Now I know where all those Cavemen come from!

We have landed in Carlsberg, NM. The trip was ok but I seem to have a problem with the truck (another?). It did not seem to shift into high gear after we stopped to rescue the stick on thermometer form the kitchen window. The truck drove great but the RPMs were 3,000 at 60 mph rather than the usual 2,000. I will check it over as much as I can during our time here. I do not expect to be able to do much and there doesn’t seem to be anywhere in town that can help me. Arrgh!

We had hoped to stop in Roswell to visit the UFO Museum and Research Site. Roswell was a much bigger town than we expected. They also have an identity, the whole alien thing. Most business have aliens somehow worked into their logo and their signage. There was parking for motorhomes but none for those with trailers. We hit some of the side roads and still didn’t find anything so we motored on.

After we arrived, met the managers and settled into our site, we had a late lunch, unloaded the car and headed for the park. I wanted to see about tour tickets since I had little luck on the internet. Our campground is about 18 miles north of Carlsbad and the park is another 25 miles south of the town. Once you get there, you have another 8 mile drive up to the caverns. Most of the land around here is flat with tiny rolling hills. Once you get to the park, the road goes up and up to a fairly high altitude. There is a pueblo style visitor’s center and a sprawling parking lot. We found a parking spot right at the visitor’s center end of the parking lot. I have a theory about great parking spaces; when you get a spot right by the door, you can never find what you want. This was no different but the reasons were different.

We got into the line for tickets. Actually there was no line, just 2 people who were together. In just a few seconds, one of the two clerks finished with their customers and took the people in front of us. In another minute the remaining clerk took us. That was when things started to go down hill. I gave her the big old Maine Howdy, "how are you today?” To which I received a “what can I do for you?” With no smile or anything even close to a friendly greeting.

I told her that I was going to be there for 3 days and wanted to get tickets. She told me to go see the information desk and they would help me plan out my visit. I replied that I knew exactly what I wanted. She again repeated that I should see the info desk, that she had to get all of these people into the park so they could catch the elevator into the caverns. She then took my National Park Pass and gave me an entry ticket to the park (which I didn’t yet want) and called the next couple from the line (actually they were the only people in the line so it was hard to tell where these herds of people she had to help were located…maybe they were hiding outside the door waiting for us to leave). I stood there but when she finished with them and there were no other people, she left her desk and went out back. More rude national park personnel! I left. I was so mad that I was afraid to go back to talk to her because I might just tell her off.

It was a quiet ride back to camp. A wasted trip of 40 or more miles (one way) and pretty much a ruined day. I just couldn’t imagine why she would treat me that way. I am not a child abuser and I didn’t kick any old ladies to the curb to get into the line before them. I was wearing my Red Sox shirt….maybe she is a Yankees fan. I was nice, friendly and clean (more or less). Maybe it was her problem but she appeared to be nice to the other people she dealt with (although I only saw 2). She wore a ranger’s uniform but I know she was not a ranger. All of the rangers I have met were customer friendly and nice. It is always the clerks and bus drivers that are nasty. I just don’t know.

I went back to camp and built a fire (yea, we have a fire pit!). I was still mumbling to myself but the fire cheered me up. I got it going well and then fortified it with charcoal and sat in the smoke. This is only the third fire we have had since we left home. We are still burning the wood we brought with us. I cut up some potatoes, onions, zucchini and cauliflower with some oil, water, salt pepper and basil, wrapped it in aluminum foil and tossed the packets into the fire. I put a rub on a couple of steaks and put them in my cooking basket and threw it on the fire when I thought the veggies were done. Yum!

The next morning, we slept late (up late watching the Olympics) and got a late morning start to the caves. Upon arrival, we noticed the same woman selling tickets so we decided to do the 2 self guided tours. The first is the Natural Entrance Tour. This basically gets you down into the caves. It is 1 ½ miles long and you descend 800 feet. You spend a lot of your time winding down into the earth. There is a large opening where they also have the bat program amphitheater and the trail starts to wind down into an opening that looks like the Hatch Shell upside down going down into the earth. After a large descent, you come into a large room. The signs pointed out into a dark corridor in the back and says that the bats are living in there. At dusk, they come out of the cave by the millions. They migrate up to the caverns in March of each year and live there until October when they go back to Mexico (they are just doing a job that Americans don’t want to do). The park does a program each evening about the bats and then everyone just sits there and watches them come out. They leave the caves each evening to go hunting for insects. Each bat eats about half its body weight in insects each night.

I wonder if they give each person a garlic necklace and a crucifex.

This cave is magnificent! Every room we saw was huge. No one with claustrophobia should be bothered by this cave. The rooms are as big as Boston Garden and there is no feeling of closeness anywhere along the way. There are lots of features and things to see and you can set your own pace for the tour. There are even benches in various places so you can just sit and contemplate. For probably 90% of the tour, the trail winds back and forth as you go deeper into the earth. You end up in “The Big Room” at around 800 feet of depth. There are rest rooms there and a small place to buy refreshments.

I came out of the men’s room and there were dozens of football players in uniform wandering around. While I was staring at them, a man dressed in the same colors came over and said hello. Knowing he was one of the coaches, I asked him what kind of an advantage did practicing in the caves give them. He laughed and said they were the local high school known as the Cavemen. They were down here taking their team picture (like they did every year). He said that he thought that they were the only school in the country known as the Cavemen.

There is a second self guided tour in the cave. It is the tour of the Big Room. A 1 ¼ mile walk around the room. There are a lot of features in the room and entrances to at least one of the other tours (lower cave). There are several formal guided tours in the caverns, most of which are not for the weak at heart. They involve crawling through small holes and along dirt pathways with helmets, gloves, kneepads and headlamps. Not my cup of tea. There is one other general guided tour that I would like to take and one of the marginal wild tours that I would consider but (fortunately) that one is booked solid (they only take a dozen people a day.

We came out of the caves a little before 5 (having absolutely no idea what the time was). We headed home figuring we would catch the bats another day. We were hungry and a little tired. We drove back and had Chinese food on the way home.

We watched the Olympics but the TV was full of warnings for Tornados, Severe thunderstorms and flash floods. We could hear something headed our way and watched it approach across the range. It looked ugly. At about 10:30, the TV gave its warning blast and we looked up to see Eddy County specifically Carlsbad get a warning for Severe T-storms and big hail and heavy rain. We both looked out the window and said “I guess we know where that one is”.

We stayed up until nearly one watching the storm(s) roll across the campground. We felt sorry for the people next to us in a popup camper. Their canvass was just blowing badly. It poured for more than an hour. There was standing water everywhere in the park but by the time we got up this morning, the ground was bare and dry (and the popup was gone).

We are having a kind of slow day, catching up on some things we need to do and relaxing. We will probably head to the park later at least to see the bats.
Later!

OK, we went to the park but didn’t stay for the bats. The last tour of the day had already left so we planned to buy tickets for the next day. As it worked out, they had 2 tickets for the Left Hand Tunnel Tour left. They had 1 ticket but they didn’t seem to be able to sell one ticket so they approved an extra ticket. That made 2 and we got there just as they released the tickets so we bought them. We also got tickets for the King’s Palace Tour later in he same day.

Our Left Hand Tour was early in the morning so we set the alarm clock for 6:15. I woke up about 20 minutes early and was immediately struck with nervousness about the tour. I have been in lots of caves and never had a problem but there is this coal mine up in Nova Scotia that gives me fits. I have been there twice and left before the tour was over both times. The coal mine is short requiring me to walk around bent over all the time. It is dark (coal of course) and very very wet. I had asthma problems both times as well as feeling very uncomfortable. I woke up dreading the whole cave experience.

Of course, I ignored it and we proceeded forth. I guess I didn’t tell you about the Left Hand Tunnel Tour. It is an off the beaten track tour. It is intended to be an old time tour. There are no lights in the tunnel, no paved path and no handrails (to balance yourself with as you look up and around). It shows you what it was like to view the cave in the old days. It is eerie to wander around a cave with just a candle to see by. It was nice to have a ranger explaining things and talking about the cave. He showed us fossils and some cave crickets and talked to us about the other denizens of the cave. We saw some mummified bat remains and some small deposits of bat guano (in some of the caves, the guano is 40 feet deep and was mined in olden times). We saw some amazing things by the lights of our candles.

The trail through the cave was unimproved so you were constantly looking out for rocks and holes in the path. They ran tape along the edges of the path to give you lines to stay within. There were deep holes along the sides of the trail that you could easily fall into if you weren’t paying attention. He told us how the caves were formed. It was much clearer than the written stuff we had already seen. This cave complex was formed not by running water within the limestone layers but by acid formed by water within the limestone and the Sulphur Dioxide leaching up from the oil and gas deposits beneath the caves. The Sulphur dioxide absorbs into the water and forms sulphuric acid which then dissolves the limestone creating the voids that eventually became the caves. As time went on, the layers rose from geologic action along various faults pushing the caves above the water table draining out the acid solution and leaving the caves.

After all that, water seeping down from the surface mixes with carbon dioxide to create carbolic acid. This dissolves the limestone too but much slower. It flows slowly enough to create the stalactites and stalagmites, soda straws, columns, draperies and other decorations. These caves are huge and some highly decorated.

Once we finished with the Left Hand Tour, we got ready to head back to the surface to await our afternoon tour. It was then that I noticed that a tour was getting their preliminary briefing before heading out on the King’s Palace Tour. There weren’t very many people there so I asked the ranger if we could join their tour. I explained that we had been placed on the afternoon tour because of potential problems meeting up with the ll: 00 am tour as our tour was scheduled to end at ll: 00. She agreed and off we went with no break.

This tour was the biggest surprise since we saw our first huge room. There were more decorations here than we had run into in all of our tours. It was magnificent. There were 4 rooms that we visited: King’s Palace, Papoose Room, Queen’s Palace and the green lake room. The rooms were loaded with all of the various types of decorations of various sizes and huge quantities. We saw some of the biggest draperies I have ever seen and literally thousands of soda straws, stalactites and whole formations of stalactites that looked like great huge arrays of organ pipes.

If you ever get a chance to visit Carlsberg Caverns, take it! If you are nervous about small spaces, don’t worry here. You can walk down the natural entrance and visit the “Big Room” with no worries about small tight spaces. Being in this cave area is like being in the Boston Garden (or whatever they call it these days). It is a huge space with no closed in feeling at all (of course, I have been comfortable in caves all over the country (except for that darned coal mine)).

I guess I was tired after all that cave exploration. I fell asleep early in the evening, during the time I had planned to get the car loaded and clean up the campsite in preparation for leaving early. We still left early but not nearly as early as we had planned. The drive is a long one, nearly 500 miles or 10 hours so an early start was imperative. We did get out near 7:30 (which is early for us) but it was a far cry from 6:00. I didn’t have enough gas to get to the Flying J in Pecos so I stopped locally to buy enough gas to guarantee that we would make it. I let the pump go to the max it would allow on my card (on the way out, most of the stations would force you to reprocess your card at $75 forcing me to take my card inside and leave it to get a full tank on one input). IT seems that many of the stations have updated their limits to $125 so I ended up with plenty of gas and some sausage biscuits to munch on.

Along the way, we picked up a Texas (rock of course) radio station. While we were able to keep them on the dial, they had an energy report. They reported that there were more than 900 drilling rigs in TX alone drilling new wells up one from last week. At this time last year there were 125 wells being drilled. There were nearly 2,000 new wells being drilled across the US. Good signs for the future I hope. We saw quite a few drilling rigs in the last couple of weeks (didn’t see any gushers).

Soon we crossed into Texas and the terrain which had been building up into a rolling hills kind of geography immediately went flat. We began seeing more and more pumping rigs bringing up the oil from down under and wondered how long it would take for it to get to market.

In Pecos, we stopped at the Flying J and topped off the tank. Surprisingly enough, the price was 3 cents a gallon more than we had paid in Carlsberg. Go Figure! Soon we stopped for a few minutes and Cheryl took up the driving. I have been downloading songs off my computer onto cds so we have something to listen to when there are no or few radio stations. We got tired of the 6 or 7 disks that we brought with us. At one point, we did get a radio station for a few minutes, just long enough to hear that the price of gas around San Antonio is $3.57. Well, our next tank should be cheaper.

The day is pretty nice although the temperature outside has been climbing steadily (partly because we have been going pretty much southeast. It is comfortable inside. We haven’t hit high on the A/C yet. When we hit the Texas border we came to a shocking realization: we had changed time zones and lost an hour so all of our planning to get to San Antonio at a reasonable hour had just taken a hit by one hour. One minute it was 11:03, the next it was 12:04. That is not the first time we have not put time zones in our planning. Unfortunately, this time we are headed east and are losing time whereas before, we were headed west and gaining time.

Well, it is time for me to take back the reins and drive this stagecoach for a while so I will finish up and try to upload it to the net. Stay safe!

C&C - emails to estabrke@gmail.com