Monday, April 10-Wednesday 12

We definitely planned to visit Carlsbad Caverns.  Last fall, we went with Mike and Tricia to Bluegrass Underground.  This is a music venue inside a cavern in TN.  We saw John Anderson, stayed in a near-by lodge, and had a lot of fun.  I had never been inside a cavern, and was pretty impressed.  Mike and Tricia both commented that on the cavern scale of really great caverns, this one was a 1 or 2.  Mike said, “you need to see Carlsbad.”  So we knew we had to go!

The closest camp ground turned out to be Guadeloupe National Park, just south of the New Mexico border and very close to Carlsbad.  We didn’t even have this park on our list, but it’s really beautiful and when we were there, not too crowded.

The campground was small and primitive, which is fine with us: fewer RV’s.  Our site had a lovely view of the mountain, which is actually a fossil reef from the Permian Era. This made Andy happy while he was cooking.

We started out on a hike, but before we had gone too far, we came across a guy sitting on the edge of the trail.  He was having some unexplained issue with weakness in his legs, and had kind of collapsed as he was hiking with his wife.  She had gone for help, so we hung out with him until she could come back with a park ranger.  I have been thinking about him and hope that he’s ok. Andy and I are very grateful that we’re healthy and able to get around.

We did some bird watching and enjoyed a mysterious moon and night sky.

The next morning, we got up early and headed to Carlsbad, just 45 minutes north.

Taking pictures of this fantastic underground otherworld is kind of lame; there’s no way a camera can capture anything close to what it’s like.  We walked down 85 stories. (Fortunately, there’s an elevator back to the top.)  It was dark and dramatically lit in places, and the whole thing is a wonderland; petrified waves of water, incredible shapes and textures, bottomless pits and enormous stalactites/stalagmites…I could keep talking, but like Mike said, you gotta go there.

I called Tricia to say, “you were right, we hadn’t seen a cavern until today.”  I think this one is a 10.