Caves, Mountains and Deserts, Oh My!

Bad Morning

Despite all the prep work I did on the two blog posts I had to complete yesterday, they still had me working really late into the evening. This kept my mind too active to fall asleep easily, and, combined with the noise from neighboring rooms, I didn’t log enough sleep. Again, my EST clock woke me up at 4 AM, and once I knew I wasn’t going to fall back to sleep, I just decided to get out of bed and start the day.

Booking rooms on the road has also become a source of anxiety after the debacle in Marlin, Texas. Regardless of the ratings I’m seeing in the listings, I’m reading reviews that remind me of my experience there. For example, people saying the pictures are old and the places are rotten despite the ratings. While I should’ve been doing yoga and working-out this morning, instead I was stressing-over where I was going to stay on Friday, Saturday and Sunday night, which had me out the door late, and I had a long day of driving and visiting three parks today.

Carlsbad Caverns National Park

The first park I visited today was Carlsbad Caverns National Park, about two hours south of Roswell. The path had me driving back down the south the way I came, so there was nothing interesting about it, until the very end when the landscape suddenly shifted from flat, endless plains to badlands and mountains. The cavern entrance is up on the top of a short mountain, and then descends 750 feet, either by a hike or an elevator. Given my time constraints, I opted to take the elevator which meant my tour only took about an hour total. Compared to Mammoth Cave, Carlsbad Caverns provides a highly polished and glamorous cave experience. The entire cave is lit-up a filled with a maze of interconnecting pathways and allow visitors to perform self-guided tours. Areas of interest are marked with numbers allowing you to listen to audio explanations on devices the park provides. It also felt climate controlled, so it ultimately feels like strolling through a museum rather than trekking through a cave hundreds of feet below the surface.

Guadalupe Mountains National Park

To say I visited Guadalupe Mountains National Park is a bit of a cheat because I simply didn’t have any time to do anything there. Before planning my trip, I didn’t even know it existed, but as I mapped the course between Roswell, Carlsbad Caverns and White Sands, I noticed there was another National Park on the way and decided why not just stop and get a stamp while I’m at it? The surrounding area into the horizons is a flat desert, which makes the Guadalupe Mountains and the range it comes from look spectacular as you approach them, and I spotted them in the distance high up from the Carlsbad Caverns parking lot. That being said, my time in Big Bend National Park the day before has sort of deadened my sensitivity for a while to something like that, unfortunately.

White Sands National Park

The drive from Guadalupe Mountains National Park to White Sands National Park was about three hours of straight driving in 90-degree, cloudless heat. It’s exactly what I’d been looking forward to on the trip and I enjoyed about half of it, but once my lack of sleep started catching-up to me, I unfortunately started wanting the day to be over.

White Sands National Park is really spectacular, though, once you get into it. While you’re never fooled that what you’re looking at is snow, it still gave me a chilly feeling, until I got out of my car anyway. The temperatures were in the low-90s, but the strong winds made it deceptively cool. Over the past two days, I’ve collected burns on my head and neck, and I’m fairly certain I’ll add burns to my ears after today. The park isn’t that big and I got a relatively short walk/hike in and took a bunch of photos before heading-out.

The White Sands Motel

Again, checking into motels is not as fun as it used to be. Fortunately, the owner of the motel was a sweet, sociable Indian woman who was super nice to me, which I really needed. The motel was all one level and she put me on an end, so I didn’t have to worry about people stomping around above me or on one side for at least tonight. After drinking down about a half gallon of water, I got into logging media and writing this blog post, and managed to finish-up right before 10 AM which allowed me to wind-down and get to bed relatively early for a change.