Monday, January 11, 2010
2010 - 03 Down in the depths (Carlsbad Caverns)
My newest good friend Will Hunzeker was trying to explain to me that Old Bedlam was the officer’s quarters at Fort Laramie National and not the enlisted men’s.
Seemed odd to me that the officers were more rowdy than the foot soldiers. But the nickname of the big two-story building would seem to indicate this.
Fort Laramie is located in eastern Wyoming between Torrington and Guernsey and is a national historical site.
What perhaps made this conversation with Will a little unique was that it was being held 75 stories underground in “the big room” of Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico.
Will is a seasonal ranger at the big cave and had just gotten back to work after spending the holidays back in Wyoming.
“The highways were crazy getting back here,” he said. “Ground blizzards north of here were just as bad as Wyoming.”
He also works as a seasonal ranger at the Fort Laramie National Monument and does some farming on the side down the road from the site. He and his girlfriend have been spending time in both Wyoming and New Mexico in recent years.
“You folks are just the second group from Wyoming that I have run into down here,” he said. “And I have been keeping track.”
Like all the rangers, Will was a friendly and talkative sort. On this January day, I think the rangers outnumbered the tourists in the vast caverns.
Did I say vast?
The Big Room is 600,000 square feet in size, which is same size as 14 football fields. One area was 360 feet from the ceiling to the bottom of what was known as the bottomless pit.
To get into the cavern, you descend in an elevator for 750 feet. It takes just a minute but you can tell you have gone into the ground a long ways.
My wife Nancy said she felt like an altitude change had struck her when we walked out of the elevator into the cavern. Felt a little like when we were shuttled to the top of Mauna Kea Mountain in Hawaii a few years ago, which is about 14,000 feet above sea level.
Yet, we were not short of breath.
My theory was that the air was old and still and there may have been some trick involving air pressure.
“Not so,” says Will. “The humidity in here is 99.9 percent. That is what you are feeling.”
I think we walked over a mile up and down and around inside that gigantic cavern, which is the biggest in the USA and perhaps the world.
The sights were beautifully illuminated and there were signs to tell you about stalactites (down from the roof) and stalagmites (up from the floor). The images you saw were so foreign and so huge and so intricate that you could not help finding yourself saying “wow” over and over.
The cave is also home to one million live bats and one fossilized one that we were shown by another ranger.
We were also cautioned to whisper in the cave, as your normal voice will carry more than a quarter of a mile.
There were lots of little pools around the caverns with a drip-drip-dripping that had probably been going on for millions of years. The origin of the cave was an inland sea some 250 million years ago.
Another ranger said the cause of the cave had been debated for years until another cave was discovered in Wyoming that revealed that it was not water that caused the erosion, but sulphuric acid.
He did not know what Wyoming cave provided that enlightenment, but I think they might the Kane Caves near Lovell.
Carlsbad Caverns was the second national park-like place we visited on our trip to Texas and New Mexico. A few days before we toured the Padre Island National Seashore south of Corpus Christi.
An 80-mile island with a sandy beach with no commercial development was quite the beauty to behold. Although it was chilly and windy the day we were there, the sky was blue and the sun was shining and the Gulf of Mexico glistened. Nancy found a sackful of little seashells for the grandkids.
As we worked our way home, we managed to dodge most of the cold and snow for two weeks on this 3,648-mile trip in our newly acquired but somewhat used motorhome.
Our vacation was educational but was it also nice to be back in Wyoming.
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