Land of Enchantment

Carlsbad, New Mexico is, without a doubt, the most forlorn, unloved, and depressing town that Rachel and I have ever visited. That's saying something! And, I LOVE New Mexico ... I want to retire here, for goodness sake! We had high hopes, since this is the gateway community to two full-blown, card-carrying National Parks: Guadalupe Mountains and Carlsbad Caverns. That should mean something, right? As best we can tell, not a soul has ever sunk a penny into anything that might liven this place up, make it feel homey, or simply add something that might show that Carlsbad's residents love it. This was a common scene:

To be clear, it's not like we drove around town looking for the worst of the worst. This was just a small step below normal in this town. It feels almost like, when something breaks down, the desert sun scares anyone away from actually fixing it ... so things fall apart ... and then they sit. 

My first reaction was one of sympathy. Maybe this is just an economically depressed community. After looking up the statistics, that doesn't appear to be it. Finally, we drew the conclusion that this odd combination must be a factor of the town's economy: not that it's depressed, but by what drives it. This is largely an oil, fracking, and natural gas producing town. It's just a guess, but it seems like there's a lot of transients ... folks who drop in with their pickup trucks and their motor homes, stick around to work in the fields for a while, and then move on. Maybe that's it. And maybe it's not. Maybe it's just a place that the world forgot, and which doesn't particularly care to be remembered.

On the brighter side: National Parks! Two of them. We spent our weekends hiking both aboveground and below. First, we checked out Guadalupe Mountains. 

This is a place with a lot of desert, a lot of sun, and a lot of wind! At the visitor center, the Ranger gave us a couple of recommendations. One was a trail that had also been recommended to me by a friend, but it consisted of an 8-mile trek with 3,000 feet of elevation gain. We're pretty hearty hikers, but that's a LOT of climbing. And, we were warned by multiple sources that the winds at the top of the mountain are intense. We agonized over the decision a bit, but ultimately common sense (and my bad hip) got the better of us, and we decided to go with the other recommendation: Devil's Hall.

Along the trail, we came across a rock troll ...

A tree troll ...

And a cave troll ...

On Sunday, we checked out Carlsbad Caverns.

Our experience at this park was the polar opposite of our impression of the town. We've been to plenty of cave parks, and they're generally not my favorite. Carlsbad Caverns was, by an order of magnitude, the most amazing, jaw-dropping cave experience I've ever had! We decided to take the long route and enter by the natural entrance.

Once inside, it was impossible not to be floored by the enormity of everything in this cave system. You could never come close to representing it with photos. Our hike was about 2.5 miles ... and that's below ground. At one point, we read that the room we were in was the size of 6 football fields!

This place is so huge, there's actually a snack bar inside the cave. Seriously.

As an aside, the National Parks are identified by codes. The code for each park is made up of the first two letters of the first two words in its name. If it has a one-word name, it's the first four letters in the name. So, for example, Yosemite is YOSE and Guadalupe Mountains is GUMO. However, the Park Service granted a special dispensation to Carlsbad Caverns to spare it the indignity of being called CACA (cue sad trombone noise). It's referred to simply as CAVE.

Weekdays here we modest. We took a few evening walks.

Our house actually has a replica old-school arcade game. Nathan has gotten pretty good at Asteroids, though I can usually still eek out a win.

But, other than that, there really wasn't much to lure us out of the house. 

Our second weekend, it was back to GUMO. We explored a little and tried a few varied trails in a couple of different locations.

As you can see, our trip to Marcus Overlook proved the rangers right about the serious wind problem this park has! On Sunday, Nathan took charge and chose our hike: the Smith Spring trail. We enjoyed a little of the local history and a couple of picturesque springs. The scenery around the upper spring was so charming that I think this hike, though modest, was my favorite in this park.

When our second weekend was over, we were ready to move on. The parks helped us make the best of the bummer town, but it was time to head to greener pastures. Or, as we were heading next to Arizona, at least less depressing ones.

Nathan's Stuff: the Sequel

 Today I am writing a sequel to my last post which was about our Carlsbad Cave adventure.  As I was saying, there are not animals down there but it was the "whole most spectacular care I have ever seen" part made up for that.  There were plenty of stalactites and stalagmites.  For those of you who don't know what those are, they are rock formations that spike up from the ground and hang from the ceiling.  There were some of the biggest cave rooms I've ever seen.  There were some very colorful springs.  If you're in New Mexico and a total National Park Geek it would be a big highlight of a trip. There might be another cave adventure blog post. There is never a shortage of interesting content. 

Nathan's Stuff: We're Spelunkers

 Yesterday I became a cave man, I mean a spelunker.  I know what your thinking, I should shave gotten a cave troll pictured, and, well, we should've gotten animal pictures in general.  But, there honestly weren't any.  We were talking to our hosts at our Texas trailer and they said they have been spelunking and there aren't many (I didn't mean to but a "m" there by the way) animals in caves.  We interrupt this paragraph to tell you breaking news. The blog post is done now.

Signs of the Oncoming Apocalypse, Part 2 (Mile 8,590, Trail Mile 186.48)

Big Bend was a pretty unique stop for a number of reasons, Tex-snow-pocalypse being just one of them. Another was our accommodations - the Super Trailer! Another was that fact that this is our first stay where we actually got to know our hosts. Mark and Michelle Chiles are native Texans who, in retirement, decided it would be fun to use their trailer to host visitors at their ranch. Their house is immediately adjacent to the trailer, and, I'll be honest, this left me a little on edge at first. But, they were clear when we arrived that they loved having visitors but that they would give us as much company or privacy as we wanted. Anyone who knows Rachel and I knows we're not the type to casually sit down and shoot the bull with strangers for fun. However, after 10 minutes of conversation with them, they felt like old friends. 

Each night, we would return to the ranch after a long day and, before dinner, sit out on the porch and have a nice, socially-distanced visit with Mark and Michelle (FYI, the rifle above Nathan's head is a BB gun that Mark uses to shoo javelinas away from their cactus garden). 

Equally exciting were our visits with the Chiles' non-human neighbors.

That's a javelina, aka, a wild desert pig or peccary.

A family of gray foxes.

And what seemed like a whole herd of mule deer. It was like a whole zoo, right in the front yard!

Even the park was a unique experience, which, after all the National Parks we've seen, is really saying something. Big Bend is one of the most remote parks in the lower 48, more distant from population centers than other heavy-hitters like Death Valley and Yellowstone. And, it contains the gigantic Chisos range, which adds a little elevation to otherwise (generally) flat Texas. It's southern border also happens to be an international border, with only the Rio Grande lying between the park and Mexico.

We started our exploration by heading toward the mountains, where there was still a little snow on the ground.

The hike along the Lost Mine Trail, with about 1,200 feet of elevation gain, was tiring but amazing.

After our hike and a light lunch, we headed to the park's eastern border for our first glimpse of the Rio Grande and an unobstructed view into Mexico.

Nathan tried to skip a stone across the international border. Still not sure if that's legal ...

On Wednesday, we changed things up and tried a rambling cross-desert trek on the Mule Ears Trail. Those are the mules ears back there in the distance.

It was a welcome change from the hard-core climbing of the previous day.

We then headed back down to the Rio Grande for an amazing hike in Santa Elena Canyon. 

By Wednesday night we were ready for some smooth sailing. The weather forecast called for a little rain in the evening, and, sure enough, we could hear the raindrops pounding on our roof for most of the night. When we awoke on Thursday before dawn, things were quiet again. We took this to mean the rain had stopped. And, in fact, it had, but not because the skies had cleared. It had turned into snow!

Undaunted, we packed up the car, headed down the dirt road toward the highway, and crossed our fingers.

Thankfully, by the time we reached Terlingua, the snow had turned to rain, and things started to feel a little less other-worldly. From there, we cut south, hugging the Rio Grande as it passed through Big Bend Ranch State Park. This park didn't have the title "National Park" attached to it, so it's considered a bit of a side-show to Big Bend NP; however, we'd received recommendations to visit from both our local hosts, and a friend of mine who used to be a National Park ranger in Texas. And, thank goodness we stopped for a brief hike because the scenery was undoubtedly as beautiful as anything we'd seen in Texas so far.

The rest of the day driving was fairly monotonous and uneventful, which, after all the winter weirdness, was fine by us! We passed in and out of the snow a few times as we headed north. We did a little shoe shopping outside of Marfa.

Just before dinner time, we crossed the state line into New Mexico and the Mountain Time Zone. Shortly after that, we were getting settled into our new home in Carlsbad and thanking our lucky stars that we were somewhere boring again.

Looking at the map, it's hard to believe that the circle is almost complete and that our trip is coming to an end.