Tag: Photography

It turns out that weekdays in December are a ridiculously good time to visit Mammoth Cave. The Frozen Niagara Tour and the Historic Tour had “participant limits” of 36 and 110 people, respectively, but only five people were on each tour today. According to the ranger who led the first tour, they get 5000 people a day during the summer, and the day after Labor Day that number immediately drops to 300 per day. Today there were perhaps 30 people in the park.

My love of spelunking is well documented, and today continued that proud tradition. I probably would have spent more time underground, but the requirement for visiting Mammoth Cave with a ranger and an imminent winter storm limited the options. That said, the Frozen Niagara Tour (which I remembered from a trip when I was eleven) and the Historical Tour (which I’d never done before) were both awesome – while Carlsbad has bigger rooms and more decoration, Mammoth was carved by underground rivers and as a result has hundreds of miles of passages, some the size of highway tunnels. During the two tours a handful of very creepy cave crickets and cave spiders appeared from the shadows, and a very cute pack rat and tiny bat also made appearances. Some interesting facts:

• Organized tours of the cave began in 1816, making Mammoth Cave one of North America’s oldest tourist attractions.
• Last year the length of surveyed passages was 360 miles. This year it is 392. They expect to be over four hundred miles of explored caves by summer. Mammoth is easily the world’s longest cave system.
• The cave has twenty-eight entrances, seven of which are natural.
• The name of the cave comes from the giant passageways, not the prehistoric elephant.

Tonight I’m in Bloomington to visit Audrey (she’s on a job at the University of Indiana) then, weather permitting, it’s off in the direction of Kansas and Oklahoma for some further exploration.

Last night was spent in a hotel – $40 for a bed, a shower, and the opportunity not to sleep in the back of a car in 18°F temperature was well worth it.

The earlier experience on the Natchez Trace Parkway was so good that I decided to detour 80 miles back to it and traverse the remaining 150 miles. Unfortunately the road was closed due to icy conditions (I assume) thirty miles from its terminus, but until then I enjoyed more birds, deer, turkeys, history, hiking, and life in general. The opportunity to drive across three states without seeing any stop signs, businesses along the road, or anything but forest and farmland is one that I don’t think is available elsewhere in the country, and it was greatly enjoyed.

Tomorrow the plan is for more caving in Mammoth Cave National Park, then it’s up to Bloomington to harass Audrey for an evening. After that Kansas and Oklahoma are on the agenda, although Mother Nature apparently decided that a massive cold front offered insufficient hardship and is now also whipping up snow & ice storms, so hopefully the roads will remain open in the coming days.

Anything on the map that in any way relates to spaceships tends to be difficult for me to avoid, and thus it was that today’s destination was the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. After a cold (temperature: 19°F) pre-dawn wakeup followed by another thirty or so miles of the Natchez Trace Parkway, the Subaru and I set off across Northern Alabama in search of rockets. At about ten o’clock the top of a Saturn V became visible on the horizon, and from that point onwards my mood was of the sort that usually leads Audrey to disavow that she actually knows me.

The space center is home to a museum that features a Saturn V rocket that was never sent into space. It’s the largest and most powerful space vehicle ever produced by man, with each of the five first-stage engines measuring twelve feet in diameter, and a total rocket height of over 36 stories; I was giddy. In addition to the Saturn V, the actual Apollo 16 command module, tons of mockups from other missions, and a “Rocket Garden” with everything from full-scale models to test vehicles were all on display. Since it was a Monday in December the staff seemed to outnumber visitors, so there was plenty of space to take it all in. While I generally try to keep him at bay, today the inner geek ran wild and free.

I met an old friend from the long-ago Andersen Consulting days for lunch today and partook of barbecued oysters and a shrimp & oyster po’boy – New Orleans continued to impress with its food. Cregan was brave enough to bring his wife along, and hopefully I didn’t frighten her too badly. His life since last we spoke included buying a house in New Orleans thirty-one days before Katrina – apparently insurance kicks in on day thirty, so he is insanely lucky if such a thing can be said of someone whose house ended up under five feet of water.

The day’s other activities included more roaming the streets of New Orleans, more wildlife refuge visits, and, after two horrid and uncomfortable nights of beds and showers, a joyous return to sleeping in the back of the car. The plan for tomorrow is to invade Mississippi, although thus far on this trip I’ve gotten distracted by everything from bridges to birds to trees to massive radio telescopes, so no plan is in any way certain.

The universe intervened on the roadtrip last night, and after driving for an hour without finding anywhere suitable to spend the night White Sands was removed from the itinerary; I probably should have known that overnight parking areas would be limited near a national monument surrounded by a government missile testing range, but I’m not often accused of having an overabundance of brain matter.

Missing White Sands probably worked out for the best as Carlsbad was further away than I realized, and despite waking up before 7AM, arrival time at the park wasn’t until after 10AM. From there the fun began: Ryan loves him some caves. Photos of Carlsbad can’t do it justice – the cave formations are probably more amazing than any other easily-accessible cave in the world, but the most awe-inspiring thing (to me) is how big it is. There are multiple rooms with ceilings well over a hundred feet high, and the aptly-named “Big Room” is 4000 feet long and 625 feet wide at its widest point; it’s tough to imagine how something like this could be engineered by man, much less occur naturally.

After four hours of romping through the cave it was time to leave, and I’m now making a beeline for Louisiana, although a large state that smells strongly of oil lies in-between. I haven’t quite figured out what the route across Texas will be, but it’s likely to take most of the day tomorrow, after which this roadtrip will be in uncharted territories and hopefully involve much more exploring and much less driving.

The town of Winslow was along the route last night so I decided to be a tourist, stopped, and yes, stood on a corner. I didn’t see a girl in a flat-bed Ford (my Lord) but there was a guy in a F150, so mission accomplished.

Today I woke up just before sunrise to a temperature of 38°F, drove to the gates of Petrified Forest National Park, and, while the horizon turned amazing shades of purple, stared in horror at a sign indicating the park didn’t open for another hour. That disappointment aside, the four-hour park visit was a good one – there were far too many photos and far too little hiking, but the supposed goal of this trip is to visit the Southeast so some sacrifices are needed.

What little plan there is for this roadtrip calls for getting to new places as quickly as possible and limiting the number of visits to old haunts, but White Sands and Carlsbad Caverns are kind of on the way, so I pointed the Subaru in that direction. I’m doing my best to travel backroad highways as long as there is daylight, so I was debating the merits of three possible routes when a dot on the map caught my attention: National Radio Astronomy Observatory. From that point the route was clear, and the fifth of December 2010 will live forever as the day Ryan went to the Very Large Array. The geek juices were flowing strong as I came upon 27 radio antennas, each 25 meters in diameter, spread across 22.3 miles of a high mountain plain. Sadly I only arrived with an hour to spare before sunset, but made the most of it by hurriedly visiting each part of the facility that didn’t have an “authorized personnel only” sign. Am I a huge dork? Clearly. But I am a very happy dork.