Saturday, May 16, 2009

Day 28: San Antonio TX to White's City NM

Thursday, May 14
San Antonio, TX to White’s City NM
Odometer Begin: 110,528
Miles traveled: 489
Time spent traveling: 7.5 hours
Other: The speed limit on the interstate in western Texas: 80 MPH!
Wx: partly sunny low 90s F, HUMID then dryer
States traveled: TX, NM

We hurtled across western Texas at 80 miles per hour on most road or 70 if in a town! There is not much in western Texas just miles and miles of land. At a rest area we saw Scissortiail Flycatchers, which are apparently the state bird of Oklahoma. And we saw green energy mixed with archaic fossil fuels. Wind farm after wind farm and then oil drills. We arrived in White’s City (the entrance to Carlsbad Caverns) 15 minutes too late to get a backcountry pass so we ended up spending our first night on BLM land. Before we set up camp though we made the short hike to the entrance of Slaughter Canyon to see the bat flight. Bat flights are up to the perogitive of the bats so we only saw three. We figured it probably has to be warmer and buggier for the bats to come out en masse. The BLM for those that do not know is the Bureau of Land Management. They pretty much got all the land the Park Service and Forest Service didn’t want. Most of it is used for grazing, and mining and there isn’t any BLM land east of the Mississippi. HOWEVER, you can camp on any BLM land unless otherwise noted. So, you can just turn down a BLM dirt road and camp on the side of the road AND the BLM owns the most public lands out of any government agency, they are all over the west. Pretty much the entire state of Nevada is BLM!

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