We got up early and back on the
road as soon as possible. I don’t think I hardly slept at all and we had a 7-hour
drive to Carlsbad, New Mexico.
This was fun a drive we were able to drive down an 80 mph road in the
middle of the desert and we had to whole road to ourselves for the most part. I
was truly amazed by all of the land, just dusty land as far as the eye can see;
it is really something to look at. I did get to see my first oil pump (I guess
that is what they are called) and then I got to see about 500 more. They were
everywhere just pumping away, but in the distance you could also see beautiful
wind turbine farms up on top of the mountains and hills. We drove for a long
time and I was able to pass my first truck on a two-lane road going 80 mph, it
was really exciting and scary, also I had David yelling, “Gun it! GO! GO!”. It
made my driving a lot more exciting,
We
finally made it to New Mexico. We
went straight to the Carlsbad Caverns National Park in Carlsbad New Mexico. We
made it in time to be able to hike down the cavern instead of taking the
elevator. We entered the natural entry where the cavern opens up, and it is
full of birds flying every which way, it smelled horrible because there was
bird poop all over the place, and of course I am not in the cave two seconds
and a bird poops right on me! I had kindly just pushed David out of the way
thinking it was going to land on him but no it hit me, so I wore bird poop all
day and I wore it well. So we kept on walking into the cave, it was getting
darker and darker, and colder. Then I started to think about the bats in the
cave and I was a little scared of the cave. It was really dark and water would
drip on you from random places on the ceiling, which added to creepy feeling.
Then as we continued on we started to see the amazing stalagmites, and other
features in the cave. It was breath taking (well literally because the air was
really thin down there) but it was just amazing. It is just incredible to think
that all this is 900 feet below the ground, yes 900 feet down. It took about
and hour to hike down to the main part of the caverns ad the whole time down I
was thinking that what we were seeing was the main part that is how awesome the
whole thing is. Then another hour or so too look around the main area and then
we took the elevator back up, we were past the time to be able to hike back out
of it, I took way too many pictures and my camera felt inadequate compared to
the all of the other thousand dollar cameras it was taking pictures beside
haha. My favorite part of the whole cavern was the mirror pool, which reflected
the ceiling and the cave feature called draperies, which were rock formations
that looked like beautiful, soft, cloth drapes. I also really liked the iceberg
rock which was a 250 ton rock that had fallen off of the cavern wall it was so
big we were still passing it a few levels down, This rock also made me afraid
that the next falling rock would occur while we were down there, which made my
heart pound a little faster. The cavern is one of the most amazing sites I have
ever seen it is just incredible.
Later
on we went and set-up camp in a really nice camp site about 16 miles from the
caverns. It was a much nicer evening and reassured my attraction to camping, we
were at the camp with about a hundred kids who were on a field trip, and so
they did a good job of scaring the snakes away. We did have some new friends,
some turtles who were housed near our campsite. We were able to lay out all of
our camping stuff to dry from the rainy night before, which the dry desert air
help a lot with that then we cooked a yummy rice dinner with nutella and peanut
butter for dessert. It was nice evening, we sat outside and I knitted. Then we
went back to the caverns to see the bat flight. This happens every night from
may to October the bats will fly out in masses out of the Cavern. It was so
cool, there were about 1000, which is low, In August they will have about a
half of a million bats. They will house hanging on the ceiling of the cavern.
They are small and fit about 300 per square foot and when they are all in the
cave and they will raise the temperature of the cavern from around 56 degrees
up to 90 degrees. It was so cool to see them all fly out and over us; I gained
a new appreciation for bats.
No comments:
Post a Comment