spare. An interesting feature of this place is that it had one of the last remaining ruins of the Butterfield Overland Mail Route. Butterfield, who was involved with Mssrs. Wells and Fargo, contracted with the US Gov't in 1857 to run a mail/passenger coach from St.Louis to San Francisco in 25 days. They made that run for just 11 months; they had to give it up when the Civil War came too close.
Then we headed back out into the desert and on to El Paso and then north to Alamagordo. Except for the mountains in the distance, its not pretty - sand, cactus and litter.
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| Ever have coffee in a cave? |
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| Great road for a speeding VW! |
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| Finally, lunch outside with no wind! |
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| Capitan - Guadalupe's feature |
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