On the Gound, Under the Ground, Through the Ground

On the Ground...

On Sunday, we met Bill in the morning for a trip up McKittrick Canyon. Bill, you devoted readers may recall, is the historic conservation carpenter we met at Padre Island and is doing seasonal work at Guadalupe Mountains NP. The trailhead is several miles east of the campground and up a long entrance road. It is then a two-mile walk to the Pratt Cabin and another mile or so to "The Grotto" and, of course, a return trip.

This was the VIP tour. Bill was also going up to Pratt Cabin to document some reported roof leaks as part of his work. He has been volunteering or working seasonally at the park for ten years and has spent much time on this trail. We were in for a treat. He described flora and fauna and natural and human history of the area as we walked along. McKittrick Canyon is on of the few places that has a permanent stream running through it and we crossed it several times. Being a very dry winter, it was pretty low, so crossing meant stepping on stones to get across.

The highlight of the trip was visiting Pratt Cabin which was built by Wallace Pratt, a former VP of Standard Oil. As a young geologist, he made his mark by proving that geology could find oil. He was successful in finding oil 175 times in his first 180 tries. From that, he worked his way to the top of the oil business. While searching for all that oil, he was enamored with the Guadalupe Mountain area that is now the National Park and bought up a chunk of it, building the stone cabin at the confluence of two streams in McKittrick Canyon in the 1930s.

It is not a big house; it has a great room, two bedrooms and a kitchen, probably no more than 1,000 sq. ft., but it is completely built out of cut limestone including the roof, which is made from random-shaped thin slabs, laid out much like a stone floor. It is a spectacular look, but only possible in a dry climate. The stone roofing is set on a wooden roof, and that is where the leaks were.

Bill opened the cabin and showed us around. It is furnished in the style of the period. It used to be open with a permanent interpreter, back when the Park Service had funds, but now it is only open on occasion, so this was a treat for us and for several other hikers who came along as Bill is a good interpreter.

After the cabin inspection, we continued up the trail to an area called "The Grotto", an overhang with formations much like a cave. It also has a picnic table overlooking a pool in the stream where we ate lunch and watched the trout in the pool.

After walking back to the trailhead, we drove over to "The Ship of the Desert", Pratt's second home in the park. The small cabin was a bit too small for his third wife (he outlived the first two), so he built another stone home in the mid-forties, on a high point overlooking the desert. The design looks like a cross between Frank Lloyd Wright and Walter Gropius. It is a long low flat-roofed building made out of cut limestone, with large steel-framed glass windows running along each side, with single room in the center as a second story, which looks very much like the bridge of a ship, hence the name "Ship of the Desert". It is also only open occasionally as it is primarily used by visiting researchers.

It was a memorable hike.

Under the Ground...

On Monday, we left the park and wen to Carlsbad Caverns National Park. It is only about 60 miles east of the Guadalupe Mountains. Only one of us toured the caves. Having never been in a big cave before, it was pretty spectacular. I only took the two self-guided routes, the Natural Entrance Route and the Big Room Tour. They had several other guided tours, most of which involved squeezing through openings and getting muddy. I figured that three hours of walking underground would be enough.

The Natural Entrance Route is a paved trail that starts at the surface making its way into a huge opening in the ground. It winds its way down 75 stories, first dropping about 200 feet almost straight down via many switchbacks. It is pretty impressive to look up a couple of hundred feet to daylight. The trail then meanders downward for another three-quarters of a mile or so, through some huge chambers with very high domes, circling around a 200,000-ton boulder, called Iceberg Rock, which obviously fell from one of those ceilings. The route ends 755 feet below the surface at the cafe and elevators (what else?). Most visitors take the elevator down to visit the second half of my walk, the Big Room. It is another mile of trail around the periphery of an 8.2-acre underground room, with 80-foot stalagmites, walls of rocks that look like draperies, innumerable stalactites and stalagmites, strange growths on the stone, called popcorn, clear pools and unvisitable lower caves that seem to disappear down forever.

After all that I took the elevator to the surface. You thought I might walk up 75 stories?

Through the ground...

After the caverns, we continued on to the town of Carlsbad, New Mexico, for fuel and food. As we did the wind picked up again and with it big clouds of dust--yet another dust storm. By the time we left Carlsbad to find Brantley Lake State Park, it was really howling, when we got to to park, all of the mountains around us and much of the lake was obscured by the dust in the air. The sun became a dull disk in the sky and finally disappeared totally. We felt like we were traveling through the ground.

Brantley Lake State Park is on the shore of a man-made lake behind a dam on the Pecos River. It is a pretty plain flat campground in the desert. Its distinguishing feature was its restroom and shower design, which we have termed "Correctional Moderne". They must have had an overstock from building a prison. All of the fixtures--sinks, showers, toilets and urinals, even the mirrors--were plain stainless steel. (That steel seat is none to comfy in the morning.) It was all housed in a tasteful concrete block building. The highlight of the park seems to be fishing in the man-made lake. Unfortunately there is a posted warning not to eat the fish became of high levels of DDT. It seemed like a good spot to spend only one night.

Today, we moved on to another desert state park, Oliver Lee, outside Alamogordo, as we intend to visit White Sands tomorrow. I'm happy to report that Correctional Moderne is not standard in New Mexico state park design. It was another windy day with a long drive through stiff crosswinds, the less said the better.

Photos