Spring Break - 2023 - Painted Desert, Petrified Forest, Carlsbad Caverns, Guadalupe Mountains, White Sands & The Nautilus/Toadstools

We packed a lot of beautiful places into a Monday-Saturday Spring Break vacation!  We visited 4 National Parks and some other cool stuff!  We took off on Monday morning and our first stop was at Jacob Lake for a pit stop and cookies.  There was snow there.  It was beautiful and the cookies were delicious as usual.  We kept going and got to Cameron AZ about lunch time.  We found a great picnic spot and pulled out our lunch gear and ate overlooking the Little Colorado River (which had water in it because it has been such a rainy year so far).  Then we headed on and made it to the Painted Desert/Petrified Forest Visitor's Center near Holbrook, AZ.  We had time to drive around and make some stops at some overlooks of the Painted Desert, the Painted Desert Inn, the old section of Route 66 that once cut through the park, some Native American ruins and Petroglyphs at Puerco Pueblo and then we drove the Blue Mesa Loop/hiked the trail down to see amazing badlands and petrified wood.  We also stopped at the Agate Bridge.  Then it was time to get some dinner (Arby's in Show Low) and then head to our motel (Green Tree Inn & Suites) at Pine Top AZ.  It was a long and wonderful first day.  The weather at the parks was cool/windy and Pine Top had snow on the ground.  It was a very nice motel in a beautiful forest town.  In the morning they provided a great breakfast.  Paul and I took a walk beforehand in the forest neighborhood behind the motel.  

Tuesday - a long day!  We drove the long/scenic route through beautiful mountains to get to Carlsbad NM on this day.  We stopped for a very interesting lunch at Silver City, NM.  We located a park with a working bathroom finally and ended up sharing the park picnic area with several idle older people who seemed to have little to do other than smoke and drink.  Marijuana fumes were in the air.  It was an interesting experience.  One man may have been homeless and probably was mentally ill.  I wished I could have given him a sandwich, but wasn't sure how it would be received and didn't.  He was pretty busy smoking and just hanging out.  Silver City was kind of a run down mining town it seemed like; at least the part we saw was. We drove on through the southern part of New Mexico and stopped at Artesia for a wonderful dinner at McAllister's.  We took a wrong turn there and had to do some backtracking, but finally made it to our destination at Carlsbad, NM where we stayed at the La Quinta Motel (which was very nice and also had great breakfasts - even  green chili chicken soup one morning).  We stayed here for two nights.  

Wednesday morning we got on our way to Carlsbad Caverns which was very close by.  It was crowded (it was Texas's Spring Break too from what we heard), but the weather was great. I was a little miffed at first because after going through the on-line reservation hassle I again had to wait in line to finalize our cave reservation and get our tickets.  It seemed like a redundant waste of time to me.  Another thing that bugged me was that Paul and I paid for headsets to use to learn about the 50 or so marked stops along the self guided cave trail...and by the #2 stop it only played in German and neither of us could get it to work.  $10 wasted.  I was not in a very good mood then either.  (And I was still smarting that they have so few reservations available for the only Ranger led cave tour and we missed getting that with all of the confusion about whether we would even be able to go on vacation because of all of the problems with having Anna Lou taken care of while we were going to be gone.) But once we got going in the cave,  it took me in with it's gigantic awesomeness!  I have never been in such a huge cave!  And the further in we went the better it got.  And when I could finally get the flash turned off on my phone camera, I could take pictures of how awesome it was!  We went into the Natural Entrance Route which descends about 750 feet down and follows the traditional explorer's route. It is steep and narrow and about1.25 miles. Then we continued on and did the Big Room Route which is another 1.25 miles.  We took our time and enjoyed it immensely and because they limit how many can come it, it didn't seem overcrowded.  It was SPECTACULAR AND SO BIGGGG!  When we came out we had hoped to watch the park film, but that didn't work out.  But, we did get lucky and find a great picnic spot right by our parking spot and had a beautiful view of our next destination in Texas...Guadalupe Mountains NP!  On our way out of the Carlsbad we saw some mountain sheep along the road.  They looked browner and smaller than the ones we see at Zion.  They were Barbary big horn sheep.  We have desert big horn  sheep at Zion. 

After lunch we headed for Guadalupe Mountains National Park just over the border in TX.  It wasn't very far.  It was so crowded we could not park at the Visitor's Center, but did get lucky enough to find an empty parking space elsewhere.  There are many hikes in this park.  We chose the one called the Devil's Hall.  It was about 4 miles and much of it was in a boulder/rock strewn wash.  It's limestone.  We loved seeing the plants here that are just a bit different from at home.  I love the distinctive bark of the alligator juniper trees.  There were some huge trees that looked so much like our manzanita bushes.  They are called Texas Madrone.  The hike was beautiful even though rocky.  And then you get to the end and it is amazing!  It's like a huge gray limestone staircase that leads up to a hall of stone!  It is very steep and slick and I just couldn't make myself go up it.  I had been slipping on the slick limestone in the canyon on the way there already.  But thank goodness Paul is not so faint of heart.  I stayed back and talked with another lady who just didn't feel safe going either.  Her husband and Paul went up and brought pictures back for us.  Maybe, if it hadn't been so crowded...no one else but us there...I would have slowly tried it, but it didn't happen.  I'm still glad I got to see it from the bottom and just enjoy Paul's report and pictures of the rest.  After we got down, we did get to go to the Visitor's Center and it was really a nice little place and very informative.   Then it was time to head back to Carlsbad for the evening.  We were pretty hungry by the time we got back and found a Chili's and had great food there and then headed for our motel.  

Thursday, after another great breakfast, we headed back to Pine Top and the Green Tree Inn for another night. Along the way we backtracked just a little bit and stopped in to see White Sands NP! (It only became a NP in 2019.  The sign on the road still calls it a national monument!)  It was so beautiful and so strange to see something that looked so much like snow, but wasn't!  I did make a sand angel.  We watched a very informative park film (glad we did) first.  We took a boardwalk trail out to an overlook and then took a little hike as well.  This sand is made from gypsum and is so much easier to walk in than our red sand.  It packs and was much firmer.  This is a very unique place with very few other gypsum dunes in the world. We could have gotten a little saucer and slid down the dunes, but didn't take time for that. You could see how the plants and animals have to adapt to live here.  This was the perfect time to be here before it becomes a blistering hot place later in the year.  After that we took a different route which was shorter and lower to get back to Pine Top.   It was a good thing, because we still got a little bit of a snowstorm before we got back.  We got very lucky and found a picnic table behind a city building in the little town of Carrizozo, NM for lunch.  And we just went inside and used their bathroom too.  It worked out great!  We got back just at dinner time and ate at Panda Express and headed to our motel for the night.

Friday morning Paul and I took a really wet but beautiful walk behind the motel again.  This time we found a little hiking trail off into the forest and enjoyed seeing a beautiful stream and some really crazy little things that we don't really know what are...maybe a mushroom or wasp egg sack?  We got a little muddy and soggy, but it was great!  Had another great breakfast and then got on the road.  Again, we made a little backtrack and saw more of the Petrified Forest where we took a hike among the giant logs and then watched the park film.  It's a pretty cool park if you take the time to see the many different parts of it and the Painted Desert.  After that it was time to head for home.  We took the same route that we came in on from here on.  We made our lunch stop at the Cameron Trading Post where we enjoyed Navajo Tacos!  They were very tasty as usual. We took a pit and scenery stop at Rainbow Bridge and saw the CO River and Condors flying while we stretched out legs. We listened to some great books during the drive there and back.  It was a GREAT TRIP!  Bean was such a big help being another driver.  (I never drove.)  Thank goodness that these places of amazing natural beauty are being preserved for us all to see and enjoy!!!  We have now been to 30 National Parks.  Paul has been to one other one, the Great Sand Dunes in CO.  We thought about going to Big Bend in Texas on this trip, but it just didn't work out with the time we had and the money we wanted to spend.  Maybe another time?  

Friday night we were still pretty full from our Navajo Tacos, so it was a cold cereal at home dinner and a great night's sleep back in our own beds!  Saturday morning we decided to add one more exploration as our Spring Break Finale.  I heard about this cool rock formation near Kanab - The Nautilus.  It's a couple of hour's drive, but we wanted to do it and the weather was cooperating perfectly.  We drove there via Zion NP (as beautiful as ever) and then followed a bloggers directions to the short hike up a sandy wash to find the formation.  We got a little sidetracked along the way taking little side hikes to see lots of amazing rock formations.  We found some sand pipes like we have only seen at Kodachrome Basin SP before.  The geology of this area is spectacular.  And the sand was packed because of the recent rains, so it was great hiking instead of slogging through dry sand.  We found the Nautilus and it was awesome - like a giant seashell carved in stone that you can walk through. Then we decided to keep on going and kept on going until we found an "ending" spot that we could be satisfied with.  It was a huge dryfall with a gigantic stone ledge.  It would be an amazing thing to see with water coming over it, but probably not a good place to be in that kind of a storm at all!  We found more sand pipes along the way too. We hiked back and ate lunch at the Whitehouse Campground nearby where the Dive of the Buckskin hike comes out. It's a great little campground that would be fun to camp at sometime.   Since it was a long drive to get here we decided to revisit the Toadstools that are nearby after lunch to get our drives worth.  I love the Toadstools and was glad to have a chance to see them again. Then it was time to head back and call it a day and a Spring Break well spent.  We stopped for dinner at Wendy's in Kanab and then made our way back home.  Happy Spring Break 2023!!!