. . . and on to Carlsbad and Dallas

It's now late the 26th and we have about two plus hours to Carlsbad.  No rush, though.  Although we're advised everyplace will be closed when we arrive, we have instructions.  The car is supposed to be in the parking lot, keys in the pilots lounge at the FBO, and reservations confirmed at the Hampton.  

The air is smooth as we pull away from Tucson.  We're VFR flight following, and it's nice to not have a lot of chatter with anyone but Ann.  There are fires in the mountains southeast of Tucson (above), generating a lot of smoke.  Our flight path takes us into the smoke downwind, and right along the US - Mexican border for several miles until we get to El Paso.

Sixty miles east of El Paso we make a turn northeast to Carlsbad, and shortly after that we get a real treat.  There are times when flying that you just catch a break.  Tonight was one of those nights.

What a great sunset. I suspect the smoke had something to do with it, but still . .

We continue on to Carlsbad Airport and a night landing, followed by what is sure to be an Olympic event some day, finding the car.  You can't be lucky all the time.  Following the directions I had written down, I managed to try every door on the flight line, hopping several fences, before finding the one (the last one, by the way) with our keys behind it.  After that it was a simply a matter of walking around the parking lots pressing the door unlock button until a vehicle called out to me.  In this case it's a nice upgrade to a Chevy Suburban.  Bag drag, dinner at Pizza Hut, and off to bed.

We can sleep in a little the morning of the 27th, but not too long.  The Caverns are around 25 mi outside town to the southwest.  The Visitor's Center opens at 0800, but the first tour of the King's Palace does not start until 1000.  Even ambling along, we got there by 0830, watched a video and eventually descend around 700 - 800 ft to the caverns.

We did not actually take the stairs shown here.  They have elevators which show feet instead of floors as you descend, but it takes a while to get down even at that.  The stairs would have been a big improvement over one of the early methods of getting to the caves -- the guano bucket.  Apparently, the original name of these caves was the bat caves.  There are still large numbers of bats that live in the parts of the cave closest to the surface.  Bats leave droppings called "guano".  I never did catch the reason why there would be a bucket called guano used to lower two people at a time 700 feet using a gasoline engine powered winch, but that was how it was done in the early days. 

We got a lot of pics, but it's hard to add commentary explaining what is being seen.

This picture to the left is interesting because of what it tells you about what happened over a long period of time.  Our Ranger guide asked a few questions, though and it became clear, once you stopped to think about it.

In this case, the rock in the background has stalactites ("c" is for ceiling, "g" is for ground as in stalagmites) angled to the left, while all the others (in the foreground, for example) point straight down.  So what do you think happened?  
The standard explanation is that those stalactites formed just like the others a long time ago.  At some point, however, a huge part of the ceiling broke loose, possibly due to a small earth quake, and jammed itself into the cavern floor at the angle you see here. 

I told Ann I feel like the proverbial pig and a watch when viewing caverns.  There is clearly a story being told by everything around us, but without a guide telling the story, all I see are extraordinary, and in some cases incredibly beautiful, formations.


Of course, compounding the problem was a lack of initiative to even ask myself why any of these gravity-driven formations were at an odd angle in the first place.  This is the simplest part of the story, not even requiring more knowledge of the chemistry of water and rock which hollowed out the caverns in the first place.  Gotta kick it in gear. 

We've seen some great caverns with our friends Gary and Karen Bruner at Luray VA and Mammoth Caves outside Bowling Green KY.  Luray is smaller but very colorful.  Mammoth is mammoth.  It is ideal for explaining how a river is fed by underground streams which slowly erode and widen a network of caves until it reaches its current level (that of the river outside).  Carlsbad has bigger open areas because of the chemistry of water and rock which involved sulfuric acid (I think that was the acid), forming the caves much more quickly.

This next set of pics is from the Kings Palace which is one of the poster children of Carlsbad caverns and among the more beautiful we've seen.  Our guide told the good / bad story of how an early park administrator stimulated interest in the caves, bringing congressmen, celebrities, and the public down, making access to the caverns extraordinarily easy.



So easy, however, that a lot of terrain got trampled (see the flat, smooth floor).  Visitors at that time were also encouraged to take artifacts.  Years later, when children and grandchildren of visitors found some of the broken off tips of stalactites and stalagmites, they sent them back to the park with notes to replace these items.  Our guide was somewhat bemused by this, noting that they have no idea where these items might have been originally located, or how they would reattach them even if they knew where.  


He also told the story of how the first movie "Journey to the Center of the Earth" was shot in the King's Palace.  Unfortunately, the director did not think the cave looked "cavey" enough, and had a bunch of foam rubber rocks brought down.

Next are pics of the Big Room (below), the largest cavern in North America.  There are a lot of smaller areas in the Big Room which have been given their own names.  The one below is called Fairyland. 
Caves offer tough conditions for photography.  The Panasonic does much better than our efforts with our old camera.

This visit is an object lesson, however, in why one would want to know how to navigate light conditions with the manual controls, even on a highly automated camera. 

The automation does an heroic job of trying to balance the limited light, but it is tough to capture depth.  If you use the flash, you get a lot of bright objects in the foreground, and darkness in the background (see left).  If you don't use flash, you get what you get, frequently a very dark picture with little detail.  Telephoto can zoom in on details and even out the uneven light, but you are stuck with just those details and limited perspective.  Even without telephoto, if the pic above did not have a few people on the trail on the lower right side of the picture, you would have no sense of the scale of the cavern.

I'll probably never be a professional photographer, but my hat is off to any of them that can pull decent pics from these conditions. 

Next are some pools of water in a more active area of the caverns.  In the first I caught the ripples in the water as a few drops fell from above.  (Hey, don't complain.  This is as active as it gets down here, most days, so it is noteworthy ;-).




The second (below right) was in a much better lit part of the cave and you can see some color to the water.
















Finally, above left is a formation called Dolls Theater featuring whole columns.

We've got a ways to go yet today, so eventually we head back to the surface, grab some lunch, and we're off to town.  Just so you know we're not making this up, it is hot in New Mexico. 
 

Returning to an earlier theme, you have to give the city fathers of Carlsbad credit for wanting to have some trees present in town.  They actually seem to have gone to great lengths to grow some here at the intersection of several roads.  

Still, the local terrain and climate are not particularly helpful, so I'm not sure we can blame the city for actually destroying trees in this case. 
We eventually make it back to the airport for the usual pre-flight festivities.

Ann notes that she is not being paid like other baggage handlers, and gets no environmental overtime for working in this heat.  I offer the opportunity to get her pilot's license and we can split the baggage handling and pre-flight duties.  She is quite adamant about not wanting to work that hard for another shingle, so we eventually blast off from Carlsbad Airport (below) with pre- and post-flight duties still clearly delineated.  It's another 2+ hour flight to Dallas TX, or more specifically, Grand Prairie Airport with some of the cheapest gas in the area.

Speaking of gas, what you see in the picture below are oil wells.  These in particular are over southeastern NM, but they continue after we cross the line into TX.





 
     A little further on we begin to come across equally large fields of windmills (right).  For all this, though, the terrain is not overly exciting except for one subtle thing.  Notice the difference in color between the oil field and the windmills.  We have definitely crossed a line between west and east TX where moisture is substantially more available.  Turns out on the weather chart there is a thing called a dry line demarking such differences.  I don't think the dry line is always depicted, or the separation between wet and dry areas is so finely drawn, but it is clear that somewhere in west TX arid conditions give way to pretty substantially moister conditions.

The approach into Grand Prairie is uneventful.  I get to fly an arrival procedure on the Garmin 430 for the first time, and we are picking up a lot of tail wind in a 500 ft / min descent (look at that ground speed in the lower right corner).

Well you know the drill by now.  Park, tie her down, load the car (except here a young fella at the FBO brings our car right out to the plane), bag drag to the hotel, and dinner.  I was going to try another BBQ place on this stop, and the lady at the Holiday Inn Express suggested a place a few exits east on I-20.  It's amazing sometimes how Ann ahd I think alike.  We are driving around, trying to find this BBQ place when we both see exactly what we want at the same time -- Ghengis Khan's Mongolian.  It took all of 2 seconds to change plans and head on in.  Nice place, pretty good Mongolian, and a fair house Chardonnay to boot.

The Holiday Inn has a hot tub with their pool, so we head on down before turning out the lights.  Tomorrow morning we'll visit with family before heading on to Memphis TN, our last touring stop before heading home.