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Carlsbad Caverns

I’m in love. Have I told you that? I could live there and still not be satisfied with my time spent. That’s right, I’m in love with Carlsbad Caverns.

After my last entry I went to eat breakfast at Denny’s since I had waken up too late for the free breakfast the hotel provides. I ate my food so fast I think the waitress, and a couple of the other diners, were astonished. I must have looked starved but I didn’t care- I was in a hurry to get to Carlsbad Caverns.

Carlsbad Caverns is about a 20 mile drive west from the city of Carlsbad. When you reach the sign proclaiming “Carlsbad Caverns” you still have another 6 miles to drive. I stopped to take a few pictures in front of the sign, a couple with my digital and one with my phone. When you are traveling alone it is always interesting to get pictures of yourself on your travels. For safety reasons I usually prefer to wit until I am alone, which doesn’t seem to be a problem in most areas, then find a safe spot to sit my camera and set it on a 10 sec delay to give me time to get into position. Most of the time in these situations I use the hood or roof of my car, and this time was no different. I took a few pictures with the digital. As another car approached the pull-off I finished my last picture and jumped back in the car.

A lady and her son get out to take a picture by the sign. On the way up to the sign she suddenly jumps in front of my car as I start to pull out.

“Wait! Wait!” she cries, waving her arms.

I stop and open the door (my Dodge Stealth’s drivers side window doesn’t work) and she picks my camera up off the hood of my car and hands it to me.

“You don’t want to lose this do you?” She laughs.

I thank her over and over. I ask if she wants me to take a picture of her son and herself but she says no thanks. This makes the second time I was saved by a complete stranger in the past few days. I think a trend is starting to develop.

I pull up to the visitor center in Carlsbad Caverns National Park, which sits perched on top of a small mountain, and took notice of a sign as I pulled up. “Absolutely NO pets left in vehicles or allowed in caverns. Must use available kennel”. I hope this isn’t going to be too expensive…

I see a lady leaving the visitor center and I ask her about the kennel. She says it looks like it is a good place, and that it costs $5 for the day. Not bad. This is going to make my day much easier!

After picking out a kennel for Ellie and providing her with a fresh bowl of water I wander into the visitor center to purchase my tickets. I had REALLY wanted to go on a wild caving tour, but when I went to purchase tickets two weeks ahead of time online they were already sold out for this day. I was hoping for a cancellation or two when I arrived but there was no such luck. The only tour available was of course the self-guided main tour that takes you through the natural entrance, descending over 750’ and the winding through 1.25 mi of pathways until you reach the Big Room pathways. The Big Room, which includes the Hall of Giants, is quite literally a BIG ROOM full to the brim with gorgeous speleothems of all sorts. Over 6 football fields could fit inside this cavern area. Now THAT is big. This tour only costs $6, and is full to the brim with exciting things to see of the underworld. I HIGHLY recommend going on this tour. It will certainly be the best $6 you’ve ever spent!

I paid for my ticket and headed down the pathway towards the gate where a park ranger gives you a drill down of what you can and cannot do. No food or drink allowed in the gave, this includes gum. Kids must stay within arm’s length of their guardian. Absolutely NO TOUCHING of the formations. (For those of you unfamiliar with a cave’s natural state, touching the formations can actually kill them. The oils from your hands stop the water/mineral mixture from adhering to the rocks surface and it stops growing.) Then, a handful of people at a time, the release you into the pathway that descends past the bat watching auditorium and into the great underground.
As I walk past the bleachers that are there for the bat fly-out I remind myself I must return in the spring to see this. Every night from about March thru October thousands of bat swirl out of the cave into the darkening sky to feed on mosquitoes and other annoying bugs. Every night they take the exact same path, and have been doing so for years and years.

The descent into the cave is a pretty nice walk. The pathways are very rough, like a chunkier sandpaper, so that you don’t slip walking down the steep grade. Each time you turn the path you can feel the air of the cave hit your face. It’s a familiar feeling for me and I absolutely love the scent that accompanies it. The air is slightly cool, but only because it is damp. The smell is a damp, earthy tone that reminds me of several things from my childhood that I enjoyed. For example, The “Fire in the Hole” underground rollercoaster that sprays water on you at Silver Dollar City (Branson, MO) has a similar scent. Anytime I am in a cave I breathe it in deeply and let it calm my senses.

The tour of the cave itself is hard to explain except in pictures, and I took plenty (over 230 of them). Every time I turned a corner I would think that certainly it would end soon. Nothing so wonderful could last that long. But turn after turn I was further amazed at the increasing prevalence of speleothems and the opening of the rooms into larger and larger ones. It was almost too much to take in.

In fact, I had to sit down on a bench after I passed the Hall of Giants. I was so happy, and the caves were so much to take in, I almost started crying. I fought with myself, sitting there in that beautiful underworld. I am NOT an emotional little girl, I told myself. I don’t cry when I am overly happy, it just doesn’t happen. I fidgeted with my camera, pretending to mess with the settings and furrowing my brow in frustration of my sudden emotional turn. An Indian man approached me and asked me if I needed someone to take my pictures. I smiled and used it as an excuse to shove away these emotions and handed him my camera. He took a picture, of which I am not sure I will post because I look a little out of it, and then I continued along my way.

I also came across a really nice park ranger along my travels in the caverns. She works at Carlsbad Caverns for 6 months, then travels up to a Colorado State Park and works there for another 6 months. We talked about caves for a while, and she told me about some friends she has that work at Mammoth Cave in Kentucky and the research they get to help out with. I told her about “The Longest Cave” and encouraged her to read it, and showed her some pictures I had on my phone of bats in Missouri caves. She gave me some information on how I could get a job working for one of the National Park caves. I stored it in my phone. This was certainly something to SERIOUSLY consider.

When I finally reached the end of the tour, where a large series of elevators take you up through the rock (with windows on all sides so you can watch the rock fly past you), I was again feeling that sweeping emotion. I walked into the bookstore, which uses all it’s profits for cave conservation, and concentrated on getting some souvenirs and post cards. While sitting in front of the post cards staring at them but not seeing them a man I had met earlier in the caves approached me and asked me if I had enjoyed the tour. I chatted with him a while, he said he could tell I was a caver by my gear. (I had brought in my adventure bag, which is stained from cave mud and had a small led flashlight attached to the zipper). He told me about some caves from where he lives back in Texas and told me it’d definitely be something worth seeing. He introduced himself as Victor and said it was nice meeting me, I shook his hand and gave him my first name as well and he left with his family.

I ended up purchasing a book and a t-shirt, and a few postcards. The t-shirt I am in love with. It is made out of bamboo, so it is environmentally friendly, and has Carlsbad Caverns in beautiful script down my left side. I picked up Ellie, who was soaking wet from being in her water bowl, and we left the top of the mountain.

On the way down the winding roads we stopped at one of the trails and walked to the end where there was a wonderful outlook over the canyons. Ellie got plenty of exercise, and we both enjoyed the warmth of the sun after spending the previous day in a winter wonderland. The sun was nearing it’s position for set and I decided to head back to the hotel which was about 20 minutes away.

I decided that since I was in New Mexico the dinner of choice should be some authentic Mexican. I headed into town and discovered that since it was Sunday the couple shacks I had seen along the main drive were closed. I decided to use my borrowed GPS to locate a Mexican restaurant.

Here’s the time to explain the characteristics of the GPS I borrowed for this trip. It is older, and when you plug it into your cigarette lighter outlet it takes several minutes, sometimes up to 10 or 15, to warm up and figure out where you are. It also has a very sensitive power cable that if you touch the wrong way restarts the unit, and you have to wait again for it to find where you are. It is also a little out of date with the information in it. After the GPS warmed up I followed it to a couple places that were closed, and the final attempt at finding a restaurant ended at an empty grass lot.

Much less to say, and a little amusing, I ended up getting Taco Bell.

It was a wonderful day and I will certainly treasure these experiences for a lifetime. Tomorrow I continue my journey to another land, I will be driving almost 1000 miles to the west, back to my birthplace.

GEOLOGIC NOTES:

In this blog I use speleothem and formation interchangeably. Formation is not necessarily an appropriate term for a speleothem, but it is used widely to describe stalactites, stalagmites, soda straws, cave pearls, cave popcorn and more. If you want to get technical, these definitions are:

SPELEOTHEM:

any of the crystalline deposits that form in a solution cave after the creation of the cave itself. These deposits are generally composed of calcium carbonate dissolved from the surrounding limestone by groundwater. Carbon dioxide carried in the water is released as the water encounters the cave air; this reduces the water’s capacity to hold calcite in solution and causes the calcite to be deposited. These deposits may accumulate to form stalactites, stalagmites, flowstone, helictites, cave pearls, and many other formations. Deposits formed along ceiling cracks may produce drip curtains or draperies that may then reach the floor to become walls. Speleothems may grow in pools to form the nodular encrustations of cave coral or the natural dams that continually elevate themselves through accretion of calcite. The pure white of the calcium carbonate is often tinted with hues of red, yellow, and gray and may even be translucent. The growth rate of speleothems is highly variable due to seasonal variations in the rate of flow, carbon dioxide content, and other factors. Caves owe most of their beauty and much of their interest to these secondary growths.

FORMATION:

5. geology
a.  the fundamental lithostratigraphic unit
b.  a series of rocks with certain characteristics in common.

I would also like to add some information about Carlsbad Caverns versus the caves I usually visit in the limestone beds of Missouri. You may notice that most caves are carved out of water, and tend to have a long, linear shape to them as the groundwater travels in a stream or certain direction. After the limestone, or other soluable rock formation, is dissolved, the deposit of speleothems can begin. As the groundwater continues to trickly through the bedrock and it reaches the cave the water is enriched in minerals that get redeposited on the walls, ceilings, floor, etc of the cave. This is how a speleothem is, generally, formed.

Carlsbad Caverns has a very large and open nature to each of their rooms, and while the speleothems in Carlsad Caverns are formed in the same manner as above, the cave itself formed in a different manner than many of the caves we visit in the midwest.

Somewhere between 4 and 6 million years ago, water that was rich in hydrogen-sulfide mixed with other rainwaters to form sulfuric acid. It is this acid that allowed the caverns to form in large, magnificent rooms rather than long, lineated passages like those we are so familiar with.

For more information about this, I highly recommend visiting the National Park Service’s website on Carlsbad Caverns, particularly this page:

http://www.nps.gov/cave/naturescience/cave.htm

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The Wintry Trek from Central Missouri to Carlsbad, NM

Wow, what a day!!! A drive that should have taken 15 hours took 20 hours due to snow and ice throughout much of the Midwest. The drive was certainly an adrenaline inducing affair, with a couple of mishaps that were almost of a vacation-canceling quality.

I left Missouri after 5am and the roads were pretty decent considering the amount of snow and ice the area had received. I had packed my car with my things, and my companion for the trip (a 7 week old puppy I was transporting for a friend) and took off with confidence and an adventurous spirit. Driving was easy, and the view of the snow covered farmland was nice to see.I watched as the sun rose above the snow-blanketed landscape, sending a pillar of light straight up into the sky.

Even though the roads seemed to be OK I decided to play it safe and head straight south on 13 hwy to Springfield and cut across from there on 44 hwy. The GPS I had borrowed from my father complained at every intersection until I was in Clinton, announcing it was “Recalculating” my route. It wanted me to drive through Kansas. Why on earth would I want to drive through Kansas? Aside from the blizzard they had rolled through the area a day prior, Kansas was boring. Oklahoma sounded like a better idea. They had toll roads, surely if you paid to drive on the road they took care to maintain it.

My theory proved to be wrong: I think there was an invisible barrier that runs along the MO-OK line, because as soon as I crossed it the roads were horrible. Snow and ice still covered the roadway, vehicles littered the ditches along the road, and cars slid along the highway in a cautious tone. Interesting that the “free” roads had been rightfully cleared by the highway department, and the instant I hit the state that seems to love their toll roads it looked as if the men in the plowing trade had gone on strike. Either they don’t have enough funding for their road maintenance or they just aren’t as efficient as Missouri. While some areas of Oklahoma might have been hit harder than MO, most of it was much the same as what I drove through in the show-me-state.

I was trekking across this frigid tundra, thankful I had chosen to take my car instead of my Jeep because of the warm air that poured out the vents and the defrost that kept the windshield from icing over when I decided to find a place to pull over and let Ellie run around and do her business. Unfortunately the big wall of snow prohibited me from entering the rest stops so, but seeing as how I was nearing a quarter of a tank I decided to get some gas. I pulled off the highway onto roads that were even worse and pulled up to the nearest gas station. After walking Ellie I went to pull the lever on my floorboard that opens my gas door. Nothing happened. Either it was frozen shut or the wire had been damaged. I had to get out my multi-tool and pry open my gas door while some hunters with a boat (yes, they were towing a boat in this weather!) chatted nearby about the weather.

After that affair I got back on the highway and continued my way across Oklahoma via the snowy interstate 44. I decided to stop for lunch at a “Whataburger” since we don’t have those locally, but after exiting where a sign said there would be one and not seeing it I stopped at a McDonalds. I ate my lunch while Ellie ate hers, and I let her wander their strip of grass-covered snow on the leash. After that we headed back to the interstate, and I made an almost crippling mistake: I turned on the wrong road. I tried to turn around and got stuck on the ice. I was trapped there for about 5 minutes, rocking back and forth, when luckily a few guys pulled over and got out to push . Oh wonderful, good Samaritans! They pushed and my car was going forward along the road once again. I gave them a thumbs up and waved a thank you and they smiled, waved and got back in their car heading the opposite direction.

The roads gradually got better as I headed west, but I credit this to the shining sun rather than the road crew laboring away. I think I may have seen a total of 4 ice trucks across the entire state. I had a new found appreciation for MO-DOT’s hard work and prompt clearing of the roads. I was relieved, for once, when I hit Texas just as the sun set. Funny that as I reach the “Lone Star” state, the only star that will sit in the sky alone, the sun, had just set.

The sunset was gorgeous, and much like the sunrise I had seen traveling through Missouri it sent up a pillar of light straight up into the sky from the sun. I casually wondered if there had been a volcanic eruption somewhere in the world that was creating these beautiful effects. I dismissed the thought, thinking I was just letting the book I had just read a month ago, Krakatoa, influence my imagination.
I stopped at one of Texas’ rest stops, which I have always known to be uniquely decorated and more and amenable. This one was no different. The outside was lit up in the night with red, white, and blue lights in the pattern of the Texan flag. Inside they had an interactive display about life in the plains and the development of barbed wire, outside amongst the snow were picnic shelters with Texas-shaped grills, and a beautiful view of a canyon that I could barely make out the silhouette of in the dark.


The roads through Texas were pretty clear, or so I thought. I was heading along a seemingly clear highway that was under construction around 10 pm. The traffic was light and I only had one or two vehicles accompanying me on the road at any given time. As I took the detour and was traveling along at what I thought was a safe speed I came across a narrowing of the one-lane road with concrete barriers on each side, each with snow packed along it and ice covering the whole roadway, rocky and bumpy. I slowed down as much as I could before I hit the ice, but jumped off the brake when I hit it knowing that would be detrimental. My car swung diagonal one way, and I corrected and then it flew diagonal the opposite direction. I was nervous, but kept my focus as I knew I just could NOT crash here. I saw the car in front of me slow down on a clear roadway and I breathed in as I hit the clear road. I discovered that the vehicle just ahead of me was a police car, and he drove at a slow, carefully speed. Knowing he probably knew the road conditions I used him as a pace car until he exited a few miles down.

I was nowhere near tired, the adrenaline fresh and running through me. I made the push for that last few hours and arrive in Carlsbad at 1:28 CST. I checked into the hotel and tried to get as much sleep as I could with a puppy that kept waking up every few hours and needing to go out and use the restroom. In the morning I turned on the news to see the weather and saw a short story on a volcano that was erupting in the Philippines.
LINK:(http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5i7EZq2rDaf4kQY0wO47q7pZBGt4A)
My imagination had proven to be an educated theory that was true!

It’s now time to continue to let my imagination act as a fortune teller as I wander deep into a place that I have wanted to explore for years: Carlsbad Caverns!