Carlsbad New Mexico/Brantley Lake State Park – August 11 through 14

From Santa Fe, we traveled south to Carlsbad, NM. I had visited Carlsbad Caverns with my parents and siblings when I was nine and had been wanting to go back for a long time. Mike had never been to the caverns.

There’s not a lot to do in Carlsbad besides the caverns. It was too hot to do much hiking; temperatures during the day were around 105 degrees every day. There is a lot of oil drilling going on, and we could smell it in the air almost every afternoon. We were also extremely disappointed with the food. Pizza Inn served perhaps the worst pizza we have ever had. I didn’t think it was possible to screw up pizza.

On the plus side, gasoline was $2.35 per gallon. Woo hoo!! Beats the heck out of California; George tells us that it’s $5.00 per gallon for premium there.

We made Brantley Lake State Park our base camp (about 12 miles north of Carlsbad). The lake was so high there was no good place to swim (it was sticks and weeds around the edge), which was probably fine since the lake had a blue-green algae bloom. There were lots of cottontail rabbits, jack rabbits, and roadrunners. We were also able to enjoy the Perseid meteor shower on the first two nights.

Tip: check your outside chair at night before sitting down. I put my hand on something big. I don’t know if it was a lizard, scorpion, or centipede, but it was large. I flung it away, and scared Mike with my dramatics.

We ended up staying three days because we wanted to do some of the caverns tours, besides just the self-guiding tours. The Slaughter Canyon Cave tour is only available on Fridays.