We decided to start the year off right by taking a weekend trip in January. We chose Carlsbad Caverns National Park for a couple of reasons: 1) It wasn't snowing there and 2) It enabled us to get another stamp in our National Parks Passport Book.
In 2002, when Joe and I were on a cruise in Alaska, we stopped in the port at Skagway. While wandering around the downtown area, we stopped in the Klondike Gold Rush National Historic Park. While we were there, we saw this book that looked like a passport and noticed that beside it was a stamp. Turns out that the National Park Service sells these "passports" and provides stamps so that visitors can record their park visits. We almost bought it, but I thought it was really for kids and I backed out. For the next 7 years, every time we visited a National Park, I looked at the stamp and thought about the ones I'd missed. Finally, when we visited South Dakota, Joe couldn't take it anymore - he bought one. Now we're on a mission to visit as many national parks as possible and fill our passport!
So...we flew in to El Paso and drove a couple of hours north to Carlsbad Caverns National Park just outside of Carlsbad, NM. We decided to take the Natural Entrance Tour where you walk down through the natural entrance of the cave, descend 750 feet and arrive in the "Big Room." The trail is pretty steep in places, but it was quite interesting. The Big Room is a natural limestone chamber which is almost 4,000 feet long, 625 feet wide and 350 feet high (at the highest point) and after visiting a couple of caves last summer in South Dakota, the "Big Room" seems enormous!!! Here are my favorite pictures:
Part of "Crystal Springs Dome":
Wales Mouth:
Witch's Finger:
We finished our tour and ate a late lunch there at the Visitor's Center. Then we decided to head towards White Sands. Our intent was to drive to Artesia, NM and spend the night, but there was still lots of daylight, so we decided to go ahead and drive all the way to Alamogordo. It ended up working out really well, except that the road goes up and over this apparently beautiful pass - through Cloudcroft, NM. And although it was still daylight when we left Artesia, it was dark well before we hit Cloudcroft. We could see piles and piles of snow on the sides of the road and in parking lots, too. Clearly, we are going to have to return in the daylight, but it was not going to be during this weekend.
On Sunday, we headed to White Sands National Monument. The sand is gypsum and was deposited at the bottom of a shallow sea that covered this area 250 million years ago. It is quite beautiful and fascinating. You're allowed to walk wherever you want on the sand and they rent sleds so you can sled down the big hills. Here are my favorite pictures of White Sands. In the first picture, the white line you see is actually leftover snow!
We actually would have liked to spend more time at White Sands, but unfortunately, our weekend was coming to a close. We completed our loop by going back to El Paso and boarded our plane back to DFW.
