Mike's Southwest Travels: Dripping Springs 1

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Dripping Springs First Trip
August 4, 2005

 

I've heard that a picture is worth a thousand words.  Given that I didn't actually get any pictures of the springs on this trip, we'll see how many words it take to describe them instead.

Excerpted from: http://www.rozylowicz.com/retirement/drippingsprings/dripping.html

Dripping Springs Resort was originally called "Van Patten's Mountain Camp. " It had approximately 16 rooms, a large dining room and a concert hall. It was very popular around the turn of the century and many famous people, including Pat Garret and Pancho Villa, have stayed there. Van Patten was married to a local Piro Indian woman and a number of Indians lived and worked at the resort. The Indians hand-carried water from the spring to the rooms in "ollas" attached to long wooden poles and, from time to time, held dances for the amusement of the guests.

In 1917 Van Patten went bankrupt and Dripping Springs was sold to Dr. Nathan Boyd who homesteaded on a parcel of land adjacent to the resort. Boyd was a physician in San Francisco who later married the daughter of a wealthy Australian engineer. Boyd joined his in-laws' business and became involved in large engineering projects all over the world. He and his wife came to Las Cruces to promote, design and build a dam on the Rio Grande whose floods often devastated the countryside. Local farmers whose lands would have been inundated by the lake behind the dam stopped the dam. Ironically, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, creating the state's largest man-made lake, Elephant Butte Reservoir, eventually built a dam farther north. By the time Boyd had acquired Van Patten's resort, his wife had contracted tuberculosis. Deciding to remain in Las Cruces, Boyd converted Dripping Springs into a sanitarium. New structures were built in different parts of the canyon to provide housing and care for the patients.

The Boyd family eventually sold the property to another physician, a Dr. Sexton of Las Cruces, who continued to operate it as a sanatorium. As late as 1946 the resort was still in relatively good shape and a group of local citizens attempted to raise $4,000 to purchase it for historic preservation. Unfortunately, their effort failed and unknown persons scavenged the resort for building materials.

Today, the ruins of Dripping Springs Resort lie scattered along the canyon, preserving the memory of Col. Van Patten, the doctors Boyd and Sexton, and the many famous and not so famous who visited there.

 

Err... Unfortunately, time and weather concerns kept me from actually visiting said ruined resort and the famous dripping spring.  It's good to know what I missed though.  At least I got some great views of the Organ Mountains and the Mesilla Valley.

   

"Sign, sign, everywhere a sign."  They range from, respectively, friendly warnings, "You are here," to overly preachy.

 

Here's a sacred grove of trees used for pagan rituals and human sacrifices.  There was a bunny rabbit hanging out here, but Mr. Bunny hopped off before I could snap his picture.  So much for wildlife photography.

    

Maybe I should stick with still-life shots.  Here's a few interesting rock structures.

 

Ah, a tranquil mountain meadow, err... filled with cactuses.  What more could a person want?  Yeah, okay.  There's no pictures of the damn dripping spring.  I'll get them next time.

Mike's Southwest Travels: The White Giant Tour

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Hall of the White Giant Tour
October 8, 2005

Excerpted from: Hall of the White Giant
If you don’t mind getting dirty, crawling through tight passageways, and climbing some slippery flowstone, you might want to try the Hall of the White Giant. Ladder climbing, slippery surfaces, and free climbing will be encountered on this trip. Highlights of this tour include tight, narrow passages including Matlock’s Pinch, and the White Giant formation. The prolonged amount of time spent in narrow cave passages requires a special attention to group communication and safety. This trip is not recommended for anyone afraid of tight spaces or heights.

Reservations are required for the Hall of the White Giant tour. To make reservations call 1-800-967-CAVE.

Duration: 4 hours

Requirements: Ages 12 and over–anyone under 16 must be accompanied by an adult. Participants must be physically and mentally able to safely negotiate cave passages containing fragile formations without harm to the cave, yourself, or others. Hiking boots or other sturdy shoes and 4 AA batteries are required.

Recommended: Soft knee pads, cotton or leather gloves, and long pants.

They aren't kidding about getting dirty.  Here I am lathered up like a horse that just ran the Kentucky Derby. 

They don't tell you the other part of the mental stamina needed for this tour.  The other tourists are going to be laughing at you as you walk past them in the main chamber in your flashlight helmet and pads, and while you're wiggling through little entrance tunnel on your belly in front of them. You're going to need some composure, but as the stoic, adventurer type, you can surely handle a few snickers.  Myself, I only cried for a minute or two.  (Hey!  I have feelings!)

This trip was just too traumatic to recall, so here's a couple of other peoples' accounts of the tour.  (Either that, or I'm just too lazy to write my own story.)  As you will read, this is not a typical tourist, sight-seeing jaunt.  I was too busy not dying to take more than a couple of pictures.  Think of this as a tantalizing tease to tempt you into taking the White Giant Tour yourself.

Text excerpted from: http://gorp.away.com/gorp/location/nm/spe_car2.htm
Will things open up past the popcorn? No. Welcome to Matlock's Pinch, a very narrow passageway named for the person who, in 1966, first explored this cave section. It's hard to imagine being first to venture into a place so dark and unpredictable. Admittedly, explorers like Matlock had experience—they knew how to read the formations, the air temperature, and breezes, all of which reveal hints about what they'll probably find next. 
 
[At one point, you're crawling along only using your out-stretched fingers and pushing with your toes.] 

"Large people will have to turn their shoulders sideways," Danny warns. I can feel the claustrophobia welling up.

Beyond the pinch, Matlock's 1966 footprints still dent the silt's calcified but very breakable crust. We steer clear. Here, we can actually walk for a few hundred feet, until we reach the rope. The rope ascends a fifteen-foot flowstone chimney. The red and white flowstone has a smooth face. It shines. And it's slippery as ice. You can't grab or push against it for purchase. Thus, the rope, knotted at intervals. You grasp it, brace your feet against the rock, and pull. By the rope's end, I'm starting to tire.

The word comes down the line, passed from person to person. "Hug the wall. There's exposure on the right." "Exposure," a caver's term for nothingness. A place where the cave floor disappears. This particular exposure looks like it travels forever, further than the rabbit hole that took Alice to Wonderland.

I lean my torso towards the rounded rock wall on my left, grasping with gloved fingers, placing each footfall with precarious care. Vertigo is setting in; my knees are shaking, which completely surprises me. I really didn't expect to be dealing with a fear of falling at 400 feet underground. Whatever you do, I mutter to myself, don't look down. And I manage not to. Not until I've reached completely solid ground.  

[He's referring to the Pits.  There are three of them in the cave.  It's not the place for the faint of heart.  We almost lost one of the group going over them, causing the rest of us to almost have a coronary.] 

Finally we reach the Hall of the White Giant. A grand room, maybe 50 feet high from where we enter it somewhere in its middle, the ceiling is dominated by a massive soda straw forest (soda straws are hollow mini-stalactites), and a pair of huge exposures dropping into oblivion to the right and left. 

The white giant, a stalagmite nearly 20 feet tall and thousands of years in the making, grows from the ground high on a rise to our left.

The return from White Giant passes more quickly, but not without its challenging moments. When we pop out of the rock and back onto the public walkway, a small group of tourists stands with mouths agape. We can see them wondering, "Where are these dirt-covered people coming from?"

We've come from down under. From a place where geological time and darkness rule. From a place where danger and challenge lurk at every turn. A place where it takes four hours to cover a mile and a half. And where the view of the earth's insides yields a good look inside yourself.

Text excerpted from: A trip deep into Carlsbad Caverns proves breathtaking, beautiful
Dec. 2, 2000, by Melanie Brubaker Mazur

CARLSBAD, N.M. – If crawling through dirt, climbing rock chimneys and seeing stalactites and stalagmites is your idea of adventure, then Carlsbad Caverns National Park’s guided caving tours are for you.

Off the beaten trail, however, Carlsbad Caverns offers even more sights. On Thanksgiving weekend, my husband and I ventured into the Hall of the White Giant. This ranger-guided tour is limited to eight people and features the White Giant, the cave’s second largest stalagmite (Those are the ones that grow from the ground.). It’s also the caverns’ most challenging guided trip. Our group had to squeeze through tight spaces I swore would be too small for a cat, not to mention an adult human, climb a ladder and rope, and shimmy along in tight spaces using our elbows and feet for propulsion.

At the beginning of our trip, we met rangers Kale Bowling and Rick Jackson, who handed us our lighted helmets. We’d been told to bring batteries, gloves and knee pads.

As we donned our gear, Bowling ran through a list of the cave’s challenges: tight spaces, mud, slippery footing, sheer drops, etc. We introduced ourselves to our fellow cavers, signed a waiver form and headed toward the natural entrance of the cave, winding down the paved path.

We rounded a corner of the regular tour, and Harding started climbing into an opening about the size of a pet door. If she hadn’t stopped, I never would have guessed it was a cave entrance. Other people heading down the path stopped to gawk.

"You’re going in there?" one woman shrieked. "You’re crazy!"

We all laughed. Yes, we’re crazy.

Harding had warned us that the first third of our spelunking adventure would be the hardest. We would be going uphill through the tightest spaces on the trip, including Matlock’s Pinch, named after one of the cavers who first mapped this route in 1966. And it was a pinch. Options ranged from crawling on your belly, arms extended in front, or pushing through on your back, scraping your nose on the rock directly above your face.

One of the interesting sights on the tour is seeing the footsteps accidentally left by the cave’s original explorers. After crawling through tight spaces, they arrived at a large chamber and understandably enjoyed standing and walking upright. What they didn’t notice was that they were shattering the thin layer of calcite crust they were walking on and sinking into the mud below. The footsteps, now 24 years old, look as if they were made yesterday. Today’s tours follow a path created by one of the original spelunkers, with orange tape marking the path’s edge.

We passed through the "no falling zone," a narrow pathway with a large drop-off a few inches away. Small shards of crystals, some resembling coral, grew underneath rocks. We also saw tiny bat bones, testimony to creatures who traveled too far back into the recesses of the cave and became lost.

We also saw two of the cave’s living creatures, a cave cricket, a white ghost of an insect, and a small beetle that eats the crickets’ eggs. At the top of the cave’s ecosystem are the millions of bats that live there during the summer, exiting the cave every evening to eat insects and returning at dawn.

Finally, after two hours of crawling, pulling and grunting, we saw our reward, the White Giant. This huge stalagmite probably has spent eons taking on its bulbous form. When we asked Bowling how old the formation was, she said stalagmites and stalactites are impossible to date because different water sources drip minerals at different rates into the ground, causing the slow buildup of cave formations. But to give us an idea, she said one hole blasted into the cave in 1932 had caused a slow flow of water to drip into the area.  

[Note that hole above the White Giant is the origin of it.]

The stalagmites hanging from the cave’s ceiling were now a half-inch long. So if it had taken almost 70 years to create a half-inch formation and we were looking at a domed stalagmite more than a dozen feet tall, we were looking at one old creation. Beyond the White Giant is Guadalupe Cave, closed to all but researchers and volunteers who work on cleanup projects, brushing cave surfaces with toothbrushes to erase the footsteps left by past visitors.  

[The ones hanging from the ceiling are stalactites actually, such as these.  I guess her editor didn't know the difference either.]

Preservation is a key part of the work all rangers do at Carlsbad. The White Giant tour and others only take place once a week to limit the effects people have on the ecosystem.

Even with only eight visitors guided by two rangers, we were changing the atmosphere of the cave, Harding explained. In addition to creating moist air exhaled during our exertions, we were leaving skin cells, hair, and clothing fibers while treading on the fragile cave floors. Even though we wore gloves to keep our skin oils off the wall’s surfaces, we were wearing parts of the cave smooth.  

[Talk about freaking anal retentive.]

Before starting back to the entrance, we sat in the cave, turned our lights off, and marveled at the total darkness. Then Bowling asked us to sit silently. The only sound was soft drips of water, slowly forming their beautiful cave creations.

At the end of the tour, we gratefully took the elevator to the surface. We were tired, dirty and sore. But we had reveled in the sight of this naturally created beauty.

[Me, too.  I'm glad I went and so will you. ] 

Mike's Southwest Travels: Carlsbad Caverns Lower Caves

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Lower Caves Tour
October 4, 2005

Excerpt from: Lower Cave
National Geographic expedition members in 1924 wrote about the wonders of Lower Cave. Visitors today can see the evidence left behind from these and other explorers. Highlights of this tour include The Rookery, with countless nests of cave pearls, the Colonel Boles Formation, and an incredible diversity of cave formations that compete for your attention almost everywhere you look. Ladders at the entrance to Lower Cave sometimes cause participants to back out. If you have a fear of heights or difficulties with ladders, you may wish to consider visiting Left Hand Tunnel instead.

Duration: 3 hours

Requirements: Ages 12 and over—anyone under 16 must be accompanied by an adult. Participants must be physically and mentally able to safely negotiate cave passages containing fragile formations without harm to the cave, yourself, or others. Good sneakers or hiking boots and 4 AA batteries are required.

Recommended: Cotton or leather gloves.

I snapped the picture on the left while waiting for the tour to start.  The name on the sign worries me.  A rainbow greeted us outside to finish the tour.  See, it's not all just about the caves.
Text Excerpted from: Experience the exquisite beauty and wonders of the Lower Cave!

The casual visitor to Carlsbad Caverns can experience many of the cave's greatest wonders on comfortable, paved, well-lit trails: the Big Room, the natural entrance, the bat flights, the King's and Queen's Palaces, etc. For the more adventurous, the Park Service offers several ranger led, "off-trail" tours. One such tour is to the magnificent Lower Cave. Here one walks on the dirt and wears a helmet with flashlight. The trip starts with a fifty foot descent into the darkness down a steel ladder. (This is quite an improvement over the National Geographic expedition of 1924 which reached Lower Cave by descending a ninety foot pit on a free-hanging, wire ladder, the remains of which are still visible today!)  

[It didn't show up well in the picture, sorry.]

Because many parts of the Lower Cave are highly moist, many of the formations are active and growing. These "fresh" formations are often white and glazed with the look of sculpted marble. In many places one can see drops of water hanging on the tips of stalactites. This creates an extraordinary sparkling effect which cannot be seen in any of the well-lit main rooms. It is not that easy to get good pictures of these phenomena: on a short tour like this there is only time for quick flash photos. (However it is possible to do time exposures in the main rooms, such as the Big Room, which are backlit.) The ranger guide does a good job of explaining the science and history of the cave as well as pointing out highly unusual and beautiful formations.  

[The Water Chamber is supposedly drying out, but it was actually raining inside the entire time.  The little spots on some the pictures are drops of water.]

One of the most unusual is called the "toothpick."  This is a huge stalagmite which stands perhaps eight feet tall and is several feet wide at the base. Several years ago a core sample was taken from it, and scientists guesstimated its age at about 300,000 years! (In contrast a man-made tunnel drilled adjacent to King's Palace in 1932 has several stalactites growing from the ceiling, none of which is as long as one inch!)

[I thought it was more like 50'.  I should have measured.  The Upper Cave is up there in the dark.]
The Lower Cave tour is described as "moderately strenuous". The only part which might make some people uncomfortable is the initial descent.  

[I would have taken a picture of the rope pull down the greasy, steep slope or the two severely inclined ladder crawls over open space, but getting a hand free to do so might have cost me my life.  Go there and see it for yourself.]

These structures are pure calcite.  One of the rangers held his flashlight to one and then turned out the light, and the cave glowed.  One of the more interesting stalactites held a bat embedded inside it.  I wonder how it got there.  I wonder why I forgot to take a picture.  (And also of the Keyhole Entrance and the Chili Pepper structures.  Once again, go see it for yourself.)
 

 

This is called the Rookery, because it's where cave pearls are born.  Back in the day when old Colonel Boles was running the show, he'd bring dignitaries down here, like Amelia Earhart, and hand out cave pearls as souvenirs.  Today, not only will they beat you and leave you for dead if you try to take one, but volunteers come down to scrub the individual pearls and even pick up the lint left behind by the tourists.  I miss the good old days.

I've had complaints that I don't take enough pictures of people and that I don't show the scale of anything in the cave.  I took this picture to kill two birds with one stone.

Here's most of our group: ten eager tourists and two nervous rangers.  Meanwhile, 150' above us, people taking the main cave tour could see us and waved.

Twenty or thirty thousand years ago, a rock dropped from the ceiling.  A big one.  It cracked the Lower Caves and left this.

The Pit, 50' to the bottom.

 

Here's a couple of other cool structures.

I feel nothing but respect and unbridled jealousy towards the the park rangers, such as the one in the this picture, however... 

The Lower Caves haven't been totally explored and for some reason they didn't take my suggestion that we go into the unknown areas.  Wimps.  However during our crawl through the Narrowing Tunnel, they did turn out all the lights, so we could all experience complete blackout conditions in a small, confined space.  Weasels.

Mike's Southwest Travels: Carlsbad Caverns Main Cave 2

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Another Main Cave Tour
September 24, 2005

   

    "You will touch this,” she commanded, “Go ahead and give it a good rub, because I’m not going to let you touch anything else.” The scorching hot blonde was dressed in a fetish-inducing, park ranger outfit.

    “Be quiet when you go inside.  I don’t want to hear anything above a whisper.”  Oh yeah, baby.  I’ll just be whispering your name.

    “Pay attention!  Go where I tell you to go and nobody gets hurt.”  She was getting really authoritative now.  I love a woman who knows what she wants. 

    “If you go down there and die; I’m going to leave you there.”  And there’s nothing like a little danger to spice up the action.  Right, baby?

    Err… Well, exactly who’s idea was it to hire a dominatrix as a park ranger? 

    So after seeing the sights of Slaughter Canyon, I couldn’t resist the siren song of the caverns as I drove past them.  Even better, it was Public Lands Usage Day, which meant free admission for everyone.  A rather obscure holiday, but I wasn’t going to question it.  Yes, the ranger actually was a hot blonde with an attitude.  Perhaps everyone’s admission was coming out of her salary.  She did instruct us all to touch a certain rock at the entrance, and that touching anything else would be painful.  She wanted it quiet, and it would really put her in a bad mood to have to retrieve somebody’s dead body from the caves because they didn’t follow the trail.  Oh, and have a nice trip.  Not to say she didn’t give us a thoroughly instructive tour, such as when somebody asked about the bats.  “Bats?  Those little flying bastards acting weird!”  See, that’s real knowledge there.

“Don't throw anything into the pools,” Ranger Hottie admonished, “Cause I have to go into that stinking cesspool and fish out all your damn change. And it’s not like I get to keep any of it, either!”

The Bottomless Pit.  I had to lean way over in a very dangerous manner to get this shot.  If Ranger Baby had seen me, she would have spanked me good and hard.  Unfortunately, she didn’t.  Damn.

 

The Pillars

   

The Rock of Ages

   

The Witches Finger and some other views of the cave.

Yes, it’s a picture of the bathroom.  Hey, where else can you pee 800' below the ground?

I noticed a strangely nervous crowd about the elevators when I got to the end of the tour.  A pair of perky, young, female interns were operating the two elevators, and having a contest racing each other to the top.  I had taken the elevator up on my last trip, but I had a feeling this time was going to be different.  We were loaded in the box and simultaneously the doors on the elevators closed.  Nothing like being in a crowded enclosed space… in the dark… with several G’s of force taking an inch off your height.  No, I don’t know if we won, but I counted being able to walk away (well, stagger away) as a victory.  As a space flight simulator, I rate it a 10.  As far as an elevator ride, I’ve developed a new appreciation for the stairs.   

Why can't Carlsbad have tram cars like these guys?  I could cave in comfort.