I hate to post two stories so close together, but since our internet connection is about to go from ‘two tin cans and a string’ to ‘no one can hear you scream’, I’m going to go ahead and put up the Carlsbad post along with a link to the fancy pictures.

One of the sights we were both looking forward to since we hit the road was Carlsbad Caverns. Neither of us had been here since we were children and while I couldn’t recall anything about the cave, I remember being fascinated throughout the entire trip. Since we’ve taken up caving as a hobby, Carlsbad has taken on the aspect of your run of the mill holy shrine and a required pilgrimage.

We knew our America the Beautiful pass would get us into the Big Room for free, but one day underground wasn’t going to do it. We’re trying to stick to a budget here, so rather than paying for a guided tour of other sections of the cave or other caves in the park, I emailed a couple of people in the local grotto and asked if they had anything going on. It was short notice, but they both responded and took us on two separate trips in two days with two caves each day!

Day one, we hit the Parks Ranch cave system while we were waiting on one person that was traveling from El Paso for the trip. It was a fairly narrow system that was much drier, hotter and full of sharp gravel than we’d become used to on the east coast. There was a small campground right above the cave system, so we left the camper right there for the night and hitched a ride with Phyllis to Slaughter Canyon.

I learned just how hardcore desert cavers are for the next part of the trip. We hiked a bit over ninety minutes across the desert to reach Christmas Tree cave. Before even reaching the cave, I was just about out of water. Luckily, it was a pretty easy cave that was much cooler than Parks Ranch and we came out at sundown for the return hike. Christmas Tree is a very decorated cave. There are formations all over the place including the cave’s namesake ‘Christmas Tree’ formation that actually looks like a small evergreen was planted and then calcified.

On day two, we met up wth Kevin, who was taking a family group from Colorado out for the girls’ first wild cave tour. They sure got a fair bit of excitement – the first cave we jumped in was Yellow Jacket and within thirty feet of the entrance we found a fair sized Western Diamondback curled up and none too happy about intruders in his home. We were glad he’d taken up residence at the far side of a fairly large room so we could ease past him. Overall, this cave had very few decorations and was mazy with a few tight squeezes. Jenn finally got to see just how fat I am when she wriggled through a hole that was so tight on me that I was forced to exhale in order to move forward and had to quickly pull my pants back up after exiting the hole! That squeeze ended up being our stopping point as one of the group couldn’t fit and one of the girls had no intention of trying.

The kids must’ve had a good time, though, because everyone was up for a run over to Doc Brito, which is a fairly short cave. The only really interesting part of this trip was a hairy section on the climb down. I went first and missed the hole for an easy climb down. I was left hanging by one arm with a short drop onto unknown ground. I managed to pull myself back up and onto the right path with a lot of huffing and puffing. Everyone else got a mini-lecture on which route to take as even a small drop like that could have been nasty with an unlucky landing and the bad route seemed to attract most people as it was the easier to see coming in.

On day three, we rested! Thanks very much to Phyllis and Kevin for organizing these trips. Thanks also to Brenda, Amy, Bryant, Gina, Andy and his family for making the trips so enjoyable. Gypsy cavers couldn’t hope to come across a friendlier group than the Pecos Valley Grotto.

Finally, on day four we made it to Carlsbad. We took the natural entrance to the Big Room and were likely the slowest people there that day as we had to stop and shine flashlights into all sorts of nooks and crannies. Also, I had to shoot roughly a hundred pictures; but sadly, most of them didn’t turn out too well because the scenes are just so large and impossible to light up well. We did get a few good shots, though. Now we have an excuse to go back again soon.

We ended up taking something like five or six hours to make it through the ‘basic’ tour. I do believe we were passed by everyone that started the tour after us, including an entire busload of Asian tourists who would pause for a few seconds, stick up a camera phone to snap a picture and move on. For all I know, their pictures turned out better than ours. We did, at least, see what we were taking pictures of and sat down a few times just to enjoy the scenery and peace. But, I guess they had to hurry as they have an entire country to see while they’re on vacation. I’d hate to hear what it sounds like during the summer after hearing the approaching tour group!

I won’t even try to describe Carlsbad. You can see a few of the keeper pictures from the gallery here. However, the pictures don’t even come close to doing it justice. You’ve really got to see it for yourself.

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It’s actually been so long ago that when Jenn mentioned she was uploading the pictures from Gila National Forest, I had no idea what she was talking about! Obviously, this post is way overdue. About six weeks overdue actually.

The Gila Cliff Dwellings weren’t really on our way; in fact, I think you could say they aren’t on the way to anywhere, but we took a little detour to see them anyway. By little detour, I mean it was about fifty miles off our route. Did I mention that the last twenty-five or thirty miles were on some pretty hairy mountain roads? That leg alone took around two hours. The signs advised no vehicles over thirty feet! The grades were fairly steep; the turns were sharp and many.

However, it was a very pleasant ride as we weren’t in a hurry to get there and were planning on staying over in one of the many campsites along the way. And there were quite a few campsites. Dispersed camping and a number of actual campgrounds lined the route. Many, if not all, of the forestry campgrounds were free, but memory is a bit hazy. It was nice to see a bit of snow on the ground still, when temperatures were pushing eighty in the desert we’d been driving through just a bit earlier.

The cliff dwellings were quite interesting. They are built inside of natural sandstone caves and have walls built inside of them that are still standing today, despite time, weather and treasure hunters. We were lucky enough to show up just as the interpretive presentation began and had a guided tour through the dwellings. As usual, our America the Beautiful pass covered the cost of the tour, but it was a fairly small price in any event. Don’t quote me, but I think it was in the range of $5 per person. It’s a bit awe inspiring to realize that people have been using the same area for thousands of years and by the way, that’s their house right over there!

If you’re going anyway, by all means check out the displays at the visitor center as well as the nature display at the base of the cliff dwellings. Both are well worth a look. In addition, there are a few other dwellings in the area that are on a smaller scale. Ask the local volunteers and they’ll be glad to point you in the right direction.

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During our trip down the Natchez Trace, we took a daytrip a bit west towards Vicksburg. Jenn and I are both into museums and historic attractions, but neither of us is all that into the nuts and bolts of particular battles. So, why would we go to Vicksburg, where you spend several hours driving around the battlefield and reading about the intricate details of the battle including the number of casualties at each battery of guns? Well, mostly because we have an America the Beautiful pass and hate to pass up a chance to get into something for free that might entertain us for the day.

The military park really is a pretty drive and not a bad way to spend the day. However, after the first six or eight miles, I think we were both pretty well bored with the dry descriptions of troop movements and casualty counts. Don’t get me wrong, this era of our history is very important and shouldn’t be discounted, but I really had a hard time reading similar descriptions repeatedly, none of which you could really sink your teeth into except perhaps the description of tunneling into earthworks in order to blow them up, which is something I thought had died out a few hundred years earlier. This same area had the wonderfully colorful description of a slave who was ‘blown to freedom’ when a mine was touched off below him.

Luckily for us, not much further down the line, we reached the main attraction as far as I was concerned: the USS Cairo. This was a city class, ironclad steamship that was sunk during the Civil War by a Confederate ‘torpedo’. It was, in fact, the first ship to ever be sunk by a torpedo, which was really a bit more like an underwater claymore from what I could understand as it was a stationary charge that required troops to fire it when a ship was next to the torpedo.

The Cairo went down in 1862 and the crew destroyed the chimneys in order to hide her location. The wreck was discovered in 1956 and various artifacts were brought to the surface. The Cairo was eventually brought to the surface in sections from 1961 until 1965. What’s left has been pieced back together and treated to preserve it’s integrity. Where the original wood has rotted away, some areas have been restored with a lighter colored timber to show that they are non-original.

Visitors are allowed to walk through the Cairo and see this historic ship from the inside out. There is also a museum that houses many of the artifacts originally discovered with the ship. Overall, just touring the USS Cairo and neighboring museum, perhaps with a stop at the Vicksburg visitor center is well worth the time. The sixteen mile drive through the park? I’m sure it would be very interesting to a Civil War buff that wanted to appreciate how the battle played out, but to me it was just a pretty drive once we gave up on trying to read all the placards and monuments.

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Leaving Tennessee, we hopped on the Natchez Trace Parkway a bit south of Nashville and took it to the end in Natchez, Mississippi. Now, it wasn’t leaf peeper or flower sniffer season, but it was still a beautiful drive. The entire parkway is around four hundred and fifty miles long, two lane blacktop through the countryside. It closely follows the original Natchez Trace, which was a footpath through the forest used by Indians and traders up until the late nineteenth century. The speed limit is fifty miles an hour and only non-commercial use is allowed. In short, you couldn’t hope for a more leisurely drive. I was surprised how light traffic was. We often went fifteen minutes or more without seeing another vehicle.

If you get tired of driving, the park system has you covered. There is some kind of pull off every few miles. These range from historic areas and exhibits to nature areas and hiking trails. In addition, there are three free, primitive campgrounds on the parkway, spaced roughly every hundred and fifty miles. You may also overnight at the visitor center in Natchez. We’ve heard that these campgrounds fill up quickly during the snowbird migration, but in mid-January, the campgrounds were pretty empty.

Unfortunately, many of the historic stops along the parkway are simply places where things used to be. You can stop, read the sign and get moving again in a few minutes. There are some nice stops, though, such as the Locust Inn, where travelers would have stopped for the night. The house is still standing and has been decorated with many examples of items that would have been found in a rural, nineteenth century home.

One recurring theme along the Trace is Indian mounds. There are quite a few stops where you can see a small Indian mound and read a bit of history regarding the site. Even if you skip most of these, I recommend stopping at Emerald mound, roughly ten miles north of Natchez. This is the second largest Indian mound in the US and is gorgeous as well. An eight acre hill has been landscaped into a steep-sided mound and flattened on top. On top of this mound, there is another high mound where a temple would have been located and a smaller mound on the opposite end of the large mound. The entire area is covered in grass that was still brightly green even in the middle of the winter.

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Recently, we stopped over in a national forest and it was getting too late to be out looking for a campsite in the dark. The fees posted for this campsite were $5/day. You can’t beat that with a stick, right? Wrong! For the first time, I noticed that our America the Beautiful pass would allow us to camp for HALF PRICE somewhere.

Now, I happen to think this interagency pass is an excellent deal for folks that want to check out the national parks as they travel, so we picked one up while visiting the Wright Brothers memorial in Kitty Hawk, NC. At the time, we joked about buying an $80 pass to avoid paying an $8 entrance fee. But, you’ve got to remember that the interagency pass takes an all you can eat approach to entrance fees. It will get you and up to three other people into just about every federal area where they charge an entrance fee for free. This includes national parks, monuments and historic sites, forestry service, bureau of land management, bureau of reclamation and fish and wildlife sites as well as federal recreation lands.

The pass is good for a year, but try to buy it at the beginning of the month rather than the end as we did. I was a bit annoyed to see our pass punched to expire thirty days earlier than it would have if we’d bought it the following day. If you happen to be sixty-two or older, you qualify for a Senior pass which is $10 and does not expire. If you are permanently disabled, you qualify for an Access pass which is free and never expires.

You could buy a pass on the internet, but if you’re going to buy a pass with an expiration date, why bother when you can buy one from so many places where you’ll begin saving money immediately? Actually, if you’re planning to use it primarily as a camping discount card, go ahead and buy it on the internet, as many of the places where you can receive a camping discount do not sell passes.

Oh, yes, I did mention camping discounts, didn’t I? Here’s a treat for those of you that like camping on the water. All Corp of Engineer campgrounds accept the interagency passes and give a 50% discount on their camping rates. I was a bit disappointed to see that the COE had raised their rates significantly since our copy of Camping With the Corps of Engineers: The Complete Guide to Campgrounds Owned and Operated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was published. The COE is starting to approach the price of commercial campgrounds in a lot of cases, but 50% off puts it back in the bargain bin.

As long as we’re talking about federal lands, here’s a fun link to maps of the various federal lands. Pity they don’t cover state forests, parks and wildlife management areas as well, but at least the federal lands have more or less similar policies from state to state.

Oh, and lest I be castigated by completeists, I’d better mention the Volunteer pass. If you’re the kind of person that likes doing volunteer work, you can earn a ‘free’ Interagency pass by volunteering 500 hours to the federal agencies in the America the Beautiful program. Now, if you’re like me, 500 hours really seems like a lot of time for a pass with an $80 value. The one bright spot in this otherwise dismal news is that you could potentially volunteer these 500 hours as a campground host and get a free campsite and perhaps a small living stipend while working towards your ‘free’ interagency pass.

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After we spent a couple of weekends at the Great Saltpetre Preserve caving with some great people from the area, we headed towards Boone, NC to start our next stint as carnies. However, we got sidetracked leaving Kentucky as Jenn noticed Carter Caves State Park was just a few miles out of the way. As this is where Crawl-a-thon is held in January, we decided it would be worth a quick stop over and looksee.

We got up bright and early and explored Laurel and Horn Hollow caves. Both are rather short trips, that have been ‘prepared’ for tourists, but they are still unlit, self-led trips. Horn Hollow has a beautiful entrance, but is otherwise not much to look at from inside. Laurel was quite a pretty little cave and we were able to get off-trail and explore the upper passage as well as climb a small waterfall that most non-cavers would have never seen.

Once we got to the camper, covered in cave mud, and I got stripped down to my high performance underwear, a couple of guys walked up, and rather than running away, they wanted to chat, which marked them as cavers and not afraid of dirty, half-dressed hippies in a parking lot. This was our introduction to Roy and Jerry. They were in the area building a bat gate, which is designed to let bats in, but keep people out during bat hibernation season. Since we were the only muddy folks around with a bat sticker on our vehicle, they assumed we’d be good suckers, err… candidates, to volunteer to help out.

Well, they were right and we decided to come out with them the following day and see just what it takes to build a bat gate. It turns out, that it requires a lot of sweat and a fair helping of calluses, bruises, burns and muscle. Just a friendly note: if anyone ever asks if you’d like to ‘pack in steel’, run away screaming. Steel gets packed in increments of roughly 400 lbs, in this case by five guys along a ridge, both uphill and downhill. After a few hours of this, I was more than happy to be put in charge of the acetylene torch. While I spent a lot of time bending and kneeling, it beat the heck out of packing steel. Luckily, the forestry service and wildlife management services were contributing a lot of manpower to the project or we’d still be trying to get the steel in today.

Roy and Jerry were super nice folks to work with. They took us out to eat a few times and related lots of caving stories. By the end of the first day, Roy had promised to pay for our campsite as long as we hung around. By the end of the second day, we were on the payroll for the duration as well. By the end of the week, we’d been promised a spot to camp in Texas or Virginia and a cave trip into Mexico if we manage to get out west this winter.

This was Roy’s 310th gate and he says he’s quitting… after just one more gate. We had a great time working with Roy and Jerry as well as all the forestry and wildlife folks. You can’t beat doing something new and intriguing, getting paid for it and having a free campsite while meeting interesting people!

View more images from Carter Caves State park, including building the bat gate, Horn Hollow Cave, and Kevin’s Kave in our gallery.

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Unfortunately, Brevard County doesn’t want anyone to park anywhere overnight without paying. On our way home Sunday, we would find a couple of likely boondocking spots, but they’re kind of difficult to find in the dark. We finally decided to just park in a Lowe’s parking lot outside of the city limits and hope the county cops had more important things to do than harass us.

We got up bright and early Saturday morning with the intention of hitting one of the popular beaches in the Cocoa Beach area. Of course, the city had other ideas. The parking meters were checked 24×7 at the rate of 1&2/3 cents per minute and we just didn’t feel like trying to find that much change. We ended up going about 3-4 miles south to Lori Wilson Park which allows free beach access and parking during the daylight hours.

We wandered around the beach for about 3 1/2 hours until the metal detector batteries finally died. We found more men of war than coins. Jenn got to pick up a couple of bags of garbage, which seemed to make her happy. Grand total for the day was 26 cents!

We broke for a late lunch in the park and started browsing the web to try and find a bit more suitable place to sleep for the night than the Lowes parking lot.

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Johnny is really the better of the two of us when it comes to this blog. I am a big slacker. He is a writer at heart. I would much rather have the adventure and take pictures than spend time writing about them. But, this is our blog, and its time for me to make a contribution. I know that I am really going to be glad that I took the time in 20 years from now. I am really sentimental. My memory isn’t so great anymore, thus this blog is probably the only way that I will remember the details of our wonderful times exploring together.

So without further delay, our funtastic Clarcona Horse Park story:

What a great way to start off the new year, in a new park exploring.

Since we are still working, we drive up and down the same streets day in and day out. We have passed the sign pointing to the park many, many times but had yet to venture in its direction. It was just begging to be explored. And, since we couldn’t locate the RC air field, it was.

It was a really well maintained park. They kept it clean and fresh. It is a newer park which helped with the ascetics but placed a damper on our “treasure hunting” experience. The only luck that we had was in the grass parking lot where people had recently dropped their change while exiting their vehicles.

We were presently surprised to find that they had camping facilities, as we are always on the lookout for new haunts. The site were well spaced and had nice oaks around them. From what we could see, they only have water and electric hookups. They did have grills in each site. They also had something I haven’t seen elsewhere, individual garbage cans in each site. I didn’t notice any recycling facilities though.

This park makes me wish that I had a horse. They are nested up against the West Orange Trail. There are stables, rings, and plenty of room to run. Granted, I would rather be out in the boondocks riding, but I am sure my horse would be happier sleeping in the clean stables.

All and all we had a nice time. And hey, after throwing away a bag full of recovered garbage, we made out with 43 cents.

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