Carlsbad New Mexico

4-7th Feb

We travelled north into New Mexico via Pecos.  We stopped there for fuel at a Flying J.  The Pilot/Flying J chain is essentially a petrol station but they provide facilities for Truck Drivers such as showers, TV lounge and games rooms plus restaurant and shop with spares and fast food etc.  A really good idea to attract customers and at lunch time this place was really humming with 20 odd trucker’s spending money.  RVers are also welcome and we have a loyalty card for discounted petrol.
As we crossed the State Line we went into Mountian Time, that now puts us 7hrs behind the UK.

 

 

Carlsbad Caverns National Park

 We visited the Caverns on the Wednesday.  The Caverns were discovered when a 16 year old saw what he thought was black smoke in the distance.  It turned out to be thousands of Mexican free-tailed bats coming out of the Caverns.  We went down the Natural Entrance which takes you 750 feet below ground via a steeply descending path of one mile and then came back up to the surface in the elevator for lunch.

We then went back down for a guided tour of the Kings Palace which goes 800 feet underground for a mile and then walked another mile around the Big Room.  The Caverns are enormous having been created when water combined with the hydrogen sulphide, from the oil and gas fields below, to make sulphuric acid which dissolved the limestone.  There are over 30 miles of passages with the deepest chamber being 1037 ft below the surface. 


These are not the biggest, deepest or prettiest of caves but the enormity of the size of these chambers is awesome and most impressive.  We only walked around 5 miles but we were underground for nearly 6 hours admiring the formations.
Sadly 95% of the formations have stopped growing.  The pools have dried out and there is little water seeping down from the surface these days.  There will be a number of reasons for this but they are reviewing whether the paved car-parking above has contributed.

The bats still live here but only in the summer months – they migrate south of the Mexican border for the winter months.  We were asked before we entered the caverns if we had visited other caves in the past 7 years as they are trying to avoid the White-Nose Syndrome (WNS) a fungus that is killing colonies of bats on the east coast.

Roswell UFO Incident

Thursday we visited Roswell. Well it had to be done didn’t it!  Alison couldn’t come this close to the International UFO Museum and not pay a visit.  There is little else in Roswell and if you aren’t into that sort of thing it is not worth making a detour.  However the UFO Convention in July might be interesting ………?

(Paul say’s “not a chance”!)

 

 

We saw a sign “National Fish Hatchery” and paid a visit to Dexter.  The Hatchery specialise in the protection of rare and endangered fish species with breeding and re-introduction programmes.  However there was little to see as the ‘pond’s were being prepared for the new breeding programme in the Spring and hence were currently empty.