The Selle Journal

Days 4-6:

Photos by Erica

The last few days have been jam-packed back to back, so we have not had an opportunity to update in a while.

After a stellar New Orleans experience we had to make tracks to Las Vegas to make our next scheduled stop with my Aunt Joanne and Uncle George. We raced into Texas (Erica's first time) and had some Whataburger (also her first time). There were endless stretches of Texan desert in between towns, during one of which I stopped and marveled at not only the existence of sotol plants, but their sheer abundance on the landscape. I found a lot of chert (a flint stone) scattered EVERYWHERE on the mountain around us, which I collected along with some sotol stalks (excellent for primitive fire-starting and non-existent on the east coast).

We stopped at a rest stop at midnight and awoke to a very dry and warm morning. We ate the last of the halibut that my sister gave us before we left (thanks Tanya!) that I smoked with some of the very available mesquite wood all around us. 

That day was a solid 10 hours of driving, until we finally arrived in Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico. As it so happened, we arrived just in time for the 'flight of the bats' evening program. There is an amphitheater built around the entrance to the caverns where every night the bats come out at dusk to feed all night. We had to see it. After a short presentation by a park ranger, the bats started to swarm out of the cavern. About 100,000 of them! They came out in a tornado of bats over the course of about an hour, some flying over our heads (one almost hit me in the face), and descended into the valley. Never knew that happened.

The park ranger told us that we couldn't sleep there, so we just drove about a mile back down the road like we were leaving and pulled over in between a couple of mountains and slept there.

In the morning we enjoyed some of the prickly pear cactus fruit that we had been seeing on the side of the road all over the place to get some extra nutrients into our systems. Also they are damn tasty. Despite some technical issues that the park was having with the lighting in the caverns, we were able to get down to the "Big Room" of Carlsbad Caverns and took the 2-mile loop self-guided tour that is 750 feet underground. The air was 60 degrees at 90 percent humidity, giving us a unique feeling as we viewed the alien-like formations which have never known a different environment. We didn't want to leave, but knew we had to make time.

Our next stop was White Sands National Monument, 2 hours to the west. It was a great suggestion from Mie Turegano. What an epic 2 hour journey it was, too. We crossed some steep mountain roads, where the terrain did a 180. We got POURED rain on and the temperature plummeted 40 degrees. Then on the other side it jacked right back up to mid 90's.

The White Sands park was hard to describe, except that EVERYTHING was white. Standing on top of one of the dunes it literally felt like I had been inserted into the loading program in the Matrix. It is the worlds largest natural deposit of gypsum sand, making it a place where plant and animals live that are found nowhere else. Even the lizards are white. We saw quite a few.

We also met some teenagers with boogie-boards that were sliding down the steeper dunes. Of course, we had to try it. They even built a sand ramp at the bottom of the steepest dune, which was awesome. I got a little air. Erica liked it as well, though there were some notable sand-in-every-crevice wipe outs. Much fun. Many thanks to Carlos, Sam, Marcus, and the gang!

On the way out I noticed a honey-mesquite tree behind the visitors center that was COVERED in mesquite beans! For those who have never had them (I hadn't before that moment) they are an extremely nutritious fruit that the Native Americans used greatly back in the day. They have a wonderfully sweet grassy flavor, with a distinctly molasses overtone. You can just pop one in your mouth off of the tree, chew the small amount of leathery pulp off of the seeds and skin, and spit out the seeds and fiber. It's kind of like eating sunflower seeds, but tastier.

Next stop, Saguaro National Park outside of Tuscon, Arizona. It was completely dark by the time we hit the AZ border, and we still had 4 hours to go, so we really didn't see a whole lot of the new state until we got to the park. Then while we looked for a place to pull over and sleep I hit the high-beams and lit up the SAGUAROS! Neither of us had ever seen them before, and certainly not in these numbers, and I was audibly freaking out. Not sure why, maybe the lack of sleep, but it was blowing my mind. We found a great spot to sleep, then lights out.

Waking up in the Saguaro Forest has been my favorite yet. It was 100% new to me and I was soaking up the experience. When we finished a pretty average breakfast (but the coffee rocked) we went on a short hike to get immersed in the landscape. This was REAL desert. At least according to all of my childhood images of a real desert having to have giant cacti in it.

And there were so many new cacti that we had not seen before as well.

When we reached the base on a totally red mountain, I bushwhacked off the trail a bit, almost vertically, to scale some giant boulders that overlooked the valley. I found a valley FULL of saguaros, as far as the eye can see. This place required time to truly absorb the depth of, and I was spellbound in a trance for at least half and hour. Just knowing that each one of those magnificent sentinels had been there for between 100 and 200 years in such an unforgiving climate was deeply humbling. I should have gotten a picture.

On the way back to the car we had the gift of being able to try a saguaro fruit. There were a couple left on the ground, though out of season, and we tasted the heavenly pulp from one of them. It was kind raspberry-like with a hint of watermelon, and the seeds have a delightful, poppy crunch. I'm sure they'd be even better when taken in season right off the cactus.