Mike's Southwest Travels: Slaughter Canyon

Main Index

Slaughter Canyon

September 24, 2005

Location:  Guadalupe Mountains area, near Carlsbad, New Mexico

The Slaughter Canyon cave tour is available by reservation only.  To the right somewhere is Ogle Cave requiring a 400' vertical drop rappel to the bottom.  That tour requires a permit and a lack of sanity.  We'll stick with Slaughter Canyon for now.  It's named after a Sgt. Slaughter, by the way, though probably not that wrestler guy. 

Here's some of my tour group:  a Boy Scout troop, a couple of attractive women, and a couple of old geezers.  I appreciated the old guys, since they made me look relatively young.  The young woman in the center endeared herself to me by brushing a bee off my back.

Here we are heading up the path.  Barely visible in the center are Stadler and Waldrof struggling to keep up with us young folk.  On a completely unrelated note, I'd like to thank those well-prepared Boy Scouts for administering CPR to me no less than five times during our trek.

Note the smoothest of the path.  Goats wouldn't use this.  Anyway after this somewhat frightening trek, we entered the cave and saw some tremendous works of nature.

Here Nature has made a scale model of The Great Wall of China out of white calcite.  It's about 6" high.

The Monarch pillar.  89' High, second tallest in the park, third tallest in the world.

"This is the ahem structure," said the ranger.  "It's called the Clansman," I said loudly enough for everyone to hear.  It's not my fault that the guys who named it weren't politically correct.

The Christmas Tree structure.

   

   

Here's some more views of the cave.

The ceiling 200' above.

A future column in the making, a couple hundred years from now.

There's also a large guano pit in the cave. There were two large walls covered with the stuff.  There are little bat bones embedded all the way through it.  Scientists have actually reconstructed a whole new, previously unknown species of bat from them.  Here's a tip: black guano is the good quality stuff and red guano is the lower quality.  One shudders to imagine under what circumstances one might need to know that.

Some of the floors are covered in a guano/clay mixture, which has the consistency of grease.  One of the old guys took a lengthy slide down a pit on it.  Thankfully, he sprang back up immediately.  "I'm okay!” he shouted, “I meant to do that!"

Why is it that when people found these caves full of bat crap, their first thought was, "What a great money-making opportunity," and then went broke attempting to do so?  Anyway, there was a mine in the cave and even a tram up to it for the workers.  A teenage boy used to scale the narrow, treacherous path every morning to start it.  He's still alive today… and still bitter about the experience.

And here's the view from the exit.  A great afternoon, well spent.