Chapter 36 – Carlsbad Caverns to Abuquerque
April 25, 1999
4/2/99 The trip from Big Bend National Park to Fort Davis Texas was relatively short, but was slowed by a stop for propane and then a long grocery store visit to re-stock after over two weeks of nothing but tiny "convenience" stores. As we drove North, the bare earth, scattered creosote bush, and cacti of Big Bend gradually changed to grassland – due to higher elevation and more moisture as we climbed almost imperceptibly toward the great bulge of the Rocky Mountains.
Our destination was Fort Davis State Park, but we found that we could stay there only Thursday night and that Friday was booked full – apparently for the Easter weekend. So we went a couple of miles further up the road and stayed at Prude Guest Ranch – a destination resort/dude ranch with many cabins, a modest number of RV sites, and a large variety of activities for guests. It is in some ways similar to Stillwell Ranch where we stayed at Big Bend. Both have been in the same family since the late 1800's. Both had a strong long-lived matriarch who was the major influence for 50 years or so. We didn't make use of any of the facilities or activities, but enjoyed the quirky atmosphere of the place. Being close to McDonald Observatory, the night-time lighting is restricted. The street lights are hooded and relatively low power. And this resort caters to amateur astronomers: each street light has a switch on the pole, allowing it to be turned off when it interferes with star watching. On a small hill just behind our trailer, a large, permanent, equatorial telescope mount was installed on a concrete pad.
Interesting sign at the corral: "Under Texas law, Equine Professionals are not liable for the injury or death of participants in equine activities due to the risks inherent in equine activities".
We spent parts of two days at the McDonald Observatory, browsing the exhibits in the Visitor Center, and doing self-guided tours. On one morning, Dave watched live images from a solar telescope and listened to a solar talk by a very knowledgeable staff member. Lots of interesting solar prominences and "sunspots" were currently visible. We were also shown an impressive series of stored images from a major solar flare a few days ago – these events only last a few minutes, so seeing one live is fairly unlikely.
The 437-inch telescope, the world's largest, is awesome. Like the other "new generation" telescope – the Keck in Hawaii - the main mirror is made up of many independently-steerable mirror segments, which are kept aligned with electronic servo systems. Now if it only worked … (apparently, they are having problems with thermally-induced temperature changes in the mirror mounts, which the servos aren't adequately tracking.)
We had planned our schedule to be there on a Friday night to attend their "star party", where they have many modest-sized telescopes set up, with expert staff members present to interpret. Unfortunately, this turned out to be the day of the wind storm – with winds fairly continuously in the 50 mph range and gusts over 70 mph. All day, while we leisurely drove a scenic route through the Davis Mountains, we watched huge clouds of dust blowing through the desert valley below. The wind died down at dusk, but after dark, it became obvious that the atmosphere was still very hazy. We went up the mountain to the observatory, only to be told that they weren't willing to expose their telescopes to all that dust and were canceling the event.
4/3 We woke to more wind, and a forecast that it would continue, and it appeared that there was no point in going back to the observatory for a Saturday night repeat of the event. So we packed up and were on the road by 10 A.M. Our route passed through yet more grasslands, interrupted by a couple of "oases" of irrigated green farmland and a few large junky regions of numerous, mostly abandoned and capped, oil wells. For a while, we drove across almost perfectly flat prairie, with an uninterrupted flat horizon in all directions. Later, the Capitan Mountains began to appear in the North and West.
We pulled into White's City RV Park, at the entrance to Carlsbad Caverns, New Mexico, in early afternoon, quickly registered and set up the trailer, and headed up to the Visitor's Center to get literature and schedules.
4/5 The wind has continued to howl, for several days now. Gusts over 70 mph have been reported all over the region. For the first time, we're glad that we are in a campground without trees – there's nothing to fall on us. Everything in the trailer feels gritty – there's no way to keep the wind-driven dust out.
Yesterday, Helen and Dave both took the King's Palace guided tour in the Caverns. We took the elevator the 750 feet from the Visitor's Center down to the below-ground reception area (complete with restaurant and gift shops) where the tours start. It's the typical Carlsbad tour, along smooth paved paths, often with stainless steel handrails, through a series of rooms and passageways with artfully placed indirect lighting to dramatize the spectacular cave formations. We were told that a number of years ago, a famous theater lighting designer took a tour of the caverns and scoffed at their amateurish lighting. They called his bluff and gave him a contract to completely redo the lighting. Perhaps an apocryphal story, but the current lighting is indeed very well done.
Today, Helen stayed at the trailer, organizing and labeling the past several weeks of photographs, while Dave Took the Lower Cave tour. This trip was very different than the previous one. The tour group was small (11 people and two rangers). We were all issued hardhats with built-in headlamps (I had been told to bring my own batteries, when I made the reservations for this tour). We took the elevator down to the main visitor area, and began by walking the normal self-guided tour route (but backwards from the end). Soon after entering the first large room, the ranger stopped and unlocked a little gate in the handrail along the trail, attached a rope to an inconspicuous anchor, and led us down a steep, slippery flowstone slope into a hole in the floor. We each walked backward down the slope, hand over hand along the rope, and found ourselves crowded onto a little ledge, and at the head of an old steel ladder which disappeared down into the gloom.
One by one, we backed down the ladder - about 50 feet of it in total, but divided into several sections interrupted by rock ledges. Along the way, we were getting short lectures on caving techniques, and were soon yelling "on ladder" and "off ladder" as we made each transition, just like real cavers. Once we were all down the rope and ladders (which took a while), we headed down a narrow, twisting passageway which opened into the first of many large rooms. As soon as we were around the first couple of corners, we were in total darkness, except for our own headlamps. The trail was marked by narrow strips of red plastic flagging tape on the floor, and was generally a completely un-modified path along the native cave floor. We clambered over slippery flowstone, along narrow tilted ledges beside shallow drip ponds, squeezed between stalagmites, squished through mud, crossed a drip pond on barely-visible stepping stones, duckwalked under low-hanging calcite curtains – all the while trying to avoid touching the fragile cave formations that we were squeezing past.
The floor and nearby walls were visibly damaged along our path – thin calcite floor surfaces broken underfoot, delicate "cave popcorn" crushed along the walls where someone had brushed against it, white calcite stalagmites discolored with skin oils. But most of this damage was done by the early explorers, in the 1920's, well before the cave became a National Park, and present-day tours stay on these already-damaged routes.
Less than an arm's length off the path, the surfaces were still pristine. We saw thousands of "cave pearls" in the drip ponds. These are typically 1/4" in diameter, and appear perfectly smooth and spherical, made of translucent calcite. The speculation is that they are formed by drops of water splashing into a shallow drip pond. A grain of sand becomes coated with calcite which precipitates out of the water, and the force of the falling droplets rolls the grain around randomly, allowing it to become spherical. Cave popcorn may also be formed by splashes, but on surfaces surrounding a drip pool well above the water surfaces. The popcorn can be incredibly fragile and beautiful – varying in texture from fairly firm and rounded – actually looking like piles of popcorn – to a delicate lacework which can be collapsed by a strong breeze.
Some of the Lower Cave is directly below the Big Room, and at two places along our route, the high arching ceiling of a room in the lower cave connected with the big room above. In these areas, lights had been placed in the lower cave to make the depth and the spectacular formations of the Lower Cave visible from the normal tourist route above. I felt like I was backstage in a theater set – with lights and power cables seemingly scattered haphazardly on the floor – out of the direct view of the audience above but in full view of us. Our headlamps, bobbing along in the gloom far below, appearing and disappearing as we walked behind boulders and stalagmites, must have been an interesting sight for the people in the caves above.
Occasional artifacts from early explorations had been left where they were found – survey markers, the remains of a magnesium flare, a rickety wood ladder. We also saw the remains of a bat which had died hundreds of years ago on top of a small stalagmite, and is now encased in several inches of almost transparent calcite.
At one point, our route led through a narrow crack about 100 yards long – so narrow that I occasionally had to turn sideways to fit my shoulders through, simultaneously ducking under ceiling protrusions. At another point, we came out into a room that was so big our lights didn't illuminate the other side. The ceiling must have been over 100 feet up. Dark, inviting, passages led off in all directions, just begging to be explored. Almost the entire ceiling and walls were decorated – with draperies, forests of soda straws, gigantic stalactites and stalagmites, etc. The "soda straws" are hollow calcite tubes, typically 1/4" in diameter and sometimes up to several feet long – incredibly fragile.
The tour lasted 3 1/2 hours. It's not physically demanding, but it helps to be agile. I heartily recommend this tour to anyone except the claustrophobic. It is one of several guided trips through undeveloped portions of the main cave, or of separate nearby caverns in the National Park.
4/6 Dave is spending many hours processing a huge batch of mail that was waiting for us at the RV Park when we arrived.
4/12 We've been lazy, and there's relatively little to say about the past week. We did manage to meet some Internet friends. Rick and Lori Randall showed up in time for us to have dinner with them, and then to hike the Natural Entrance and Big Room portions of the Caverns together. A few days later, Judie Ashford and Gary Villere appeared. They were meeting family here, so we only got a few relatively brief conversations.
We met both of these couples early last summer at an RV Club get-together at Kamiah Idaho. We had been corresponding with Judie for some time before that, since she is the head of the "Computers on the Road" group within Escapees, and the publisher of that group's newsletter. Rick and Lori appeared at Kamiah in a borrowed motorhome, looking for information about the RV life. Rick has now retired. They have purchased a small motorhome, and are still thinking about whether to sell their house, buy a bigger rig, and become full-time RV travelers. We had hoped to see Bob and Fran Boston here as well – also RV Club friends who we met at Kamiah. We later found out that they were indeed here, but had not received our Email in time to locate us.
One day, we drove a back road through the country north of the park, to Dog Canyon (in the northern edge of Guadeloupe National Park) and then to Sitting Bull Falls. Dog Canyon has little of specific interest, other than being a trailhead for several trails that go all the way across the high country to the southern roads into the park. An interpretative trail through the grasslands in the valley (0.6 mile) made an interesting break in the driving. Sitting Bull, a National Forest site, has a very interesting waterfall, in a water-carved canyon. We took a short hike around the base of the falls, but didn't tackle the trails that head up into the high country. By the time we got back to our campground, we had covered 180 miles.
We took two daytrips down to the main areas of Guadeloupe National Park, spending time in the Visitor's Centers, and hiking two relatively short trails (Smith Springs Loop Trail, McKittrick Canyon Nature Loop). The really interesting country is all up on top of the Capitan Reef, 2000 to 3000 feet above the trailheads. We weren't feeling that ambitious, and left these for another visit. The limestone of the Capitan Reef really was the result of a reef, several hundred miles long, extending in a huge arc around the shallow edge of a huge sea which once covered this area. Much of Carlsbad Caverns is in this reef. Subsequent uplifting of the entire area raised the reef far above the water table.
4/13 The drive North to Albuquerque along SR 285 gradually gains about 1200 feet of elevation, and shows a slow, steady change to slightly less arid conditions (more grass, occasional trees). About half way along the 300-mile route, the soil changes fairly abruptly to the intense red which characterizes northern New Mexico in our memories of this region from when we spent a summer here 39 years ago. This is all virtually flat ranch land with ankle high grass, gray-blonde in color, spreading out to the horizon in all directions. No trees, few bushes, or shrubs. No buildings either. Intense blue sky with small clouds surrounding us on the horizon, their flat bottoms reflecting the flat landscape. The row of telephone poles beside the highway and the snow fence in one place added to the minimalist feeling with their sterile geometric shapes. The occasional less-geometric object, such as a lone cow, an oil well, or a broken windmill, riveted the attention - tiny relief from the sensory deprivation. We can see how this landscape would lead local artists like Georgia O'Keefe to minimalism.
Our computer navigation maps provided us with interesting demographics, by ZIP code. One nearby ZIP code (87009) has a total of 51 people, in an area that appears to be about 1000 square miles. The average age is 69! The average year of construction of the homes is 1942, and the median household income is $11,912. By the time we turned west on Interstate 40, the terrain had become hilly, and mountains were showing on the horizon.
We're now settled into American RV Park, on the western edge of Albuquerque, for several days.
4/15 The truck has a new windshield. The windshield had been cracked by a stone thrown by a passing car, in Big Bend National Park, and we've been waiting for the right opportunity to get it replaced. The repair shop we called in Albuquerque not only had a competitive price, but sent a mobile repair truck to do the job while the truck was parked beside our trailer in the RV Park. The repair guy showed up at the time specified, and did the whole job in an hour.
4/16 After sitting unused for two days, the truck refused to start this afternoon. I checked all the usual things, got out the service manual, read the diagnostic charts, checked a few more things, scratched my head for a while, found nothing amiss, and then called our Emergency Road Service – provided free with our fulltimer's trailer insurance policy. It's the first occasion we've had to use this service, so we didn't know quite what to expect.
The lady on the phone asked the right questions and projected a feeling of competence. Still, it's uncomfortable to be depending on this disembodied voice, probably a thousand miles away, to solve our local problem. She took our location and cell phone number, and assured us that help would arrive in about 40 minutes. Almost an hour later, just as I'd started to worry, a long flatbed truck showed up, loaded our truck, and delivered me and the truck to the local Dodge dealer. No money changed hands, and there was no paperwork to fill out. I had already made some phone calls and identified this dealer as the "right" place to have the truck taken, so I didn't get a chance to test the ability of the ERS folks to find suitable repair facilities.
By the time the truck arrived at the dealer's, it was approaching 5 P.M. on a Friday afternoon, and too late to get anything done. Fortunately, their service department works a full day on Saturday. So I arranged for a rental car and headed home. We made full use of the rental for sightseeing and shopping. It's wonderful to be back in a small, maneuverable, responsive car. Driving around town is far more pleasant than in our clumsy truck.
By the end of Saturday, they thought they had the truck fixed, but wanted me to leave it over the weekend, to see if it started on Monday. I agreed, and Sunday we headed off sightseeing in the rental.
Sunday evening, while the truck was still in the repair shop, we drove the rental car to High Noon, a nice restaurant in an old adobe building in Old Town, and then proceeded to lock the one and only key in the car. (Why don't rental agencies supply two keys?).
I decided to play it cool. We went into the restaurant, ordered dinner and a bottle of wine, then while Helen was comfortably sipping a nice Chardonnay at our table, the restaurant made a phone available to me at the bar. I called the rental agency and got no help at all - they simply told me I was on my own. (This was Advantage Auto Rental, a company I haven't dealt with before (and will try hard not to deal with again). My recollection is that Hertz used to provide its own emergency road service for such things. Anybody know if that's still true?)
Finding a locksmith open on a Sunday evening seemed like a losing proposition, so I again called Foremost ERS, although I doubted that this vehicle was covered (our truck is not insured with them - only the trailer). It turns out that the language of the ERS contract covers our trailer, its tow vehicle, and a substitute vehicle when the tow vehicle is disabled. They agreed that I was covered, put me on hold, called until they found a place that was open and had the right skills, and then came on the phone with the name of the company that was coming and the expected arrival time (30 minutes - but it turned to be much less).
I alerted the headwaiter and our table waiter, and went back to the table. We had barely finished the wonderful appetizer (stuffed, broiled, portabello mushrooms), when my waiter told me that the tow truck had arrived. I went out front, showed the guy where the car was, and he told me to go back and enjoy dinner and he'd bring me my keys in a few minutes. Indeed, a few minutes later he brought the keys to our table, asked me to sign one form, and departed. He said it took more time to fill out the paperwork than to jimmy the lock with a "Slim Jim". So much for burglar-proof locks!
Can you imagine a more pleasant way to have an ERS experience? Anyway, we have received our money's worth from our "free" ERS. It remains to be seen if our premium will rise at the next renewal.
On Monday morning, I called the repair shop, and found that the truck had started fine and was ready for us to pick up. The problem turned out to be an air leak in a deteriorated rubber hose which is part of the fuel return line from the injector pump back to the fuel tank - a $5.00 replacement part, which was very difficult to access, and a $100 labor charge for the replacement - in addition to all the previous charges for the labor involved in bleeding and pressure testing the fuel system twice in order to find the problem. It's the first engine problem of any sort, in 70,000 miles and appears to be a Dodge problem, not a Cummins problem. There was no advance warning - the engine had been starting instantly, right up until this incident. My fault – after getting home, I browsed Turbo Diesel Register and found that they had reported this potential problem over a year ago, and I should have replaced, or at least inspected, the hose at that time.
4/17 Backing up a couple of days: While the truck was incapacitated, we took a long scenic drive in the rental car. Sandia Peak was the highlight. The geology here is very interesting. Eons ago, while this portion of the continent was being pushed upward, a crack developed just east of Albuquerque, running North to South for hundreds of miles. The crustal block East of the crack rose and the block to the west subsided, leaving a sheer vertical escarpment that was well over five miles high. Over time, wind and rain partially filled the valley with sand and silt, and later, the Rio Grande changed its course to run down the center of the resulting valley. The river and the city of Albuquerque now sit nearly four miles above bedrock. The porous soil underneath forms a huge fresh water reservoir (which is rapidly being depleted during the current drought.)
About one mile of escarpment is still exposed. Sandia Peak is the highest point along this cliff. It is reached by "the world's longest tramway", starting on the eastern edge of Albuquerque, or by a twisty little road from the East, where the mountain slopes are much more gradual. So we drove East on I-40, then north on SR-14, then west again to climb up to the peak. Much of the mountain is National Forest land. At the end of the road, there are paved walkways along the escarpment, a gift shop, and the biggest and most varied collection of radio, television, telephone, and microwave antennas I've ever seen. They ought to run guided tours of the antenna farm!
A spectacular trail runs along the cliff edge about a mile south to the tramway terminal. This is also the upper end of a ski area on the eastern slopes. The view to the west from this trail is awesome. Albuquerque is spread out below, extending almost to the base of the cliff directly under us. The sprawl of Albuquerque ends abruptly at the Sandia Indian Reservation to the north – largely undeveloped scrubland. Twenty miles to the west is a series of small but prominent cinder cones and a few miles closer, the basalt escarpment of Petroglyph National Monument. Eighty miles or so to the west, barely visible through the haze, is Mt. Taylor a huge extinct volcano 11,300' high.
4/19 Albuquerque Museum was a pleasant surprise. It is large, attractive, and devoted almost entirely to local art and artists, and to presenting the history of the surrounding area. The outdoor sculpture garden has some wonderful pieces (all contemporary) by artists who were completely unfamiliar to us (presumably from this region). It took several hours to get through it all, and we still felt we had just skimmed the surface of the information that was available.
A festival was in progress in the lawns and sculpture garden surrounding the museum as well as in an adjacent park. There was continuous entertainment on two outdoor stages, and plenty of artists displaying their wares.
The Albuquerque Zoo also is very nice – well landscaped, and with nicely built modern animal enclosures. We saw our first Komodo Dragon – the largest of the Monitor Lizards, growing up to about six feet long. This one was perhaps five feet. A family of Southern White Rhinoceros has just gone on display. They arrived from Africa last November, and have been kept in seclusion while they got used to their new home, finally appearing in public just a few days ago. The 5000-pound male seemed to have settled in well. He was sprawled placidly on the ground quite close to the viewing fence, chin propped comfortably on one gigantic leg, watching the tourists go by. The female, and a half-grown youngster, were keeping their distance, far back in their enclosure.
We spent our usual excessive amount of time enjoying the antics of a Meerkat colony. What is it that makes these creatures so interesting? We've sometimes felt that we could watch them for hours. There was also an active colony of prairie dogs, but somehow they are nowhere near as interesting.
While we were watching a big lion, another tourist decided to stir things up, and let out a fairly convincing roar. The lion immediately stood up, shook his huge mane, and rumbled a little. The man responded, and then the lion really got into the game, letting out a basso profoundo earth-shaking roar designed to subjugate every inhabitant in several square miles of jungle. The man responded, very anemically by comparison, and they roared back and forth for several minutes, before the lion got tired of it and stalked away to sulk (or hide?) behind a rock.
While walking around Old Town, we had stopped to read the menu at the Maria Theresa Restaurant and found it very interesting. Tonight, we went back there to have dinner. The building is an adobe structure dating from 1840, and is on the National Historic Register. The interior is tastefully furnished and well maintained. The meal was excellent. I had Dijon rabbit – probably the first time I've tasted rabbit. Helen had lamb in a burgundy sauce – both spicy, unusual and very well prepared. We can heartily recommend this place, and also High Noon, where we had dinner the previous day.
4/20 For some time, my desk chair – a swivel armchair that was original to the trailer in 1988 – has been feeling progressively more wobbly. Last night, I discovered that the metal support mechanism had cracked completely through and was about to collapse completely. No way to fix it, so today I spent an hour sitting in about two dozen different desk chairs at Office Max. I found a comfortable one that doesn't clash too badly with the existing furniture. The old one went into the campground trash bin.
4/21 Dave stayed home and caught up on various maintenance tasks, while Helen visited the Turquoise Museum, the University of New Mexico campus, Anthropology Museum, and Art Museum.
The winds continue to blow fiercely. The trailer is rocking, clouds of dust are blowing past, and everything inside feels gritty, even after keeping all the windows closed. Apparently, the entire Southwest is windy this time of year – we've been fighting wind at least half the time for the last six weeks, all across Texas and now here in northern New Mexico.
4/22 The Museum of Natural History is of modest size and budget, but is definitely worth a visit. A display of dinosaurs is very well done. The bones are nearly all plastic casts, not real bones, but it hardly matters, since the overall design of the exhibit is captivating. A tutorial on tree-ring dating technology gave me some new insights. I hadn't realized that the overlapping lives of trees from various eras gives a continuous record that extends back much further than the life of any one tree. By looking at the rings in the ceiling beams of an Indian ruin, they can determine that the building was constructed in the spring of the year 1372, for example. They can even look at the rings in charcoal and figure out the date of a particular campfire, or perhaps the year that a city was destroyed.
Petroglyph National Monument is a small, relatively new, park. It is adjacent to the sprawling suburbs of Albuquerque. An escarpment of volcanic basalt from 110,000 years ago is literally covered with graffiti dating back up to 3000 years. The volcanic rock is light colored, but has acquired a jet-black "desert varnish". These petroglyphs were created by chipping through the black layer to expose the light-colored underlying rock. In the subsequent centuries, more desert varnish has dulled, but not completely obscured, the "art". The "art" ranges from very early abstract line patterns, through realistic but crude drawings of animals and human from around 1300 AD, to Christian crosses and sheep brands carved by Hispanic sheep herders in the 1700's and 1800's, and then to names, initials, and bullet scars, from the 20th century.
4/23 We wandered into the Albuquerque Botanical Garden and Aquarium today. We intended only to visit the Botanical Garden, but discovered that the exorbitant admission price also included the Aquarium. The Botanical Garden seems to be in the early stages of development, and really isn't worth special mention, although it has future potential. The Aquarium is fairly small and seems oriented primarily toward education of local school children. However, their central, largest, tank, is remarkably well done. On one side, a coral reef has been constructed that is one of the best we've seen. It's difficult to keep a broad variety of coral alive in an artificial environment, but they have either succeeded very well, or have an artist who has created remarkably realistic artificial coral. We've snorkeled through quite a few such places in the Caribbean, and this one felt realistic. They also have created a dark grotto – a cave under the coral – which has a colony of large eels, some of them swimming actively. In the other aquariums we've visited, we've rarely seen more than the head of an eel sticking out of a hole in the reef.
Later in the day, we went 10 miles north from Albuquerque to visit Coronado State Monument, which preserves artifacts from the Pueblo cultures of the early 1500's, and records details of Coronado's visit here in 1542 (he was searching for the fabled "cities of gold"). The area was densely settled during that period, and is littered with the remains of that culture. (The Indians were so badly treated by Coronado, that subsequent visitors found the Pueblo abandoned.)
Time to move on – but not very far. In the morning, we'll head 60 miles west to Grants – near El Morro and Malpais National Monuments.