Carlsbad Caverns (10/10/23 Tue)

These Caverns are not really in Carlsbad, they are in White City, NM. My campground was actually at the gate to the park. Nice winding road into the park, an up onto a peak. I chose the 2+ mile hike down into the caves and an elevator ride back up into the giftshop. For a grand total of $0 (with my Nat.Park Pass). With my usual lots of time taking pictures that took about 3 hours. This will be my third cave system this summer. First was Lewis and Clark Caverns in July while riding through Montana. Earlier on this current trip I went to the caverns at Great Basin in Nevada. When I told Anne I was going to Carlsbad Caverns she asked why, you've already gone to caverns. Because I'm passing them and someone said to, was the best answer I could give.

Now having been to Carlsbad Caverns I can say they are different. The most obvious difference is that these caves are enormous. I attempted to capture the scale in the photos, but you really cannot. They keep the cave very dark, so nearly all my photos are in my phones moonlight mode. Each picture takes a few seconds of holding steady to capture the low light cave environment. It does a wonderful job. But it's another world down there and the only common thing for scale are humans, and they've setup the paths so you don't see other people all that often. All of the silver railings you see in the pictures are about 5 feet apart. There are parts of the cave you can easily see 1000 feet. The sizes of formations are generally huge. Sometimes 30 or 40 feet high. Objects in photos are crazy hard to judge. You could be looking at a rock formation that's 200 or 8 feet tall. And I took some photos that span as little as 8 feet, and some that span many hundreds.

The bats are only in the first part of the cave. At least that's the area they pass through at dusk and dawn. During the day birds feed at the mouth of the cave. You hear the birds until you get pretty deep into the gave. By the time the bird chips are gone you notice there's no bat poop on everything. At the opening they seem to have made the switchbacks walls with benches, but you would not want to sit on anything the bats fly over. It smelt bad in that area. Very steep and tight people switchbacks into the mouth of the cave. I took pictures of some of them. For almost the entire cave walk there are no steps, just various sloped concrete or paved trails.

There are custodians cleaning sections of the cave. With paint brushes removing lint and dust we are dragging into the caves with us. There are a lot of these poeple down on the sidewalks sweeping tiny cracks along the sides of the path. I suspect they don't cover much more than 10 feet in a day. And in one cave area there was a couple dozen working at this.

Near the end of my caving I met Billy. He too was leasurly taking photos, but he had an SLR. I asked if the digital SLR captured this low light well? He said it was better at details in smaller features. We talked a bit and he too is taking some time to travel between jobs. He worked at IMDB and was part of the Amazon layoffs. Or at least he took it that way because he was no longer able to work remotely. Soon after he wasn't working he headed to Bamf to take photos. He's currently headed up to Utah and Moab. Still surprising to keep bumping into people taking advantage of "unscheduled free time" aka "fired".

After leaving the caverns I want to the Guadalupe Mountains National Park, just down the highway into Texas. The entire park is hiking, so I didn't spent much time there. But started south trying to slip between the storm cells. I managed to only get a few drops on me all day. I did pass a lot of dust twisters, but had trouble with my phone going too dim, so I missed the best twister photos. There was a really big one in a huge dark cloud. Near the end when they had mostly disipated I rode into one with a small tumbleweed bouncing around the two lane road. It just felt like a gusty wind with quick direction changes. Glad is was little and not full of dirt dust.

Skipped breakfast this morning and I didn't eat a lunch until about 1400. Then close to 1700 I passed by a DQ and stopped. But I decided to eat again before my icecream. "How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?" says Pink Floyd. Either way I'm now covered. Time for icecream.

After DQ I rode another hour or more and stopped at a campground in Marathon Tx, called Marathon Motel & RV Park. Turns out to be a really nice place. The have motel, cabins as well as camping.Great sitting areas with fountain and fireplace. The owner does star gazing talks with giant telescope after dark. Met and talked an hour or so with two guys from Austin. One on a motorcycle, the other on bicycle. Eventually I got to setup my tent in the dark, like I am now very used to doing.

Tomorrow I visit Big Bend National Park.