| Submitted by: Mark R. LeeperUnited States |
| Submission Date: 15 February 2005 |
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We woke up early and went out. We had breakfast at a local restaurant, then headed out for Carlsbad Caverns. There is a lot more to the National Park than the Caverns themselves. You drive about seven miles through parklands with high yellow cliffs on either side. We stopped several places on the way in to look at rock formations. At one turnoff you follow a short path to an outcropping of stone that the signs suggest would have made a home for two families. I told Evelyn it was a nice cheap summer home and what kept it cheap was low overhead.
Well, eventually we got to Carlsbad itself and parked. Carlsbad is a National Park, which I thought meant no admission was charged. Not so. Admission to the caverns is $5. If you want a guide to go with you at your own pace and explain everything, that's fifty cents more.
The guide is a device I have seen elsewhere. It is a fifteeninch wand that hangs around your neck that is a radio receiver, a small speaker, and a rechargeable power supply. When the wand just hangs, it is turned off; pick the earpiece up to your ear when you are in a designated area and a voice tells you about that section. Now all it would take, probably, is for someone to bring a Walkman and scan for the same frequency that the electronic guide uses and you could save the fifty cents. Actually, I thought the tour guide did a particularly good job of explaining everything. There must have been on the order of sixty messages or so, and they were very well explained. When the tour was over, I asked Evelyn if she had any rechargeable batteries on her so we could tip the guide.
The main chamber is about as deep as an eighty-story building is high. You have the choice of walking down and sightseeing on the way or of taking the elevator down. If you follow the signs for the Red Tour they take you to the elevator; if you follow the Blue Tour, it goes into the mouth of the cave and down the entire path. Most places that the Park Service tells you are gentle hikes are a bit more than that and can be exhausting. Here the warnings you get overstate how exhausting and possibly dangerous the Blue Tour is. One older gentlemen did complain about how tough the tour was, but for most of the rest of us it wasn't bad.
The previous night when the bats came out, people claimed there was a bat smell. I couldn't tell at the time, but walking the Blue Tour you definitely smell it. You are not in the same chamber with the bats, of course. That would be disgusting and possibly dangerous. You just descend and descend surrounded by all the various structures of speleothems (a stalactite or a stalagmite is a speleothem). You see curtains and soda straws, as well as grotesque shapes of the free-standing speleothems.
If I remember rightly how this was all created, you had a giant underwater reef. The mixture of sea water and fresh dissolved big holes in the rock, then upward pressure from colliding continental plates forced the holes above the water table so the holes drained. Then rainwater came through the roof with calcified limestone deposits and leaked through the ceiling, leaving deposits of the limestone which built up, creating the weird shapes over time, much like dripping hot wax will form odd shapes.
So when in the 1959 film JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH had explorers going ever downward through caverns, they really could not have gotten down even so far as the water table. About a quarter of the way into the trip I reminded Evelyn to be looking for settings from that film. In fact, before asking a ranger where the film was shot I had already picked out three of the four sites in the cave he told us about. There was one point where the Lindenbrook expedition was camped below the Saknussem expedition and heard them above. There was a green pool that was used in the movie. (I think for a while they thought it was the grave of Alec McEwan.) The Red Tour has a section of oddly shaped formations that Alec McEwan fell through. Between the halves of the Blue Tour (at the beginning of the Red Tour), there is a big chamber with a snack bar and souvenir shop. Sort of a strange setting.
I have been in caverns in Israel, Slovenia (formerly part of Yugoslavia), China, and Ohio. This is certainly the best set in the world. In Slovenia they said they were the second biggest cavern in the world, second to Carlsbad, but that they were the biggest with stalagmites and stalactites. That was a lie, obviously, but I have to say that Carlsbad has nothing to match the underground train ride Slovenia has.
Well, when we were done with Carlsbad, that was the big event of the day. We headed out to El Paso. There is not much along this road but the Butterfield Stage Piney Station. This is a memorial to where the stage used to stop. It is just across the Texas border. There were some spectacular rock formations. We also found the sky getting dark at some point and expected we might get rain. Actually it turned out to be a dust storm.
El Paso did not seem as inviting as New Mexico did, maybe because it is a big city and in New Mexico we stuck to small towns. El Paso seemed a little run down. We arrived at the motel just as the Vice-Presidential debates were starting. Neither of us were hungry yet so I turned on the debates. Evelyn stuck in earplugs and tried to write in her log. We went for dinner at the State Line Barbecue. It was a lot better than the Dairy Queen in Carlsbad. Back in the room we wrote until we fell asleep.
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Each night our Motel 6s have gotten a little less comfortable. I woke up before 6 AM and I think we checked out before 7. Today the plan was to drive to Tombstone. Breakfast was at the first place we could find that seemed decent. It was decent but the service was very slow. And they overcharged us and had to change the check. From there we hit Route I-10 west back to New Mexico and then west into Arizona. A lot of this was desert irrigated to make plots of farmland. There are always mountains in the distance. Our last stop in New Mexico was Steins, a ghost town right off the highway. Evelyn commented that the ramshackle town looked a lot like some parts of the Dominican Republic. Steins was a mining town at one point. But fate went against the town. I am sure what we see cannot be all of the town that was around before, but it isn't empty either. Somebody has a bunch of farm animals there including irritatingly boisterous roosters. The place seems to be more a dump than a ghost town. There are old tires and old rims (different places, of course). There is an old stagecoach. There is a modern vehicle that is clearly intended to run along train tracks. They have some rust with metal but no metal without rust. The whole town looked like what some bad science fiction movies said the post-nuclear world would be like. There were some nice goats in one of the yards. For $1.50 each the guy in the one open store would show you around town. Well, you could see most of the town looking through the fence. At least there was enough to know we didn't want to see it any closer than we already had.
Another few moments and we were in Arizona. Ricardo Montalban gave us a departing story about stagecoaches as the last thing we did in New Mexico. More farms or ranches. More fields of chaparral. It is clear that here Nature had an over-developed sense of drama. High mountains with rock faces surrounded us.
We pulled off the main highway to the Fort Bowie road. This is a dirt road past several grazing ranges and leads to a pull-off. At the pull-off there is a mile-and-a-half walk to Fort Bowie.
What is Fort Bowie? Well, the story starts in September 1857, when the Postmaster General awarded an overland mail route to John Butterfield. Butterfield needed for his route a station that would have water and the only place he could put it was in Apache Pass-- land belonging to the Chiricahua Apaches who were led by Cochise. Cochise tolerated this intrusion for two and a half years. Then in 1861 some Apaches--nobody is sure who--raided the ranch of local John Ward, stole stock, and kidnapped a Mexican boy who lived on the ranch. Ward thought it was Cochise who led the raid.
Second Lieutenant George Bascom set up a trap to capture Cochise. He brought a contingent of soldiers into the pass. Cochise and some companions wanted to find out what Bascom was doing there and went to talk to him in Bascom's own tent. Bascom accused Cochise of the crime and told him he was captured. Cochise pulled out a knife and cut his way out of an unguarded wall of the tent. His companions did not get away, however, and Bascom hanged them.
Cochise led his Apaches against the Anglos for two weeks of raids. The Anglos sent the cavalry in to secure the pass. For the next twelve years Cochise would lead a successful guerilla war against the Anglos.
Brigadier General James Carlton captured the pass by force. After repeated attacks he built Fort Bowie to protect the pass. The first Fort Bowie was crude and uncomfortable. It was later rebuilt and expanded to accommodate more troops more comfortably. After twelve years of warfare an ex-Army scout named Tom Jeffords made peace with Cochise. (Anyone remember the film BROKEN ARROW with Jimmy Stewart as Tom Jeffords winning over Cochise? There was also a television show about Jeffords also called BROKEN ARROW.)
At last there was a lasting peace between the Anglos and the Apaches. That was 1872. And peace lasted for about four years. Cochise died in 1874. Jeffords was replaced as agent in 1876. Suddenly there was a lot of dissatisfaction from the Apaches. Afraid of losing the pass, the government abolished the local reservation and moved all the Apaches to another reservation. Particularly unhappy about this move were three Indians: Juh, Naiche, and Geronimo. But that's a different story.
About a mile and a half from the road, you can walk to Fort Bowie. On the way you pass the old stage station that started it all. There is a ranger station next to the fort's ruins with a rather affable ranger. Little more than the foundations and a few walls set in protective adobe remains. Yet the fort seems very big. It also had some surprising comforts, such as a steam-driven icemaker. There are still angry territorial battles going on here, I discovered, as a red ant bit the back of my right knee from inside the pants leg.
I asked the ranger if over the last few years more visitors were showing more sympathy for the Apaches. 'Only the uninformed,' he said. He then talked for about ten minutes about how vicious the Apaches really were and how the other tribes did not want them around. They had seized the land from the Athabascan Indians before them, etc.
After a while we headed back. The whole hike took about three hours. Further down the road we saw the site where the Apaches ambushed a wagon two days after Cochise's escape. Our next stop was Chiricahua National Monument. This is a park full of rock formations and huge boulders stacked so they look like a slight wind would topple the stack. Actually that is a single piece of rock when you see that a local volcano spewed the rock in columns with more than one kind of rock. Erosion removed one sort of rock and left the other, leaving weird formations.
There are many impressive sights, but I am not sure how to convey them in a log. Maybe Evelyn will do better. We left this park about 5 PM and at 6:30 PM got to Tombstone. |
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