There just aren't any old songs about stalactites.

On this day we visited Carlsbad Caverns. Just like every other cave you visit, this place had the stalagmite that you are encouraged to touch to get it out of your system. Its name was Fred, though Frederika may have been more appropriate.



We took the Natural Entrance self-guided tour, which was really impressive. It was uncrowded, and the sheer scale of the rooms and steep decent was interesting. If you click on the pan above, you will see a very tiny person on the path near the hole at the bottom... that's the ranger, spraying off the asphalt. That hole is maybe 40 feet tall.



The same area, from the inside looking back up.



Once again, the scale of the picture is huge, though its hard to tell. This is looking back up the way we've come, with the trail angling up to the left, then back and forth until it reaches the bright hole in the middle right, which is many stories tall.



Another view further on, this time looking down at the switchbacks of the trail. It descends around 750 feet in a mile.


From there we took the self-guided Big Room tour, which wanders past many impressive formations, with fanciful names like Hall of the Gods.



Pointy!



This is the Caveman...



...and the Chandelier glowing in the distance.



There were pools of water in the cave, and places where it was actively dripping, but you could tell that the water level had dropped considerably in much of the area, and there was even a stop on the trail with a sign talking about a pool that just wasn't there. We asked a Ranger about this, and he said that for decades they lost a lot of moisture out the elevator shaft (you can take an elevator straight down instead of hiking), though now they are trying to prevent that with baffles, etc.


This is the lunchroom, which is 750 feet underground. It comes a close second to the picnic area in White Sands on the list of Strange Places We Have Eaten At.

"Out in the West Texas town of El Paso..."

On a whim Darrin and I decided to visit the Guadalupe Mountains National Park, which is near El Paso, in the way that anything in Texas is near anything else. (Its like, more than 100 miles away.)


Everyone thinks Texas is flat, but there are a few mountains here. The highest peak in Texas is in this park; its over 8000 feet.



The park is in the Chihuahuan desert, which has a unique collection of yuccas, prickly pears, chollas, little runty oaks, and other types of vegetation. The flower stalk of the yucca on the right grows an amazing 5-6 inches a day.



The hike we did took us up a canyon to a permanent spring, one of the few sources of water in the park.


Here we are looking back down across the valley at more typical Texas terrain. (flat!) The funny little hill in the distance is called nipple mountain, for fairly obvious reasons.


Click me to see where we went.

"Oh White Sands, come hold my lonely hand..."

We spent this day at White Sands National Monument. This is the road into the heart of the dunes area; at this point, there is no pavement and you are driving directly on packed dirt and sand. The banked sides from grading and the white color makes it feel like you are driving through snow.


This is probably the most surreal picnic spot we've ever been to.



The sand is actually about 97% pure gypsum, a mineral which is water soluble and has eroded out of the surrounding hillsides via rainwater, settled into alkali flats in the valley, crystallized again, gotten picked up by the wind, and formed into the dunes. It is a very special set of circumstances that created this place.





These are the markers for one of the trails in the park, which is the only way to mark a path out there. We had done a bit of cross-dune wandering, and quickly discovered that one couldn't rely on footprints for the way back; it was incredibly windy and ours would disappear back into the ripples in a matter of minutes. Unlike some of the dunes we've been out on, these were fairly hard-packed, and only the top few inches are loose.



There is almost no vegetation out there.


Click me to see where we went.

"And we're lost out here in the stars..."

So this morning we drove out to the Very Large Array National Radio Telescope, which is situated in a large plateau at about 7000 feet above sea level.



There was a little visitor center there with a short introductory film and some exhibits explaining the place and how it worked, and a walking tour that allowed you to get fairly close to one of the dishes. Each dish is about the size of a baseball diamond, and nearly 100 feet tall. They are set up on three radiating arms in a "Y" configuration. Each arm is 13 miles long, so when the scopes are all at their maximum spread, the array would cover the entire Washington DC metropolitan area, and then some (like as far as Fairfax!).






The arms are actually railways, and the dishes are moved around on them by special devices made for the purpose. We were lucky enough to be there when this was happening, and got to see one of these giant things trucking along at a brisk walking pace on its way to a new station along an arm. This hanger is used for maintenance and repair.






In the afternoon we went to the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, a place mostly known for the enormous numbers of waterfowl and cranes that winter there. It is more quiet there in the summer, but we still saw a nice assortment of wildlife. While we were in the visitor center, I looked through the "recent sightings" book and noticed that someone had written down a coati ... I asked the woman working there about it and she said the people who had seen it seemed pretty certain that is what they saw, but it was very unusual for the park; they usually don't come that far north. Well, coati were something we were specifically looking for, so this was kind of interesting news, but didn't take it too seriously. However, not 1 mile down the road, Darrin spotted one in the rearview mirror, crossing the dirt road. We were so stunned (and he was moving so quickly) that I only had time to get the binoculars on him and say "yep!"; so no picture, unfortunately. But what a nifty animal!


Click me to see where we went. If you zoom in on the Very Large Array marker, you can see the giant "Y" shape made by the rails for the array. One of the arms stretches across the highway.

"I strolled to an old mission garden..."

We are interested in the architecture of Spanish Missions, and wanted to see some of the examples in New Mexico, so we started the day with a visit to Isleta Pueblo, and their old mission church, which dates from the 1600's. The Pueblo itself has been occupied continuously since the 1300's.




A somewhat surreptitious picture of one of the little beehive shaped ovens everyone seemed to have in their backyard that are used to bake bread. Photography was allowed here (unlike most occupied pueblos), but we didn't want to be intrusive.



At a tiny gift shop in the pueblo, a woman was selling 'pumpkin pies', which were these sort of folded flat-bread things filled with pumpkin and raisins, and baked in those little ovens. They were quite tasty.


We took a New Mexico Scenic Byway called the Salt Mission Trail that passed through several tiny towns with funny little churches, all from the 1800's.



The weather was highly variable. This picture and the one above were taken about 20 minutes apart. This particular style of church was a favorite (down to the color of trim) and we saw several.






This is the Quarai section of Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument. These missions are obviously ruins; abandoned in the late 1600's mostly due to fierce aggression from non-Christian Indians. In addition to the mission itself, there were ruins of a large village nearby. One interesting thing at both this site and the next was the inclusion of a kiva in the architecture of the mission. There was no real explanation for this; the park service suggested that the kivas were built to help aid the transition to Christianity for the Indians. In later years though, Indians would have to pursue their traditional rituals in secret or risk whipping and such by the missionaries.



The structures were fortress-like.



These ruins are at the Abo section of Salinas, and were built and later abandoned under similar circumstances; with everyone leaving for safer quarters along the Rio Grande.






Socorro is one of the areas people ended up settling, and Mission San Miguel, still in use today, was built in the early 1600's, though it has been much modified over the years.


Click me to see where we went.

"Ridin' down the canyon..."

On day 8 we visited Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument, a place that is relatively new and so obscure its not actually on most maps... we decided to go there because we'd passed the sign for it on the highway and it sounded cool.



The interesting geological formations are eroded tuff, similar to Bandelier. That baby thunderstorm in the distance grew to massive proportions by the time we left the park.





One of the trails headed up a narrow side canyon.



Along the way we found a nice petroglyph of a snake.






The canyon at its narrowest was considerably cooler than the rest of the trail, and often only a few feet wide.



Later in the day we stopped at Petroglyph National Monument in Albuquerque, where there are thousands of images pecked into the lava fields west of the city. This petroglyph is of a macaw, which the people of the area acquired via trade with people from South America. Macaw feathers were used in ceremonial headdresses and the like.







We walked around the old part of the city and ate at this little cafe for dinner, which is in an adobe house that dates from just after the city was founded in 1706.

Click me to see where we went.

"I wore moccasins on my feet, and I'd make believe I was under a teepee"

We spent the day at Bandelier National Monument, which protects numerous interesting archaeological sites. This is a large kiva, situated in Frijoles Canyon. Kivas were below-ground ceremonial and communal gathering places for the Pueblo peoples. The ruins here date from the 1100s to the 1500s.



A little way down the canyon was this large, baseball diamond-shaped pueblo. The belt of trees behind it marks the path of a creek, which was a permanent water source for the people who lived here.



The walls of the canyon look a bit like sandstone, but they are actually tuff, a layer of volcanic ash from an enormous eruption that deposited a layer of material 1000 feet thick. The stuff is incredibly soft and erodes easily, forming natural caves that the Pueblo people took advantage of. By enlarging some of the caves and building walls in front of them, they made secure and comfortable lodgings.



The park service kindly provided ladders into some of the cave rooms, called "cavetes".






This kiva was carved out of the cliff wall, and was used for ceremonial weaving.



This was called Long House, for obvious reasons. Here you can see, or imagine, what the multi-story pueblo would have looked like when in use. The rows of smaller holes are for the vigas (roof beams).



This is the fun trail to Alcove house. At this point a noisy thunderstorm was building just over the canyon wall, so there was some sense of urgency to get up and back down the 4 ladders (140 feet worth) before we got rained on.



Alcove house, with an above-ground kiva, more cavetes and vigas holes.


We returned to the car via the nature trail along the creek.



We then visited the Tsankawi section of the park, which had a fantastic trail up to an unexcavated pueblo, then along a ridge where there were more cave rooms. What was especially interesting about the hike was that the trail itself was ancient, worn into the soft tuff by original inhabitants of the area. There were fantastic stairways and channels; some nearly waist deep and barely wide enough for us to pass through.



The pueblo was beautifully situated on the top of the plateau, with great views of the mountains and mesas nearby.



The skies were fantastic all day; fortunately, we never got rained on, despite the constant rumble of thunder.


Mmmm.... Southwestern food! I realize this picture doesn't look that yummy, but really, it was terrific. The big plate is carne adovada (red chile marinated pork), black beans, and something called Calabacitas, which is corn, zucchini, onion, and melted cheese... a standard side dish in these parts. The puffy things in the middle are sopapillas, to be eaten with honey, and in the back are a red chile sauced tamale, and a bowl of the spiciest tortilla soup in all of creation.


Click me to see where we went.