Exploring Southern New Mexico

In order to celebrate the July 4th weekend, we decided to take a road trip down to Southern New Mexico to explore the sites there. We drove about 800 miles over 2 days. Our first stop along the way was Roswell for their annual UFO Festival. Roswell is of course home to the many out-there conspiracy theorists believing in government cover-ups of UFO landings, due to a supposed UFO crash in 1947. We were very underwhelmed - their parade was really just something that anyone could participate in no matter how unimpressive their outfits were. We had hoped to see more wackos and better costumes for the festival. It's not somewhere we have any plans of returning to. It did however, have some interesting decor - such as this R2-D2 official US Postal Service mailbox outside the Visitor's Center, and a UFO-shaped McDonald's.


Luckily, Roswell was on the way to Carlsbad Caverns, so we didn't have to drive extra to get there. Carlsbad Caverns National Park was where we planned on spending most of the weekend. At sunset we watched about 400,000 bats fly out of the caves to go hunting for the night. We were impressed with that; they spiraled up out of the cave in a swarm. We were told that they circle around seven times before they gain enough altitude to escape out of the cave mouth. We didn't bother counting.

The next day in the morning, we toured the inside of the caves for several hours. Sadly, we were unprepared and our cameras did not have enough charge in the batteries so we did not take all the pictures we wanted on this trip. We did however get a few that turned out well.


Here we are walking into the entrance of the caves. This is also where we saw hundreds of thousands of bats fly out the night before. This path descends down 750 feet to where you can explore the rest of the caverns. Fortunately, there is an elevator to take you back up.


Poor Snoopy was stuck in a kennel while we were in the caves - we felt kind of bad since July 4th is the day we decided to celebrate Snoopy's birthday every year and being in a kennel was a bad birthday present. Hopefully we made it up to him at White Sands National Monument in Alamogordo because as expected he loved running in gypsum dunes (the dunes in the park are not sand, but gypsum). We even found a white lizard for him to chase.



White Sands was one of the funnest parts of the trip. Although we liked Carlsbad Caverns, we thought Luray Caverns in Virginia was more impressive. Here are a few of our favorite pictures from White Sands:






The wind blows the dunes several feet per year. This last picture shows a brush whose roots have locked that portion of the dune into place. The wind carried the rest of the dune past the brush, leaving behind the brush perched on a 20-foot pedestal.