Following our week of skiing in Colorado, we continued our road trip in the campervan by moving on to southern Utah, starting with several days of hiking among the rock formations and arches throughout Arches National Park. Darlene was also able to snag a permit for us to spend a day scrambling over and squeezing between rocks in the Fiery Furnace.
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Our last stop on our road trip home was to Saguaro National Park which is split into two halves on either side of Tuscon, Arizona. After our cave tour at Colossal Cave, we spent the afternoon cactus-touring along the scenic loop of the east park and then found some dispersed camping in the foothills back near Colossal Cave.
The next morning we made our way across Tuscon to explore the western half of the park. Each half is a little different, including the visitor centers. I wouldn’t skip either one. We didn’t do any hiking but just toured the scenic loop, checking out the cactus varieties up close. That evening we were treated to a grand sunset out in the open desert west of Phoenix, near Saddle Mountain.
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Oh look, another cave system! Colossal Cave Mountain Park is a privately-owned park and cave system near Tucson, Arizona. We hadn’t planned on going here but decided to stop by and check it out. As there happened to still be space available on their next scheduled tour, Darlene and I joined their mid-grade “Ladder Tour” – a little more than their basic walking tour but not so much spelunking as their “Wild Cave Tour”. Anyway, it was fun – we’re glad we stopped for it!
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Onward to White Sands National Park in New Mexico – the world’s largest gypsum dune field. We spent a few hours hiking around and taking pictures. The fine gypsum feels nice and cool underfoot – it doesn’t heat up in the sun like sand.
I had hoped to also visit the Trinity test site but it’s open to visitors only two days each year (once in April and once in October) due to the site being part of the active White Sands Missile Range. We left the park an hour or two before sunset to find a nice dispersed campsite beyond the next little range of mountains:
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Continuing on our return trip, next stop was Guadalupe Mountains National Park in Texas near the New Mexico border. We checked out the visitor center and went for a hike in the afternoon before continuing on to camp on some BLM land in New Mexico near Carlsbad Caverns National Park. The following day was of course to visit Carlsbad Caverns.
We bought tickets for the self-guided tour and spent several hours enjoying and following the extensive walking paths of the cave system. There are ranger-led tours to some more isolated portions of the cave but these are very limited and get booked up well in advance. After exploring the cave at our leisure and having lunch back in the van, we waited around to join the ranger-hosted twilight event to learn about the bats that use the cave for much of the year and to wait for their grand, swarming, evening exit from the cave. No photography allowed (or any devices or talking for that matter) but we did get to watch many hundreds stream out. Apparently at later times of the year, you can see many hundreds of thousands of bats exit the cave.
We camped on some more BLM land that evening but woke the next day to a forecast for severe high wind and dust storm expected for hundreds of miles in every direction later that day. We had already planned to restock food in the town of Carlsbad so we ended up just renting a hotel room in Carlsbad to sit out the storm.
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On our return trip from watching the eclipse in Central Texas, Darlene and I first headed to the southwest edge of Texas to spend a few days exploring Big Bend National Park along the Mexico border.
We didn’t have campground reservations and of course everything in the park was booked out for weeks but we were able to snag backcountry sites which you can only reserve in-person 24 hours in advance. These are a handful of very dispersed but specifically designated sites along some of the unpaved back roads. Know that some of these roads require high clearance 4×4 vehicles and some of the sites are very remote, requiring hours to reach. We actually chose not to take one of these sites because we didn’t want to have to spend so much time to get to it and from it. As it turned out though, we spent over an hour trying to get to a camp area outside the north end of the park. In hindsight, we should have looked to find a campground out the more built-up west entrance of the park.
Anyway, we spent three full days hiking, biking and touring very different areas of the park, from desert to mountains and along the Rio Grande. If you go, make sure you don’t skip out on the really well done Fossil Discovery Exhibit.
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Darlene and I drove the camper van out to Texas to try to see the total solar eclipse as it traced out a path across North America on April 8th. Darlene’s friend and coworker Rhonda and her husband Jim have a home in the country in central Texas, northwest of Austin, which happened to lie near the center line of the path of totality. They invited us as well as many other friends and neighbors to experience the eclipse together on their property.
The weather forecast was looking pretty grim a week before the big day – a multi-day storm for central Texas and heavy cloud cover for much of the entire path across the central states. We made the long trip anyway in the hope of seeing something though. It started looking more hopeful as we got closer. On the morning of, the clouds were pretty heavy but patches of blue sky started to appear mid-morning, a few hours before the moon’s shadow was to reach us. It never completely cleared but we were all excited and grateful to be able to see and enjoy the eclipse through the passing clouds – and even still see totality through the veil of clouds right up until the end of it. The clouds did obscure much of the outward radiance of the corona during totality but it was still spectacular and we were able to clearly see several prominences extending beyond the edge of the moon – even with the naked eye!
I had set up a bunch of cameras and my two telescopes to capture the scene and share magnified views of the sun as it happened. I had a few things go wrong though, including inadvertently moving my telephoto camera’s lens out of focus (ruining the wider view I wanted to capture) and discovering a series of tiny blotches across the images and video from my 8″ SCT telescope setup that I had to touch up afterwards.
I was still able to put together a short video of the experience:
Many thanks to Jim and Rhonda for their hospitality and inviting us to join them – and nice job guys on fixing the weather just in time!
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Here’s the galleries (and videos) from several previous solar eclipse experiences:
Eclipse from the Ruby Mountains (annular eclipse in Nevada on 10/14/2023)
A Total Eclipse of the Sun (total eclipse in Oregon on 8/21/2017)
Eclipse Watch (annular eclipse in California on 5/20/2012)
On our way to Texas to see the eclipse, we enjoyed an afternoon checking out the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona: lots of wide vistas and pretty landscapes, some pueblo ruins and petroglyphs, Triassic era fossils and of course lots of colorful “rockified” (okay, petrified) tree remains everywhere.
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