RV Winter Rambling 2006-07

In a Cavern……

To reach Carlsbad from Las Cruces (both in New Mexico) we had to travel south through the Texas panhandle. We had to drive right through the city centre of El Paso, a border town across from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. I had visited the area in the 1970’s but it hadn’t left an impression on me so I wasn’t prepared for the dismal industrial zone, which channelled us into the urban centre. We were please to eventually leave the city behind.


After miles of grazing grasslands, we headed back north through the Guadalupe Mountains back into New Mexico and settled for the next two nights in the small town of Carlsbad – in another Walmart. The famous Carlsbad Caverns, a National Park is twenty miles out of town. After already visiting the Colossal Cave and Kartchner Caverns around Tucson, we didn’t expect much more than what we’d seen. We were amazed. We elected to take the two self-guided tours and skipped the guided ones where you needed kneepads and headlights. I just can’t imagine crawling through an eighteen-inch-high hole deep below the earth without having a panic attack.


We entered through the massive ‘natural cave entrance’ with swallows swooping around our heads. The bats won’t be returning from their winter migration until next month but they wouldn’t have been swarming in the daylight anyway. We walked down and down and down and down …….. on the well-constructed pathways into the doom below. The cavern was enormous all the way down and the artificial lighting was discreet and minimalist. The strenuous steep downhill trek made me oh so glad that there was an elevator to take us back up to the top. It was over a mile until we got to the bottom, 800 feet below the surface and words can’t describe the wonder. You have to experience it. We were exultant! The entrance route interconnected with the ‘Big Room’, which is so huge, it’s a mile around and it took almost another hour to navigate it. Colossal stalagmites and stalactites dwarfed us as we strolled it in awe.

I guess the immensity of the caves and the lengthy tours created the necessity of restrooms, which they’ve constructed at the 800-foot below surface level. Apparently, once a day a huge vacuum sucks out the contents to the surface – a big yuck, but isn’t technology wonderful.

We completed our day with a couple of geocache hunts, which gave us an overview of the little town of Carlsbad at the edge of the Chihuahuan Desert.

posted by O'Leary @ 9:07 PM