White Sands and Caves

We headed into New Mexico with a very optimistic visiting schedule: hit White Sands for some dune-surfing first thing in the morning, stop by the air and space museum to learn a bit about human flight, and then head up to Roswell to learn about neighbors who may have flown in to visit. The dune-surfing was huge fun, riding plastic toboggans down pure white gypsum dunes. The migration of the sand has led to some very interesting plant life, as the vegetation tries to cope with 30-foot high dunes that can move up to 100 feet per year, like slowly breaking waves.










White Sands National Monument is right in the middle of a giant rocket-testing facility, and that’s what the museum was focused on. This gave an interesting nuts-and-bolts view of the space program, which was very different from the human-drama focus of Johnson Space Center which we’d see on our way through Texas. Both of these stops took longer than Dave’s estimation, so the little green men and their visits to New Mexico would remain a mystery…

The reason that we had such an action-packed start to our New Mexico visit was reservations for a cave tour in Carlsbad Caverns National Park. There are huge rooms full of amazing formations that you can see on self-guided tours, but for the really serious sections you need to have a few rangers along as guides. The tours are generally booked well in advance, but we did manage to book one space on the Spider Cave tour and two for the candlelight trip through Left Hand Tunnel. Viewing the cave formations by flickering candle lanterns was a very different experience from self-guided meander through the brightly-lit Big Room.









The Carlsbad website had all sorts of warnings about people with asthma going into the tight crawls of Spider Cave, so Dave had to face this one unaccompanied. The cave got its name from the hordes of spiders that used to occupy the first 30 or 40 feet of the entrance tunnel. This section is so narrow that you have to crawl on your belly with your arms in front of you; so having the walls “pulsing with life,” as one ranger described it, must have been quite the experience. Fortunately the spiders were no longer present, and there were only a few blind cave crickets watching as we squirmed through into the Auditorium. The Auditorium is the first room in Spider Cave, and is probably the size of a cargo van. After the opening crawl it really did feel like an auditorium…



The formations deeper in the cave were like nothing I’d ever seen before - they looked more like deep-sea life than rock. Calcite deposits formed under pressure into snowflakes, or ‘popcorn rock,’ or spongy-looking helictites that looked like undersea sponges. We had to move very carefully through the tight passages, since the formations are extremely fragile and the slightest touch could destroy them.

Cochise Stronghold, Chiricahua National Monument and a Motel with Heat

After seeing where the cowboys and the outlaws hung out, we went to visit Cochise Stronghold, where Cochise and his apache warriors were based during their war with the white settlers. These days the Stronghold is better known as a hiking and climbing destination. As Megan’s finger still wasn’t quite back to 100% we focused on hiking and exploring, which was probably all to the good since the afternoon winds were howling. We hiked from the east side over the pass and down into the west and then back, past huge rock walls and funky desert plants – a truly beautiful place!


"Duck on a Rock"

After our time at Cochise Stronghold, we were heartened by how warm it was camping even at the quite high elevation of 5000 feet, so we trucked over across the valley from Cochise to the Chiricahua mountains (to pronounce, think ‘cheery-cow-a’). It is a magical place, with hundreds of towers of basalt rock (but no rock-climbing allowed), all shaped by winds over thousands of years. Of course, although it seems obvious, we never considered how windy hiking in such an area would be! Also, the temperature plummeted at night so we spent about 48 hours in the park completely frozen. To warm up, we hiked for about 15 miles during our one full day there, but at no time were we able to take off any of the many layers we had worn….After eating pretty much all our food and quite bored of the chill we decided to recharge in the nearest town we could find. One motel room with the heat cranked, two showers, a very large pizza and some cheesy 1980’s movies put us right again. The next day we hit the road into New Mexico.

Tombstone

No trip to Arizona would be complete without a stop at Tombstone, 'the town to tough to die’, the scene of the historic gunfight at the OK Corral (you’ve probably seen the movie) as well as a host of Wild West characters. The old Boot Hill Cemetary has been restored and cleaned up, so you can see the graves of many (in)famous gunfighters and their victims.


The losers at the OK Corral

Today, Tombstone presents itself along the lines of Disney, with great variety (and quality) of reenactments. The idea is to show the history and lore of the gunfighters, outlaws and law enforcement of the area during its heyday in order to provide a tourist industry for the town.

Re-enactments in the streets

Megan’s Birthday

As an aspiring student of ecology, Megan chose to visit Biosphere 2 on her birthday, conveniently only about 20 minutes from our campsite near Tucson. Biosphere 2, a giant test-tube for the Earth’s many ecosystems, has been around for about 20 years, amidst much controversy. The early years saw people placed within its airtight seal, to live and grow all their own food, breathe oxygen, etc, completely separate and independent of Biosphere 1, AKA our planet. Needless to say, the early experiments were rife with the human drama that comes with 8 people locked up together, but they did come up with some useful scientific information as well! The Biosphere contains 5 distinct ecosystems including the largest man-made ocean in the world. Today, it’s owned by the University of Arizona and is no longer sealed off completely, but is the home of some interesting new experiments, albeit without the drama of in-house inhabitants...

Afterwards, in honour of our proximity to the Mexican border, we went for Mexican food and were even treated to some decent mariachi music. Mmmm chicken mole…. And the following day Dave baked Megan a chocolate cake in the outback oven.