“‘Cause I need freedom now and I need to know how; To live my life as it’s meant to be” – Mumford & Sons
We must have hit the part of the trip where we all need a little down time. As soon as we arrived at our hotel in Alamogordo, NM we decided that we would get some pizza and eat it in the room while writing and watching the Food Network. Since there was still plenty of cold Coors Lite to be drunk from the cooler that plan was A-OK with me. We’re just over a week in and it’s already been an awesome summer that would make for a very fulfilling trip. Happily, there is still a long long way still to go – to me this is life as it’s meant to be.
Yesterday’s hike took us 3,000 feet up to the top of a mountain and today’s took us several hundred feet up to the opening of Slaughter Canyon Cave and then some unknown number of feet down into it. We were a part of a 20 or so person tour group which is always a bit of a downer. The cave was very cavey though. We saw things hanging from the ceiling and sticking up from the floor.
Since there was such a long line of us we were instructed to send back information telephone style to people behind us as we moved. Instructions like “slippery here”, “cave cricket on the right”, or “water on the left” were typical. I tried to spice the messages up a bit by adding my own tidbits like “cave moose on the left” or replacing messages like “this is calcite” with “this is a cow’s eye” but they never caught on. We did get a couple nice cave selfies. Someday we’ll have to return to visit the actual Carlsbad Cavern, there’s an awful lot of mountains to be climbed before then though.
