Our first defined destination was Carlsbad Caverns National
Park in southern New Mexico. We headed that way after crossing the Mississippi
River by traveling through Arkansas and then all the way across the great state
of Oklahoma.
One of the interesting formations at Carlsbad Caverns
On our way to Carlsbad, we woke up one Sunday morning in mid-April in Seminole, Oklahoma, about 50 miles from Oklahoma City. I glanced at a calendar and realized it was April 19, the anniversary of the Oklahoma federal building bombing in 1995. It was a little strange to drive through Oklahoma City on that particular date.
Past Oklahoma City, I-40 parallels old Route 66, which is celebrating a centennial this year. We drove along a few sections of the original Route 66 a couple of years ago, coming back from Thanksgiving in Oregon, so we’ve seen some of the sights along the Mother Road, as John Steinbeck called it. I think about Steinbeck’s writing from time to time as we wander around; his Travels with Charlie, in which he wrote about his trips in a specially converted GMC pickup truck camper, was definitely one of my inspirations for our years on the road. Blue Highways by William Least Heat Moon was the inspiration to take the back roads and see the country away from the interstates. Both are great books.
Speaking of which, we were happy to get off I-40 and onto
U.S. Route 183, heading south from Arapaho, Oklahoma, toward Texas. We had two
choices of places to stay for the night, Great Plains State Park or Quartz
Mountain State Park. We chose Quartz Mountain and we were not disappointed. It
was a bit of a side trip, but well worth it. After about 20 miles on state
routes, through a town called Lone Wolf, we started to see mountains. Just one
small range of very old mountains, with flat land extending out far beyond the
peaks. They are the Wichita Mountains (not to be confused with the Ouachita
Mountains in Arkansas, where we were last month, though the names are
pronounced the same way, just to be confusing).
Up close, the mountains were even more interesting. I was
particularly intrigued by a huge standing rock that looked just like a
malevolent penguin to me. That might have been just me; I’ll bet some people
think it looks like a statue of the Virgin Mary. But I liked the idea of a
giant penguin keeping an eye on the campground below. There’s also a big lake,
originally dammed for agriculture in the area, but it’s recreational, too, and
has good fishing if the number of fishermen we saw there is any indication.
Penguin Rock is near the top on the left
The next day, we drove up to Baldy Point, a few miles from
the campgrounds, and you could see the marks left by ancient waves from the sea
that the mountains once rose out of, which was amazing. We also saw some people
rock climbing there, which was terrifying.
Baldy Point—I still cannot believe people climb this!
On to Lubbock, Texas, where there weren’t any public campgrounds. We stayed at a private lake campground that had been created in 1957, and as far as I could tell, nothing had been done to the place since. But they thought they were something special; the entrance fee was crazy high, on top of the camping fee. We were glad to leave, and I understood the old Mac Davis song that had the line “happiness is Lubbock in your rearview mirror.”
We soon left Texas behind, too, and crossed into New Mexico,
but still in the Permian Basin, where oilfields are perhaps the only industry.
Our route was lined with businesses catering to the oil industry, but while it
was cloudy in Texas, the sun shone brightly in a deep blue sky in New Mexico.
We stopped in Carlsbad at a park along the Pecos River and had lunch, then
stopped again nearby for ice cream cones after lunch. Another 20 miles down the
road, we got to Whites City. It’s the nearest place to stay to Carlsbad
Caverns, so we stayed there.
Sunset from Whites City Inn
We had an entry reservation for the caverns the next
morning, and the self-guided tour we took through them was nothing short of
spectacular. We’d been to Mammoth Cave a few months ago, and I know there’s
lots to see there that we didn’t see, but the main “wander through” part of
Carlsbad has a LOT more to see over a 1.25 mile, fairly easy path. There are
some sharp inclines, up and down, but though they said there were tight spots,
I would hardly call them very difficult. No “Fat Man’s Misery” on that path. We
made it through at an easy pace, often stopping to let people pass, in about
two hours, and it was an amazing two hours. I’ve got a few of the photos I took
below, but I took dozens of photographs of all the wild and crazy features in
the caverns.
Whites City was created by a family named White, who were
not related to Jim White, the first person to really explore the cave in the
modern day. Odd random fact. But the folks who built Whites City were aiming
to create a tourist attraction equal to the caverns. A tough task, and
apparently it didn’t work for long. The bits and pieces that are left
are an odd assortment. There is a strip of stores, mostly attached, that sell
souvenirs and a pitiful array of groceries. The various rooms—once perhaps
separate shops—have oddball things like stuffed animal heads, human and horse
legged stools, and other strange things. Mike posed with the alien statues
outside the grocery.
Once upon a time, the White family built a castle on the
side of the mountain that rises above the town. It housed a museum and souvenir
shop, and tourists arrived via a tram, now long gone. But the ruins of the
castle remain on the hillside.
The ruins of a castle-museum-tram line-
roadside attraction in Whites City, New Mexico
Back down in the town, there is also a post office, a
restaurant, and a gas station—the last gas station for 111 miles, according to
the sign. That’s the direction we took when we headed out, and our route turned
out to be the Texas Mountain Trail (we crossed from New Mexico back into Texas
about 15 miles from Whites City). First we drove through the lovely Guadalupe
Mountains, which are another national park themselves. Then there were some
mountains, mostly seen from a distance, that were disjunct mountain ranges;
that is, there were just singular mountains rising up from fairly flat plains,
not long mountain ridges. They are sometimes referred to as sky islands, or so we heard. The Cornudas Mountains were volcanic, we could tell
from their shape. There was a quirky roadside stop, with a restaurant and gift
shop, in the vicinity of the Cornudas. We stopped and bought cookies
so we could be customers and use the bathroom. As we got closer to El Paso, the
Hueco Mountains came into view.
The Hueco Mountains near El Paso
We just passed through El Paso, stopping to get gas, since
the strong headwind had almost depleted our gas tank during the drive from
Carlsbad Caverns. On to Las Cruces, in New Mexico again, where we stopped for
groceries and then continued on to Leasburg Dam State Park. It was a nice park,
but there was a lot of construction going on, so we just stayed overnight. But
there was a beautiful sunset! I do like a good sunset.
The sunset showing off a southwestern palette
We backtracked to Las Cruces, then drove on west into Arizona, destination Benson, then a few miles south to Karchner Caverns State Park. A co-worker friend of mine had told me when we were first planning to wander around the country that, if we ever got to the southwest, we should definitely see Karchner Caverns. He did not mislead us. The cave system is much smaller than Carlsbad Caverns, but it also wasn’t discovered until 1974, and was not developed as a tourist destination until the 1990s.
This slow move from discovery to a tourist attraction gave the state of Arizona the opportunity to find out everything that had been done wrong at other caves, such as Carlsbad, and do it right. This included not building the visitors’ center and parking lot directly over the cave (which would change the runoff that seeped through, affecting the cave quite a lot). They also didn’t build an elevator, which would dry out the cave. Instead there are a series of air locks to keep the humidity of the cave at the proper level. We took a ranger-guided tour of the Rotunda and Throne Room (the other part of the cave is closed from April to October because bats there are nesting). What we got to see was quite amazing; there was one column, formed by a huge stalactite and stalagmite that met in the middle, that they call “Kubla Khan,” from the poem Xanadu by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which begins
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
Karchner Caverns from the outside—
you aren’t allowed to take photos inside
I think that concludes our underground tour of the southwest, although I guess the Grand Canyon is, in its own way, subterranean as well. That’s coming soon!
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