November 3, 2006

November 3, 2006

Today our first stop is downtown Roswell to see the UFO Museum. It is a small museum devoted to the “Roswell Incident”. According to the museum on July 4, 1947 a UFO crash-landed on a ranch near Roswell and the army conspired to keep the story hidden.

After a quick run-thru we drive over to the Roswell Museum and Art Center to see the Goddard exhibit. Unfortunately the Goddard Room is closed for the filming of some TV interview. Robert Goddard was an early pioneer in the development of rockets. In 1930 Goddard moved his laboratory and rocket testing to Roswell because of its open spaces and sparse population. Hoping that the filming would wrap up shortly, we wander around the rest of the Museum to kill time. The museum has some interesting timelines on Indian history and New Mexico history that I find interesting.

Getting impatient, we give up on Goddard and head south out of town towards the Carlsbad Caverns. Along the way the terrain turns from flat ranchlands into desert. When we turn west into the Park we climb into some rocky desert hills. At the national park we choose to hike into the cavern through the natural route. The cave entrance looks just like the jigsaw puzzle my family had of it when I was a kid. This historical entrance is a huge hole in the ground. The park service has constructed a 1.25-mile paved path that takes you steeply down into the main cavern 800 feet below the surface. Once there we hike the 1.25-mile path around the “Big Room”. The cave is huge and long, decorated extensively with Calcite stalagmites and stalactites of all sizes. In summer, people sit at the natural entrance every evening to watch a cloud of thousands of bats fly out of this “bat cave” in search of insects. Finished with our self-guided tour of the main cave, we ride the elevator back to the Park Visitor’s Center and spend the night at a rustic RV campground outside the Park.