Day 16-17
2-3 July 2011
Brantley Lake State Park,
near Carlsbad, NM

What an interesting and fantastic two days! The reliability of my internet connection comes and goes, so I hope I get to finish and publish this posting.

I'm using my Samsung Mesmerize cell phone as a tethered hot spot (legally too! I pay U S Cellular for the privilege of using my 5 Gb of data each month for computer connections. It often works but every once in a while (usually when I'm data roaming), it objects and will not connect to the internet even though the computer and and cell phone hot spot will connect.

Yesterday, Friday, 2 July, Mary and I went to Carlsbad Cavern National Park. When we left home, we weren't sure we'd get to see the cavern since one of New Mexico's several forest fires was located there. And was it ever there! Burned vegetation was visible right to the edge of the parking lot at the visitors' center. Literally. We walked over to the edge of the parking lot and looked out over a whole canyon of burned desolation and could reach out and touch the burned vegetation without leaving the pavement. 

However, this fire is out and people can see Carlsbad Cavern. All the guided tours were booked (they say reservations in the summer can be very hard to come by) so we took two self-guided tours assisted by the recorded narration (which is really quite well done). We walked down the Natural Entrance trail (a one hour continuous descent) and then toured the BIG Room (that was an hour and a half walk around the perimeter of the room).

I grew up in cave-rich Tennessee and lived in Kentucky, home of Mammoth Cave, so I am no stranger to caves. I've even crawled around in a few on my hands and knees exploring dark, narrow, wet passages. Carlsbad is a beautiful cavern. The tour route is well planned and the stories of this and other caves in the area are well told. The formations are amazing and beautiful and the cave itself is HUGE! 


Mary, on the other hand, had NEVER been in a cave! (There are very few caves in Wisconsin where she grew up.) She was constantly in awe of the amazing sights before her. She doesn't like edges that look out over deep holes, but the rails along the trail enabled her to go to the edge and take in the wonderful vistas before us.


We did not try to take any pictures IN the cave. Caves do not lend themselves to good pictures, particularly those with big rooms that stretch out beyond the reach of a weak flash on a camera. Besides, there were other picture takers constantly messing with my dark vision through the flashes of their cameras and I decided that I didn't need to do that to others or myself. So the pictures of Carlsbad will live forever in my mind.


We spent over 2-1/2 hours down in the cave. We could have spent another 1-1/2 hours walking out but we decided we were both hungry and so we rode the elevator 754 vertical feet in under a minute! That thing travels.


After the cave exploration, we toured the grounds of the National Park. Normally there are excellent hiking trails to be walked. However, the fire has curtailed that. We did walk out through one area to an overlook where the trail ran through a totally burned out section of the park. Cooked cactii are not very pretty! And there were plenty of rocks that clearly had "exploded" (at least at their surface level) due to the extreme heat of the fire.  There are still fires in New Mexico. Fortunately the one near Los Alamos is being controlled which means that in another week it MAY be possible for us to visit LANL (Los Alamos National Laboratory). There is another fire in Cloudcroft which lies between us and our next destination of Las Cruces. We may have to go through El Paso to get there instead of taking the mountain road that is much prettier (and, I will admit, much hairy-er to drive in a Motor Home).


Later that afternoon, we went to the Living Desert and Zoo State Park in Carlsbad. That was a lot of fun. They have exhibits of the flora of a desert. The Chihuahuan Desert of NM is a "living desert" and has the greatest bio-diversity of any desert in North America (there are four of them; did you know that?). They also had representative samples of the wildlife to be found in the desert, birds, hooved animals, BIG cats, bear, elk, and others, including huge tarantulas, scorpions, and nasty looking rattlessnakes (all of which were WELL caged, mind you!).


Today, Saturday, July 3, we drove back up the road to Roswell, home of the "incident" in 1947 that has fueled the fantasies and speculations of generations of UFO-believers. The first weekend in July is the Annual Roswell UFO Festival so there was a lot going on. I didn't realize that I shared my natal month and year with such an historic moment! Do you remember hearing the story? A "flying saucer" supposedly crashed in the New Mexico desert outside Roswell and there were even dead bodies (and perhaps a living one) of true aliens. Aliens from outer space, not from across the border. 


There wasn't as much silliness as I expected although there was some, including the alien walking around for people to get their picture taken with it. We went and toured the International UFO Museum where several (presumably important) authors were hawking signed copies of their books about UFOs and other related phenomena. The many displays tell ALL about the incident at Roswell, the "cover-up" carried out by the U.S. government and had lots of "testimony" from people who purportedly saw something and how some of them were even threatened with dire consequences by military representatives if they didn't keep their mouths shut. I will admit to being a skeptic but something happened in early July, 1947, and it is clear that there is a lot of speculation about what we do or do not know. And probably will never know since the U.S. government has kept classified lots of things that might explain what this was all about. Was it a weather balloon? Was it a crashed alien space ship? Or was it a Russian experiment into space travel gone tragically awry (as suggested in a recent book claiming to review the story and to bring forth some new evidence from an interview with one who was there)? Or was it something else? 


I wish all of you a good, happy, and memorable Fourth of July! We'll celebrate ours at one of the local communities (either Carlsbad or Artesia, I suppose).

We also walked around the downtown taking in the sights of the festival, including the belly dancing troupe putting on an exhibition in one of the plazas (although I'm not sure what that had to do with UFOs). We also had our first New Mexico meal at El Toro Bravo near by to the International UFO Museum.