Entering another world

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Today I was on the road by about 6:15 AM local time, a pattern that thankfully for the most part would continue for the rest of my trip. Driving west on I-20 out of Sweetwater there was a peculiar smell in the air...burning oil. I'm assuming it had to do with all the oil wells and refineries I saw along the highway. Just a guess. I had to stop on the side of the road and get the picture of the sunrise. The picture really doesn't do the sunrise justice as the entire horizon was glowing a bright orange. Pretty much the best sunrise I've ever seen.

I arrived at Pecos, TX and then headed north on 285. Probably because I wasnt driving as fast on this road I spotted my first cactus. I had arrived in the desert! Other then the occassional cactus and oil well, there was nothing but openness on both sides of this two land road. The "town" that I did run across, Malaga can only be called a town because its on the map. There was nothing there. It just seemed strange as if I had landed on another planet.

I took a shortcut to Carlsbad Caverns by taking a road west out of Malaga. This two laned road proved interesting as I saw a couple of jack rabbits and some cows lazily grazing not five feet from the road. They hadn't escaped out of their fenced area as there wasn't a fence to be seen.

Arriving at Carlsbad Caverns around 11 AM, I made my way to the Natural Entrance of the caverns. Its a gaping hole, hard to miss, yet there is no evidence that any person before the late 1800's ever entered the cave. On the way down the passageway the most interesting part was seeing the 200,000 ton boulder that fell from the roof of the cave thousands of years ago. Supposedly in the past 100 years only five recorded events of rock dislodging have been recorded, and three of those were caused by humans. Little comfort when you see a picture of the "boulder".

Walking into the cave is truly entering another world. The Natural Entrance trail connects with the Big Room trail about 750 feet below the ground (after walking about a mile). The Big Room trail is also about a mile long and in my opinion has the most to offer visually. Half the time I expected some orcs to jump out and attack as this reminded me of the cave scenes in the movie "Lord of the Rings".

In the early afternoon I took a ranger guided tour of Kings Palace which is another mile trail and it lasted about 1 1/2 hours. Our guide was cool, if not a little "out there" but in a good way. She had a lot of information to provide and was quite enthusiastic. The coolest part was when she had us all sit down and turn off anything we had that might emit light. Then she turned off the lights in that area of the cave. She also managed to get everyone to shut up for a minute. Absolute complete darkness. This was unlike anything I had ever experienced. You couldn't even see your hand in front of your face. Just for this experience I would recommend the tour.

I left the Caverns at 4 PM and head north on 62 towards the town of Carlsbad where I stayed overnight. I drove around a bit trying to find this particular Mexican restaurant which ended up being closed. There really didnt seem to be much to the town as the downtown area was completely closed down for the day by the time I got there. I'd definitely go back to the Caverns though, there is so much to see there but I couldnt spare another day unfortunately.

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Photos

The Devil's Mouth
This is on the way down to the Big Room.

The fallen boulder
This is the picture of the 200,000 ton boulder. I included the random people to better get a sense of how large this rock is. This photo was altered a little bit because it originally turned out too dark and you couldnt see anything.

Faeries
After visiting Kronin's Cranny, these rocks appear to look like faeries.