Voyager America  

BIG Natural Wonders Continue:

Carlsbad Caverns National Park, Carlsbad, NM

The Natural Entrance Trail into the caverns.

"Beauty and wonder...above and below. High ancient sea ledges, deep rocky canyons, flowering cactus, and desert wildlife...treasures above the ground in the Chihuahuan Desert. Hidden beneath the surface are more than 119 caves...formed when sulfuric acid dissolved limestone leaving behind caverns of all sizes and strange but beautiful creations everywhere."

I last passed through Gatesville, Texas, almost 40 years ago and last passed through Big Bend National Park 40 years ago.  Now it is on to Carlsbad Caverns which I have only visited once before, 50 years ago, the summer of 1970.  I came here with two friends, David Apple and Tom McAbee.  We were on an eight week road trip around America just after David and I graduated from Pennridge High. Tom had just finished his freshman year at Hamilton College.  We spent a few good days with David's relatives, the Hunsickers, in El Paso, Texas.  We then drove from El Paso to Carlsbad straight through the night.  And what a ride: I remember the road being filled with jackrabbits, snakes, and Night Hawks----they came onto the tar road at night for its warmth and seemed to be everywhere.  We slept in the car in the Carlsbad Caverns National Park parking lot until they opened and then ventured inside.  The world inside the cave was beyond imagination---so huge---so beautiful---who knew such things existed. From my last time in the cave, I remembered the immensity of the Big Room, that a 37 story building could fit into one part of it (I actually remembered it to be 17 stories so it was way bigger than I remembered), and I remembered these very delicate shapes, called helictites, that were in a part of the cave we did not now have access to. 50 years is an amazing stretch of time to reckon with.  This awesome cave was the perfect place to enjoy such a reckoning. 

Some of the Giants that tower above our heads.

The caverns are filled with stalagmites, stalactites and so many other strange and fascinating formations.

 

The Big Room. Floor space in the Big Room is about the size of 14 football fields.

This formation is called Drapery.

Some of these long formations are as thin as soda straws.

In the lower right corner of this photo you can see the railings along the walking path.
It lends some perspective to the immensity of the area of this chamber of the Big Room.

White Sands National Park, Alamagordo, NM

Our first glimpse of White Sands National Park in the far distance. 
The white strip before the distant mountains is the park.

"Like No Place Else on Earth. Rising from the heart of the Tularosa Basin is one of the world's great natural wonders - the glistening white sands of New Mexico. Great wave-like dunes of gypsum sand have engulfed 275 square miles of desert, creating the world's largest gypsum dunefield. White Sands National Park preserves a major portion of this unique dunefield, along with the plants and animals that live there."

After an mind-blowing time at Carlsbad Caverns, we drove over the Sacramento Mountains and through the Lincoln Forest to Alamagordo, NM on our way to White Sands National Monument. Because of Covid precautions, the Visitor Centers of the national parks and monuments are not open, however each location usually has a table outdoors, manned by a park ranger, with maps, pamphlets and other sources of information about each location. The ranger at White Sands was extremely excited to tell us about a very recent geological find that has elevated the status of the National Monument to a National Park.....White Sands National Park! 

In 2018, scientists discovered footprints that appear to show humans stalking a giant sloth. The human footprints were found inside the footprints of the sloth as it was tracked. Another set of footprints discovered is believed to be a young female who walked for over a mile with a toddler's footprints occasionally showing up besides her. This is really amazing. You can read more about these incredible discoveries on the White Sands website under Fossilized Footprints. Also National Geographic recently published an article in October of 2020 about these extraordinary finds. Type National Geographic White Sands into your browser to read this story.

White Sands National Park occupies just a portion of this massive gypsum dunefield. You can stand out in the dunes and see nothing but sand, immediately transported to another place and time....and maybe even another planet or moon. A road takes you 8 miles into the dunefield. There are hiking trails, picnic areas, back-country campsites and huge dunes you can slide down. And the sand is pure white and so fine, sparkling like crystals in the sun.

There is another side, a dark side, to these pure white sands. As big as the national park feels to you when you are standing deep into the dunes, it pales in size compared to the rest of this massive dunefield. Located to the north of the national park is the huge White Sands Missile Range. It is the site of the "Trinity" nuclear test, part of the Manhattan Project. "Trinity' was the code name of the first detonation of an implosion-design plutonium nuclear device. The complexity of the design of this new "atomic" bomb required a major effort from the Los Alamos Laboratory in northern New Mexico, and concerns about whether it would work led to a decision to conduct the first nuclear test at White Sands Missile Range on July 16, 1945. The rest of the story is a very grim part of our history and the history of the world. The same kind of bomb was detonated over Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9, 1945.

The beautiful pure white dunes of the national park in juxtaposition to the dark, harsh reality of the missile base and its history, is quite an unsettling contrast. Today, White Sands Missile Range regularly conducts missile tests. What kind we have no idea. But residents of Alamagordo hear them all the time.

Could this be the surface of the moon?

The recent discovery of human and giant sloth footprints at White Sands
National Park tell a fascinating story as depicted in these illustrations.

The sands of White Sands are forever shifting and changing shapes.

Many plants and wildlife thrive in these dunefields. Bobcat, Coyote, Kit Fox, American
Badger, Apache Pocket Mouse, Lesser Nighthawk, Burrowing Owl, Grasshopper Mouse,
Pallid Bat, Desert Cottontail Rabbit and Greater Roadrunner all live here.

Derek suggested that we take Selfies in the
different places we visit. We are happy to comply.