New Mexico
July 2013
We have some free time and it’s a good day for exploring. We visit Carlsbad Caverns, beyond Whites City, a provocative name at best.
Mount Davis, the high point of Pennsylvania, is on Negro Mountain. No one in the history of this area was named Negro. Here in New Mexico however, there was a guy named White, James Larkin White. J L White is the guy who discovered Carlsbad Caverns.
Okay, actually, there were people living in this area long before White came along, people who knew a great deal about Carlsbad Caverns. White (who was white) got the credit, if you know what I mean.
Not to be confusing, Whites City, New Mexico, which is just a few miles east of Carlsbad Caverns National Park, was named for its founder, a guy named Charlie White, a White who was not related to the previously mentioned James Larkin White. What are the chances that two unrelated Whites are associated with Whites City! Apparently pretty good.
To be clear…
James Larkin White — discovered of Carlsbad
Charlie White — founded Whites City, 1920s as a commercial resort to service visitors to the caverns
other non-white, indigenous peoples — lived here a long time before the white people (or White people) came along
A seven mile drive off the main road takes us from Whites City to the Carlsbad Caverns Visitor Center. Carlsbad Caverns National Park is located in the Chihuahuan Desert so you get not only the famous caves, but attached is the complete desert experience, if you so choose. We do so choose, stopping to walk through this little visited part of the desert.
Visiting this part of the desert allows us to walk among plants that we never see back home. To wit…
catclaw acacia
These grow thorns. If you’ve got a cat, you have seen these thorns before, at the ends of their paws.
pinyon pine or Mexican pinyon
Collected for human consumption, native to western North America. It grows in areas with low levels of rainfall.
sotol
The Natives wove sotol into baskets, ropes, mats and sandals, and with proper preparation, they ate it.
agave tequilana
…without which we have no tequila, and without which we have no tequila poem.
One tequila
Two tequila
Three tequila
Floor.
mariola
The mariola plant actually contains a small amount of rubber giving it an unpleasant taste, you can imagine, so the animals leave it alone. Smart plant.
juniper
You can eat this, or turn it into diapers as did the Natives. But not both.
Oh my. Look at this… thing…!
I think it’s a Sago Palm Trunk.
From the parking lot at Carlsbad, we look across the desert and, although no one tells us that this is them, we can see our ultimate destination for this trip in the distance, the Guadalupe Mountains in Texas.
In the Carlsbad Caverns parking lot, a ranger tickets cars of owners who have left their pets inside the vehicle. Yeah. It’s 80° out here, it’s hotter in there. You loved Fluffy or Mr Purrkins enough to bring them on vacation but not enough to keep from cooking them? When they say, “Do you like dogs?” they don’t mean as an ingredient in a recipe.
Carlsbad Caverns offers a menu of tours. We take advantage of none of them. We have only so much time on this trip and this fascinating place fell off the bottom of our list of priorities. Additionally, neither one of us is a fan of claustrophobia, but we both seem to have some. There are ways to hike down to the caverns, which is what we would do given the time, but most people take the elevator. Eight or sixteen people, depending on which elevator, enter the little room and sink 754 feet down into the earth to the actual caverns themselves. Creepy. Perhaps next time. Probably not.
And now it’s off to Texas.
