On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
On our way west we stopped in Carlsbad and Alamagordo so we could revisit the Caverns and see two parks we didn’t get to before: White Sands, which closed the day we got there in 2020, and Guadaloupe Mountain, which we hadn’t been close to before.
We saw Carlsbad Caverns in 2015 when we were driving to Roswell and I noticed that it was only 30 miles off our route. We took a break from the driving and rode the elevator to see the Big Room and adjacent formations. This time we walked 700 feet down through the original entrance.
The main attraction of Guadaloupe Mountain is hiking. Most of the trails took more time and effort than we had available – I’m not going to do a “difficult” hike to the highest point in Texas on a hot dry day, so we visited some of the historic sites instead.
White Sands is what it sounds like – acres of gypsum sand dunes. We did a driving tour.
Natural entrance
Switchbacks on the way down. The ones you see from the surface are about a quarter of all of them.
Part of the Big Room. I took more pictures than this, most of which are underwhelming. They didn’t convey what I was seeing very well.
Ruins of a Butterfield Overland Stage station
Frijole Ranch house, the oldest building in the area, from between 1870 and 1906. The site had water from a spring with a spring house built over it.
One of the many white sand dunes.
Kids sledding on the dunes. The Visitor Center rents them out.
Clearing the road after high winds the night before.
Baud
White Sands lives up to its name.
oatler
@Baud:
As does Visitors Center.
mrmoshpotato
@Baud:
@oatler: And let’s not forget the sleds.
OzarkHillbilly
A good cave photographer “paints” with light. It takes a lot of time to just set up all the slaved strobes for a big room shot.
frosty
@OzarkHillbilly: All I had to work with was the lighting the NP set up which, to be fair, meets your description of painting the cave. First problem is that putting a frame around it limits what the viewer sees. Second is my photography skills like figuring out exposure and f stops for the situation.
OzarkHillbilly
I know, it takes a long time to become good at it, learning from a whole lot of failures. It is easier now with digital because one can see the results while still in cave and any obvious flaws can be remedied immediately. Back in the “good old days” one had to wait until the slides got developed and compare with the notes one hopefully took. I helped a # of well known cave photogs with their shots and learned early on that I did not want to be one. A lot of work, a lot of equipment with oft times frustrating results.
OzarkHillbilly
@frosty: Anyway, thanx for the pics. I spent a lot of time in the Guads during my misspent middle age and never regretted a second of it. They are beautiful.
AM in NC
Thanks for sharing these! The hubs and I have been lucky enough to be able to retire early, and (after I recover from ACL surgery next month) we want to start planning road trips to National Parks. Just before COVID, my sister and mom and I took all the kids/grandkids on a road trip from Boulder, CO to Moab, Arches, Grand Canyon, Mesa Verde and some hot springs, and it was amazing. It was one of the things on Mama’s bucket list to take the grandkids to the Canyon, and she got to do it!
Torrey
@frosty: First of all, thank you for these pictures. I hadn’t previously thought about what goes into cave photography, but I see your point about the fact that even just framing a shot removes the sense of vastness or of confinement or both together that one gets from actually being in the cave. That said, I really like your cave picture. (I liked all the pictures, but the cave picture really stood out for me.)
ETA: Also appreciate OzarkHillbilly’s explanations of some of the complexity of getting a good picture in a cave. These “On the Road” segments are a good way to start the morning, a good accompaniment to the first few sips of coffee, and often educational to boot. Can’t ask for more than that.
frosty
@AM in NC: We had seen all the major National Parks with family trips before I retired so these trips are for the less visited ones. Favorites: Rocky Mountain, Black Canyon of the Gunnison, Petrified Forest. All of them are unique and most of them are the best example in the world.
pieceofpeace
Wow, great picture of cavern, and as others mentioned, photos can’t get to the feelings when being a part of that vastness, but this one tweeks the idea of its vast scope.
mvr
Thanks for these photos. I’m jealous.
We do get to national parks but I hope to get a chance to do more of it. One of the things that makes retirement attractive is that we could do more of it (along with the corporatization and bueauracratization of academia. I like the parts of my job I was hired to do 32 years ago – teaching and research w some service, but not all the new rules and reporting and routines needed just to log into my computer at work (every 15 minutes because of “security”). It would be nice to be able to visit more of them.
It is cool when one can combine a few parks into one trip. The photos do convey a sense of these places, despite your frustrations with the cave shots.
Thanks!
arrieve
As a frequently (usually?) frustrated photographer, I understand the disappointment of not being able to capture what I see. (I remember many years ago taking pictures of a beautiful waterfall in the Smoky Mountains, which appeared to be only a fraction of its real height in the photos–my first lesson in trying to convey scale.)
But I love the picture of the cave anyway. It’s beautiful.
AM in NC
@frosty: THANK YOU! I thought that I would ask a front-pager to put out a request to the jackaltariat on their favorite NPs, because I know we have a lot of road trippers with experience and knowledge ’round these parts!
J R in WV
petrified forest nat park is amazing …. giant logs in eroded hollows like jackstraws, scale impossible to capture. The petrified wood is jewel-like !!
Privately owned land around the park is mined for the beautiful “wood”, which is cut into giant slabs used for table tops and furniture like that, wildly expensive beautiful things. You can see giant flatbed trucks with one or two big stone logs being hauled away to workshops…
Miss Bianca
Fun fact to know and tell: When I was doing e-commerce for my local Ace Hardware, our biggest, bestest customer – the one that frankly subsidized the business for us – was the White Sands Trading Company, who bought boatloads of a particular type of sled for the sand-surfing on the dunes. They bought from us because the manufacturer was such a dick to deal with that they preferred to use Ace as a middleman vendor.
ETA: Hope to get to White Sands some day, tho’ with the Great Sand Dunes just down the road from us (so to speak – still a good few hours’ drive away), it’s not as high on my bucket list as some other destinations.
central texas
About 35 years ago my wife and I were at White Sands in the late fall, intending to camp for a night or two. During the evening, a ground fog appeared and we had an interesting experience of a “white out” without snow or wind. There was no horizon, not reliable direction keeping without a compass, and an all-around feeling of being very disoriented. It was wonderful. We had a compass, plenty of time, and no inclination to wander. About the only saving grace was that unlike the norm in WS, where a breeze will erase your footprints in an hour or so, the ground fog was still and we could backtrack easily.
The last time I stopped there, 3-4 years ago, I noticed that they have installed some safety measures. There are tall poles, visible for 1/4 mil or more, that follow the road, so that those who wander away can have some idea of where to go if they climb to the top a dune and look. It should be mentioned that once you get 1/2 mile or so away from the roads, navigation is a challenge. One dune pretty much looks like any other and their position shifts constantly. As noted before, a slight breeze will erase your footprints in an hour or less and make backtracking impossible. From the bottom of the dunes, you have no horizon and from the top it can be obscured by dust if there is wind.
way2blue
I’ve visited a few caves over the years, but never a cavern like Carlsbad. It’s wicked deep! Burned into my memory is walking through the Pinnacles in California with someone ahead unscrewing all the light bulbs. Not fun… (My Dad loved Nat’l Parks and we visited several of the western ones on vacation. We’d take the nature walks, listen to the evening programs, tour the visitor center… He soaked it all in. ) Thanks, frosty.
Dan B
@AM in NC: North Cascades NP is one of the least visited plus next door is Mount Baker with some amazing trails. To the south is the Glacier Peak Wilderness which requires hiking. Both of these have drier sides on the east slopes and wetter sides with hundreds of glaciers. John Day Fossil Beds in Eastern Oregon is located in some of the most varied terrain in the US. There is wild uplift, volcanic cones, striped soil, green rock cliffs, blue rock cliffs, beautiful woods, pastures, small rivers and valleys. Also Glacier NP and Crater Lake are great if you can’t hike.
frosty
Thanks for all the comments everyone! Two more “second tier” favorites that take a couple days to see, even for a drive by without hiking: Everglades and Big Bend.
@Dan B: You’re describing our next long Road Trip: the Washington parks, Glacier, and the Canadian Rockies.