The Knutson Family Adventure

New Mexico is a beautiful place and now at the top of my list with PEI.  There are so many amazing natural sights to see and such different and changing landscapes as you are travelling.  It was so crazy to go from the flat dry desert like landscape of Carlsbad, through the mountains covered in trees and snow in just a few hours drive.  White Sands, New Mexico is on the other side of the Sacramento mountains from Carlsbad.  As we were crossing over and descending down, the views were just breathtaking.  I was a little concerned about the truck, and the brakes going out on the way down but she did fine.  We pulled over and took some pictures of the amazing view.

  

 

We stayed at Boot Hill RV in Alamogordo, New Mexico while we explored White Sands National Monument and the area.  The people at this park were just the nicest people you could meet.  They even had sleds which they let us borrow to bring to White Sands and use for sledding.  We were about 20 minutes away from White Sands National Monument, so we got up Saturday morning and headed over for a day of fun.  The sand was the most beautiful soft, white sand you can imagine.  We waxed up the bottom of those sleds and climbed up the white dunes.  Climbing up sand dunes is even harder than climbing up snow hills!  But it was warm and sunny, so we can’t complain.  We had so much fun sledding and playing in the sand, although we probably only went down the hill a few times.  Our legs just couldn’t climb any more.

  

  

  

 

After we stopped and got some lunch, we headed back up the mountain range to the beautiful lookout point we had stopped at the day before.  There is a trail here that led down the mountain to a river flowing below that the kids and Eric wanted to climb, but we didn’t have time when we stopped the other day.  I began the steep journey with them, but decided part way down that I did not want to go any further.  Haydn decided to stay with me while Eric and the girls climbed the rest of the way to the bottom.  As Haydn and I sat there, I was looking around at the beautiful views while imagining in my head all the terrible things that mothers think of when their children are doing dangerous things.  I was so very excited and relieved when I saw all 3 of them come climbing back up over the rocks.

  

  

 

 

 

With our truck back in tip top shape, we were ready and excited to be back on the road again.  We decided to skip going to Big Bend and head onto our next destination which was Carlsbad, New Mexico.  The Carlsbad caverns are located there so we stayed for just one night and spent the next day exploring the caverns.

This was called the touching stone, because you are not supposed to touch any of the formations inside the cave, they told us to touch this one as much as we wanted.

  

There were two options for entering and exiting the cave: 1. the natural entrance which is a steep downhill trail about a mile long and 2. the elevator.  I had seen amazing pictures online of the natural entrance so I really wanted to head in on this trail.  It was a lot of walking, and surprisingly hard on your legs going downhill for that amount of time.  We took some breaks along the way, but it was very cool and I am glad we did it.

            

      

This cavern was enormous!  So much bigger than the cavern we went to in Florida.  The self-guided tour around the caverns took us about 2 hours and we were pretty much done with walking after that.  Needless to say we took the elevator out of the cave.