Carlsbad - At the top of the Mountain

I wish I could have captured the landscape for you. We were at the top of a mountain in front of the Visitors Center looking down on what they call the desert. There were lots of cacti, some in bloom, but you'll have to trust me because my photography didn't show what I saw. We went on a 9-1/2 mile drive recommended in the guide book that must have been written by a dare-devil. The road was graveled, very narrow, with cacti reaching out at every turn--no guardrails--no shoulders even and the road went up, up and up and then down, down and down, twisting and turning, turning and twisting. I was scared silly....I prayed really, really hard that God would see fit to get us out of this nightmare and He did. The drive from Highway 180 to the Visitors Center is beautiful--enough beauty to skip the 9-1/2 mile nightmare. The land changes from flat to hilly to mountainous. The mountainsides remind me of Route 64 in Virginia on the way to Roanoke--like someone cut the mountains with a big knife. This land is part of the Chihuahuan Desert, as the guidebook says, "one of this continent's four great desert regions". It has some remarkable cacti---some were blooming but in places everything looked dead from no rain---brown, black, dead! Well, Wednesday we leave for El Paso, Texas and the salt flats. More later from your happy travelers.