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.