Day 9 Carlsbad Caverns and Guadalupe National Park

It was an interesting sleep adventure when the temperatures don’t actually get below freezing, but in fact waiver in the lower 40s.  The heater would stop and go determined by the temperature of our tent cube and over the course of the night, socks came off, extra shirts came off and extra blankets came off as it was too warm otherwise. Breaking camp is quick and easy at this point and we were ready ahead of schedule. We had a drive to get to Carlsbad Caverns as we had a time slot for entering the caves.  Today is the self-guided tour. 

The roads were blocked (?) as we stopped and got some coffee for the road (easier to buy when you are in town vs either starting up a fire or the coffee maker) and our GPS took us on an interesting detour. This particular detour put us on a rock road and then we drove THROUGH a creek which had a trickling of water.  We drove on a little more and we encountered another creek and then, yes, I kid you not, a Family Dollar semi.  We wondered and discussed how on earth a semi could have driven through those small creeks we'd just maneuvered through and around those curves on this rock road but at this point in his journey he was stopped with his flashers on.  We guess he was trying to figure out how to turn around!!  We drove on and encountered yet another creek, this one with a warning about not driving through if it was flooded. We weren’t sure what determined flooding?  This one was flowing pretty freely and you could see a nice little waterfall at the edge/ditch, so definitely deeper.  Another truck our size came from the other direction without even thinking about stopping so we assumed this was not considered flooded and drove on through.  That semi would NEVER have made it through that!  Most of the vehicles we passed on this road were trucks or SUVS, I don’t know if a car would have made it through that last creek as it was fairly deep.  

The terrain changed to much more hilly and snowy, the temperature dropped 15 degrees in just a few minutes.  It wasn’t in the low 40s any more!  It stayed around 20 for the rest of our journey.  There were ski slopes along these pretty quiet isolated roads but nothing going on.  It was pretty early and a Monday.  There were many fields and lots of cows, some like home and some longhorns! Today we actually saw a herd of elk, a small herd but very cool.  We’ve seen the signs along the road to look out for them but hadn’t seen them out and about.  Then the cold fog rolled in and was dominant for our remaining drive to Carlsbad. The fog was so thick when we turned off for the park entrance we couldn’t see the cars in front of us.  It was misty and the bushes and trees all were frosty, coated with ice.  They were lovely! 

 

We entered the visitor’s center early and they let us go in ahead of our time.  We opted to enter via the Natural Entrance which is through the outside.  From the spring through the late fall each evening they have a special outside arena near this entrance where you can sit and watch the bats exit, lots of bats!!  There aren’t too many right now as it is winter (We have been told it has been uncharacteristically cold this year!).  This entrance features a 1 mile DOWN ramp, switching back and forth with amazing cave formations and oh, the wonderment of it all!  Once you’ve traversed down, down, down you enter the Big Room, the “official” tour begins for most I believe.  Most take the elevator down and do the 1.2 mile through the Big Room. We did encounter several people going UP the entrance ramp as the natural entrance wasn’t open when they had their early time and they really wanted to see that part of the cave.  I don’t blame them.  We would have done it too as caves are just awesome.  None of this cave has any tight squeezes so no claustrophobia.  We were about 750’ UNDER the visitor’s center!  A park ranger that was leading a guided tour near us stated that they had been closed due to weather and today was their first day open in a week.  We have been very lucky in that regard!  We did take the elevator up once we were done with our self-guided tour as we wanted to get to Guadalupe National Park early enough to set up camp and hike.  We have a guided tour set up for the caves tomorrow and the parks aren’t too far apart (but they are in different states!).  When we left the center, the fog was still thick and it was still so cold.  All of their trails were closed but one so we took a quick hike along the nature trail in the fog.

When we got to Guadalupe NP the rangers there warned us that there was a winter weather forecast for the park and he wouldn’t hike some of the trails that we had hoped to do first thing in the morning.  He said they are slippery on a good day so icy precipitation wouldn’t make them any easier.  We also discovered that our tent site we had reserved was literally a tent only site and we couldn’t park our truck there but had to walk everything in.  We could have moved all of our sleeping gear to our tent cube but with the winter weather advisory we came up with Plan B.  We hiked a smaller hike this evening while we could, and it was beautiful!  The temperature here at Guadalupe was back up in the 40s!  We canceled our tent site as we didn’t want to have our truck and tent separate and mess with potential ice in the morning, and drove back to Carlsbad Caverns and booked a hotel there close by.  We can then (hopefully) make our scheduled ranger-guided tour and head toward Big Bend tomorrow as soon as we are done.  We didn’t spend as much time as originally planned at Guadalupe but that is okay too.  We have been so lucky thus far on our journey so a small glitch is quite okay. We will go back as they have some nice, challenging trails to be conquered!