Part Four: The Springs

Tomorrow. It came. Wet and cold. Clouds swarmed down and hung over the hills as if to say, enough, you’ve thought about us enough. Time to move on. And we did. We laughed at taking an eight mile hike in a canyon to recover from an eight mile hike up a mountain, but it was true. It did help us recover. And today would be a day of discovery. We wanted to show our friend from Canyon Lake the caverns of Carlsbad and then we wanted to visit Sitting Bull Falls on the New Mexico side of the Guadalupe Mountains National Park, a thing my Ozona friend and I tried to do last year and missed.

So, off we went. I sat in the back seat of the truck, while my two friends sat in the front. It was just as we do when we hike. Except this time, I was simply in the rear, and not holding anyone back. It was nice to sit and ride and listen to them talk. There aren’t really three way conversations from front to back in a truck or a car. Too hard to hear. I didn’t mind. It was nice looking out my window and listening to the sound of their voices chatting amiable almost as if I weren’t there, and that was fine because the last two days had left me almost speechless. It was good to have time to piece things together. To take my feelings, hold them up to the light and see what they told me.

At the Caverns I finally bought my own lifetime senior pass. I’m now good for all our national parks and I no longer have to ride the cards of others. It was about time, and then we took the elevator 700 feet down to the caverns and they were about time, too. Millions of years of it and they are part of the same reef complex we hiked just two days prior. As we walked in, my friend from Canyon Lake asked me how Carlsbad compared to Longhorn Caverns just up the road from me in Texas. I replied, they’re both underground. Carlsbad Caverns is Notre Dame, Rheims, Westminster Abbey. Longhorn Caverns is the parish church.

When we finished our long walk through that massive cave system, we came out into the light and headed to White’s City to eat lunch. It was nice and we had a really good beer from Santa Fe Brewing. Then we set out to see what was up with Sitting Bull Falls. None of us could really imagine how there were falls in the middle of the desert and the drive to the Falls only deepened our skepticism and curiosity. It was barren land with no homes to speak of, only oil trucks and gravel pits digging up the ancient seafloors to build 21st century homes, buildings, and roads.

But we finally reached the Falls in the Lincoln National Forest. My pass was good for the five dollar admission. We parked at the old CCA campground and followed the signs. Then, we were there. What an oasis. The water, rising from springs in the canyon lands above, falls sharply to pools below, and it’s quite a sight to see. The pools are surrounded by an amphitheater of rocks on one side, and on this day Barbary goats (Aoudads) were climbing the walls with their little ones. Each of us explored the pools and the falls in our own time, took pictures of the scenery and each other, and tried to capture digitally the memories we were storing in our brains. It was a calm end to an exciting three days of hiking and discovery. We went back to the campground and our dinner, well satisfied.

After dinner, as is almost always our wont on the road, my friend from Ozona and I played guitars and sang. Our friend from Canyon Lake sat in an easy chair and listened, an audience of one. And I had a similar experience to the one I had the night before when we sat in the dark and played. I was caught in the terrain between what had been and what was yet to come. And just as I’d seen in all the geologic strata I’d been walking through I felt certain I was on my way to a new period that would be colored different that last, still tightly related, contiguous, but new with lots of unknowns.

Tomorrow: Part Five: Going Home