Carlsbad Caverns backcountry

One of the best ways to experience the National Parks is in the backcountry, off the beaten path. There is a time and place for the more curated nature experience, the “park” component of the National Park System, and frankly is the only way of engaging with some of the most iconic geologic features of the parks. At Carlsbad Caverns for example, it seems unlikely one could ever tour the caverns without running into a fair number of people. Similarly, if the grandeur of Yosemite Valley is to be experienced, it usually has to be shared with the crowds that assemble beneath its most iconic features.

Rattlesnake Canyon, Carlsbad Caverns National Park, April 2018.

Yet the backcountry of many national parks offers another treasure: solitude. It is a commodity in increasingly short supply in today’s noisy and hyperactive world, and one that seems to be vastly underappreciated given how few park visitors are willing to get off the paved trails and away from the visitor centers.

During my spring trip through the Southwest I was fortunate to backcountry camp at White Sands and Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico, and later on, at Bryce Canyon in southern Utah. The latter two parks offered an opportunity for a night of complete solitude where I was likely the only person out in the wilderness within miles. At Carlsbad Cavers I hiked into Rattlesnake Canyon from a dirt loop road winds through Chihuahuan Desert habitat west of the entrance to the caverns.

Unopened flowers of ocotillo, Carlsbad Caverns National Park, April 2018.

Texas walnut growing in a dry wash.

The region around Rattlesnake Canyon is a collection of rounded mesas dissected by winding canyons, not unlike the topography I remember from the southern part of Mesa Verde National Park. Ocotillo, prickly pear cacti, and shrubs grew throughout the dry slopes. It wasn’t as colorful as the Sonoran Desert vegetation I observed just days before in Saguaro National Park, but the blooming ocotillo added some vibrant color to the desert scrub.

At the bottom of the valleys were water would be more frequently available (no water was to be seen at all during my visit) small trees – Texas walnut (Juglans microcarpa) grew. One of the more interesting plants to catch my attention, growing throughout the park, was “sotol”, an interesting yet forbidding plant that grows in basal rosettes of pointed leaves like some species of Yucca. The long slender leaves bear sharp hooks which are very adept at catching clothes.

Sotol is formally Dasilirion wheeleri, and a member of the Asparagaceae family. Yucca, which it resembles in overall growth form is actually in a different plant family, the Agavaceae. Interestingly sotol has been used to produce both beer-like and distilled alcoholic drinks. Fibers of the plant were also useful to the Ancient Puebloan people of the Chihuahuan Desert.

Sotol, Carlsbad Caverns NP, April 2018.

Barbary sheep near the entrance to Carlsbad Caverns National Park. This species is non-native
and was introduced into the area from northern Africa.