{"id":1978,"date":"2010-12-06T21:19:51","date_gmt":"2010-12-07T05:19:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/?p=1978"},"modified":"2017-06-08T01:19:19","modified_gmt":"2017-06-08T08:19:19","slug":"call-me-the-underminer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/2010\/12\/06\/call-me-the-underminer\/","title":{"rendered":"Call Me the Underminer"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The universe intervened on the roadtrip last night, and after driving for an hour without finding anywhere suitable to spend the night <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikivoyage.org\/wiki\/White_Sands_National_Monument\">White Sands<\/a> was removed from the itinerary; I probably should have known that overnight parking areas would be limited near a national monument surrounded by a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wsmr.army.mil\">government missile testing range<\/a>, but I&#8217;m not often accused of having an overabundance of brain matter.<\/p>\n<p>Missing White Sands probably worked out for the best as <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikivoyage.org\/wiki\/Carlsbad_Caverns_National_Park\">Carlsbad<\/a> was further away than I realized, and despite waking up before 7AM, arrival time at the park wasn&#8217;t until after 10AM.  From there the fun began: Ryan loves him some caves.  Photos of Carlsbad can&#8217;t do it justice &#8211; 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 <b>big<\/b> it is.  There are multiple rooms with ceilings well over a hundred feet high, and the aptly-named &#8220;Big Room&#8221; is 4000 feet long and 625 feet wide at its widest point; it&#8217;s tough to imagine how something like this could be engineered by man, much less occur naturally.<\/p>\n<p>After four hours of romping through the cave it was time to leave, and I&#8217;m now making a beeline for Louisiana, although a large state that smells strongly of oil lies in-between.  I haven&#8217;t quite figured out what the route across Texas will be, but it&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"img-main\" src=\"\/photos\/images\/2010-12-A\/5142_carlsbad_caverns_np_big_room.jpg\" width=\"600\" height=\"400\" alt=\"The Big Room in Carlsbad Caverns National Park\" \/><\/p>\n<div class=\"caption\">The Big Room.  Clever comment about the genius behind the name is left to the reader.<\/div>\n<p align=\"center\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"img-main\" src=\"\/photos\/images\/2010-12-A\/5146_carlsbad_caverns_np_big_room_chandelier.jpg\" width=\"400\" height=\"600\" alt=\"The Chandelier formation in Carlsbad Caverns\" \/><\/p>\n<div class=\"caption\">The Chandelier.  I&#8217;d guess that the largest stalactite in this formation was easily over ten feet long.  It&#8217;s also visible in the previous photo.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8217;m not &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/2010\/12\/06\/call-me-the-underminer\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Call Me the Underminer&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[8,30],"class_list":["post-1978","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journal","tag-banjo-tour","tag-photography"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1978","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1978"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1978\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11085,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1978\/revisions\/11085"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1978"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1978"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}