G&C Summer 2017
Blogpost 015
July 13th – 16th
“A Game of Caverns”
I could prattle on for a
reams-worth of complaints and derisions with regards to our final days in America’s
most insecure state (to borrow a phrase from a friend) but there really
would be no constructive point. As Charlotte spent her day at the Texas A&M
insect collection, I stayed at the hotel and worked. All that surrounded me and
my fortress of drywall and empty furniture were chains of fast-food restaurants
and shops one could find in any all-American providence. Apart from a run-in
with one particularly impudent hotel guest who asked if he could borrow my
phone and then later accused me of lying when I told him I didn’t have it on my
person, my experience in College Station was conflict-free. Before my fiancé
and I left this Texan “city” we were sure to dine on Texas BBQ and were
pleasantly satisfied with a literal bucket of meat that didn’t twist our
intestines up into a knot of gustatory malice. It took two days of driving
before we finally crossed into New Mexican territory and I offer no
exaggeration when I say our attitude was tantamount to that of a Hobbit
escaping Mordor; So long were the days of oversized cowboy-themed relics,
Texas-shaped waffles, and power tool proficient cannibals.
Delicious Texan BBQ!!
Our
first excursion celebrating our return to New Mexico was spent at the Carlsbad
Caverns National Park. Both Charlotte and I would consider ourselves fans of
subterranean natural wonders due to childhood visitations to various caverns
east of the continental divide in addition to the fact that cave-exploring is
the closest we’ll ever get to exploring the humungous insides of an ancient
eldritch titan. The visitor’s center and entrance to the caves was placed at
the top of a high accretion of desert earth lined with sharp stone escarpments;
it’s like the Grand Canyon had r-selective offspring, for you can find them
plentiful throughout the New Mexican lands. By the time we reached the
visitor’s center we had only a few hours to enter and explore the prodigious
limestone catacombs and labyrinth of gypsum and clay speleothems over a mile
beneath our feet so we power-strolled ourselves to the cavern’s eternally
gaping mouth and started our decent; and much like the start (or twenty-minute
mark in) of the film The Decent (2005) our initial decline into the
cool, creosote-colored abyss was met with giddy circumlocution from the two of
us but sadly unlike The Decent we
failed to see any flesh-eating mole people.
As
made our first steps down the Carlsbad Caverns amphitheater and onto the
winding paved walkway into the depths we were greeted by fluttering wings and
the echo of cave-swallow songs. Immediately, we knew we were in for a treat the
main entrance had a diameter of over a hundred feet and you could peer down
twice that in length to the first subterranean layer of the path ahead. And
although there were hikers and families galore clamoring up and down alongside
us we felt like courageous adventurers in a game of Dungeons & Dragons, in
search of goblins, beholders, and treasure to plunder for which there was none
to be found, but there were a whole bunch of neat rock formations!
Approaching the entrance to the cave
Through
tunnels and slopes, past towering stalagmites and menacing stalactites we
pressed on like dwarves imbued with dragon sickness. Folds and points had been
etched into the rock over thousands of years, creating monstrous sculptures of
nightmarish proportions.
We
reattached the “bottom” of the cavern some one-point-two miles deep into what
was known as the “big room,” which as the name suggests was indeed a
cathedral-sized chamber where tourists could descend no further. It was here
that we discovered the elevator system conveniently located besides a snack bar
and partial gift shop. The elevator had been installed for mobility-challenged
tourists but was being overrun with lines of people smushed together like
sardines; it was like something out of The Children of Men, or some
other dystopian fantasy where human beings have been reduced to livestock. Past
the elevators was the tunnel to the bathroom which Charlotte and I had to check
out! We’d never seen a cavern restroom before, expecting to find a hole with a
curtain or perhaps a buck on a string ala Buffalo Bill. But much to our
surprise the hallway of stone ended with the open end of a modern public
restroom complete with tiles, walls, fluorescent light, sinks, commodes, and
the works. Beflummoxed we were at this almost abstract reality! It was like a
glitch in the Matrix or some temptative trick of the devil, either way
we relived ourselves and carried on with our underground hike and saw many more
weird and beautiful things; just off the top of my head I saw stone resembling
a waxy melted-man, a giant gnome, twin lion’s tales, grotesque H.R.
Giger-inspired beings, and a nipple the size of an adult Manta ray.
Probably the coolest bathroom!
So many cool rocks!!!
Lion's tail
We
also came across a particularly intriguing marker on our map called the
bottomless pit; in truth the pit was just one hundred and forty-feet deep but
for the cavern’s earliest explorers light could never reach the bottom. Peering
into that inky black void I couldn’t help but thing of primitive humanoids that
must have discovered and explored the caves long ago. What would they have made
of this ebony well? Perhaps they perceived it as bottomless as well, or maybe
as the passageway from our world into the land of the dead or even as the
birthplace of daemons and monsters. Words do the caverns little justice and
pictures do even less, (though we certainly took our fair share), they fail to
capture the utter smallness one feels down there surrounded by that much earth;
to walk those hollow halls is to walk in the tomb of giants.
An old wooden ladder used to originally explore the caves
Very interesting rock formations!
At
the two-and a half-hour mark we’d completed our hike with thirty minutes to
spare before the caverns closed for the day. My legs were shaky from finally
being used after so many countless days sitting in the car and hotels but my
fiancé didn’t share my affliction (decades of skiing can do wonders for
lower-body strength and endurance). Regardless we both felt incredible and our
day would only get better at the hotel room for the evening where the season
primer of Game of Thrones was to be had. We watched without blinking and
were completely content.
Fun at a local tourist trap!
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