Creatures and Caves - Carlsbad, New Mexico - July 17 & 18, 2019
From Black Canyon Campground near Santa Fe, New Mexico, we headed south on highway 285 towards Carlsbad, New Mexico. Our destination for the night was Pine Springs Campground in Guadalupe Mountains National Park, just across the border into Texas. We wanted to spend most of the next day at Carlsbad Caverns National Park, on the New Mexico side of the state border, but Carlsbad Caverns does not have any campgrounds, so we stayed two nights at Pine Springs and drove the thirty five miles back up highway 62 to visit the caverns during the day.
On the way from Santa Fe, we stopped in Roswell for a picnic lunch at a park we found using Google Maps, Cahoon Park. While sitting at the picnic table, we spied a little pond in the park. So after we were done eating, we walked over to check it out. It was nicely landscaped and contained some creatures, but they were not from outer space. They were mainly turtles and dragon flies. However, we did see some aliens on the main street in town, well, statues of aliens anyway. They were near the ice cream shop we found, Sippy & Opal’s Ice Cream & Sweet Treats. It looked like the shop was pretty new and their homemade ice cream was refreshing on this hot day. The real mystery in Roswell for us were the large fields of large trees on the outskirts of town, all planted in perfect rows, spaced evenly apart, like an orchard but the trees didn’t look like any fruit trees that we were familiar with. Right Buddy (RB) searched the internet on her phone to solve the puzzle. The trees were not planted by aliens; they were hickory trees, or more specifically, pecan trees which are a type of hickory. New Mexico produces about 20% of the U.S. pecan crop. Who knew?
We arrived at Guadalupe Mountains National Park just in time to buy a "been there" sticker in the visitor’s center before it closed for the day. The campground only has 19 RV sites and is first come, first serve. Because we did not have a backup plan, we asked the park ranger at the visitor center if there were any spots left in the campground. She almost laughed at us. Summer is their slow season as people believe it is too hot to camp. The RV sites are basically in a large parking lot with picnic tables and no hookups. The twenty tent sites are nicer, spaced out among small juniper trees, but they are exclusively for tent camping and the parking for their vehicles is not level. The ranger was right, there were plenty of RV spots left. For being a parking lot, the campground was not bad as it is surrounded by great views of the mountains. There were flush toilets, fresh water and a utility sink. However, there is no dump station. Being a dry climate, the evenings cooled down and we were quite comfortable sleeping with just fans and no AC.
After dinner, we had time to walk back to the visitor’s center along a trail and take the short nature trail over to the Pinery Butterfield Stage Station Ruins. There were interpretive signs along the trail; however, many of the ones related to plants seemed to no longer be next to the plants they were describing. We know that must be hard to keep the signs updated as plants die and new ones take their place. However, not being familiar with many of the desert plants, we still learned quite a bit from the signs. There was a tree that we found particularly interesting, with beautiful smooth trunks under a red, peeling bark. It is called the Texas madrone, also known as the naked Indian tree, or lady’s leg tree. The Texas madrone bears white flowers in the spring and red berries in the fall. Unfortunately since it was mid summer, we didn’t get to see the flowers or berries. There were also lots of unfamiliar insects. We noticed that certain types of plants usually had the same types of bugs on them. The interpretive signs did not help us identify all the little critters. Can anyone look at our pictures (links to the albums are below) and help us identify them?
Most of the next day was spent at Carlsbad Caverns. On the drive up to the visitor center and cave entrance along the Carlsbad Cavern Highway, there is a small pull off with a historical marker. The marker contained information about the Indian rock shelter that was in the side of the cliff. As we walked down the short path to check it out, RB heard a noise from the cliff above. She looked up to see two Barbary sheep navigating the cliff. A couple of people walking back from the rock shelter said there was a whole herd of sheep by the shelter. Sure enough, there were about twenty of them by the rock shelter. As the sheep saw us approach, they started climbing up the cliff. However, they did not seem to be too startled by our presence and were walking up the cliff at a surprisingly casual pace, glancing back at us periodically to see if we were staying long or leaving. Barbary sheep are native to northern Africa and were released in the wild in the United States in the 1950’s. They are now considered an invasive species as they are aggressive and compete for the same resources needed by native mule deer and bighorn sheep. In our excitement upon seeing the sheep, we forgot to read the information about the Indian rock shelter.
There are three public tours of Carlsbad Cavern: Big Room Route, Natural Entrance Route, and the King’s Palace Tour. The first two are self-guided and are included in the daily admission price to the park. The third is a ranger-guided tour and requires an additional fee. All three are along paved, well-lit routes. There are also sometimes “wild tours” available that are along unlit and unpaved routes with headlamps and possibly gloves, knee pads and elbow pads, either within other passageways of Carlsbad Cavern or within other caves within the park, such as Slaughter Canyon Cave. Carlsbad Cavern has 30 miles of passageways with the self-guided tours only covering about 2.5 miles of it. There are also over 100 other caves in the park, the location of most of them is not made public. In order to help preserve the caves from damage, some are open only to researchers and explorers, such as the 140 miles of passageways of the Lechuguilla Cave.
We chose to only do the self-guided tours. Although we still had to obtain a ticket, we were not required to pay anything since we have a valid annual National Parks Pass. Starting at the Natural Entrance, we descended the 750 feet down into the cave along what is called the Main Corridor, a little over a mile long. At the entrance, cave swallows were flying in and out because they nest on the cave walls in what is called the twilight zone. There were quite a few interesting formations during the descent, including the Boneyard, which looks like Swiss cheese. It was lunch time by the time we reached the Big Room. There is a lunchroom at this point along with restrooms, but we decided to take the elevator back up to the top to have lunch at our van as the options at the lunchroom didn’t look all that exciting. After lunch, we took the elevator back down to the Big Room.
The path around the Big Room is a little over a mile long and is filled with cave formations of all types, including soda straws, draperies, flowstone, columns, lily pads, cave pearls and popcorn. The Big Room is over eight acres, the largest, readily accessible cave chamber in North America. It is hard to capture the scale of the whole chamber in pictures, but RB tried. Due to its irregular shape, you cannot see the whole room at once, and it just seems to go on forever as you walk down the winding path as it follows the outer contours of the chamber.
Instead of taking the elevator back up after finishing our tour of the Big Room, we opted to walk back up the Main Corridor and out the Natural Entrance. It was good training for us in preparation of our upcoming Grand Canyon backpacking trip, 750 foot elevation gain over 1.25 miles. By the time we made it to the top, we still felt pretty good and considered doing it again. However, the bat guano smell near the Natural Entrance seemed stronger on the way up than it did on our initial descent and we decided not to breath that in again.
We decided that we wanted to stay to see the Bat Flight Program in the evening which meant we still had several hours to kill, so we took the Red Tail Lodge on the scenic Walnut Canyon Desert Drive. The drive is a 9.5 mile, gravel, one-way loop through the mountain desert. The brochure says passenger vehicles can travel the road easily, but we would not do it again in our van. The first couple of miles were OK until the road started dropping down into a canyon. The narrow, twisting and sometimes steep road required us to go as slow as five miles per hour at times, with an average speed of about 15 mph. Although it was scenic, you are not missing much by skipping this drive.
Our dinner plans were to make chicken quesadillas with a homemade salsa verde. We parked near the picnic tables at the visitor’s center. The picnic area was exposed to the heat and the sun, but there were not a whole lot of other options. There is a restaurant in the visitor’s center, but we are trying to keep our expenses down by cooking most of our meals. Left Buddy (LB) boiled the tomatillos for the salsa using the butane stove (GAS ONE 10,000 BTU Portable Butane Gas Stove - paid link) on the picnic table. While RB took the tomatillos inside the van to finish preparing the salsa using the hand blender (KitchenAid Hand Blender - paid link), LB attempted to fry the tortillas with the grated cheese and canned chicken in a pan using the butane stove. However, the stove turned itself off due to overheating in the desert sun. So we just ate the quesadillas uncooked with the salsa. It still tasted great despite RB loving melted cheese, since the cheese was half melted in the sun anyway. :-)
After dinner, RB wanted to explore the Chihuahuan Desert Nature Trail near the visitor’s center, but LB wanted to get out of the heat so RB went by herself. The trail is a half mile loop, mostly paved with interpretative signs. Desert plants lined the trail, such as prickly pear cactus, agave lechuguilla, algerita, ocotillo and sotol along with another assortment of bugs. As the visitor’s center sits on top of a mountain, there are panoramic views out over the plains to the east. RB also came across a lot of reddish brown striped millipedes. We saw these all over the park. Don’t know what type they are, but they are definitely millipedes instead of centipedes since they have two pairs of legs per body segment instead of one and lack the rear facing legs on the last segment that a centipede has. Millipedes are harmless to humans while centipedes are usually poisonous.
It was ice cream time, but we did not see ice cream on the posted menu in the restaurant. However, as we were waiting to walk down to the Natural Entrance for the Bat Flight Program, RB spotted people coming out of the visitor’s center with soft serve ice cream cones. She stopped one of them and asked where they got the ice cream. “In the restaurant” was the reply. “You’d better hurry because they are about to close”. Hurry we did. We got our cones just in time. In addition to the large menu board overhead at the counter, there was a small sign next to the cashier listing the dessert menu. Sure enough, ice cream was on that small menu. We didn’t see that small menu before.
We are so glad we stayed for the Bat Flight Program. There is an amphitheater surrounding the Natural Entrance to the cave. Close to sunset, a park ranger gives a short talk to the crowd that gathers there until the bats start emerging from the cave. No electronics are allowed during the bat program because they believe they interfere with the bats. There was a time when they used to allow people to take pictures, but then they noticed that the bat population started to decline. After reinstating the photo ban, the bat numbers have recovered. During the summer months, hundreds of thousands of Brazilian free-tailed bats live in the cave and emerge around sunset. There are several other species of bats that live in the cave, but they are not as numerous and they emerge from the cave at different times. The emergence of the Brazilian free-tailed bats can last from 20 minutes to two and a half hours. We did not know this ahead of time, so we were expecting all the bats to come out in a matter of minutes. While we were there, most of the bats came out within the first 20 to 30 minutes, but there were still bats emerging when we left after 45 minutes. They just kept coming and coming. It is a really amazing sight to see. You can hear the bat wings flapping since there are so many of them. The swarm of bats seem to spiral out of the cave and looked like a swarm of bees as they head off into the distance. As time went on and the density of bats started to decline, some of them flew directly over our heads, so close that we would duck. As the cloud of bats swirled out of the cave, it seemed to bring up the smell of guano with it, but it was not overpowering. Since we could not take pictures or video, you will have to go and experience the bats yourself.
The sun had set by the time we left Carlsbad Caverns, so the drive back to our campground was dark. Highway 285 is not lit and there was not much traffic, so it was really dark. RB helped LB keep close attention to where we needed to turn off highway 285 into Guadalupe National Park for the campground. We did not want to miss the turn and get lost or drive extra miles because our gas tank was getting low and the closest gas station was over thirty miles away in any direction. It’s amazing how a little motivation keeps you alert, even when you’re tired after an exhausting but fulfilling day.
Check out our related video: Carlsbad, New Mexico – July 17 & 18, 2019
(RB)