Well, that's it. The summer is over. I'm all packed up and ready to go. Had my last fresh guac at Gabriel's last night and my last [two] breakfast burittos from ChiliWorks this morning.

Today's rental car: the Ford Contour. Nice car, actually. I'm impressed with it. It's not as luxurious as the pimped-out Taurus they gave me last time, but the controls are nicer and it handles better. Lacks an odometer, tho...

Ok, time to mail this halite core sample to Uncle Dave, and get Lukas' discman sent back to him, then wander around New Mexico in my fancy rental until my flight this evening. Then...

Vegas, baby! What's that line from Swingers? "Beautiful babies, baby!" or some shit. Vince, wherefore art thou, Vince? Anyway, no beautiful babies for me. I'm gonna "nerd it up," as Jason says.

Here's the only picture from tonight's Hell's Hole trip that came out. Kevin and Alex were appropriately impressed with the cave. Afterwards we went to Mary's for spaghetti and chocolate mousers. Yum.

So I just had lunch with the release manager for gcc. Sort of a nerd celebrity. Wow does this guy know his computer science.

Tonight I'm going back to Hell's Hole partly to show some more friends where it is, and partly to get better instructions on how to get to the lower exit for Mike.

And tomorrow is my last day in New Mexico. These past two months went by so quickly. And ahead is a month of only pain and suffering. But first, Defcon, Vegas, Urban Exploration, and the Twin Cities.

OK, my report on the last couple of day's adventures in reverse chronological order so that it formats normally for this webpage:

Sunday, July 23

I got up in the morning for another day of caving. Oh geez was I sore. The trip to Spider Cave involves a short hike down into a canyon, where the entrance lies right in the bottom wash. Whenever there is a lot of rain, the entrance could be filled with water and/or silt, so the Park Service has built a watertight rock enclosure around the entrance up to a height of about five feet.

Below the gate is a short ladder ending in a small space with a tight crawl heading off to one side. This crawl continues for many meters, and ranges from an actual crawl to a squeeze involving taking off my beltpack, getting down flat on my stomach (on the floor consisting of small, sharp rubble) and push myself along with just my ankles.

To make things even more exciting, the ceiling of this crawl is well-populated with harvestman spiders and there's no way to avoid contact with them. I hope I don't get chiggers all over my back or something.

Once past the tight belly-crawling, Spider Cave opens up into a space unlike any cave I've been in. It's all "bone-yard," and most of the formations are a brilliant, puffy, white, dolemite that looks a lot like marshmellow. I took lots of pictures.

I think this is my favorite of the tours offered by the park. It was both physically challenging and visually rewarding.

After four hours of caving, I was exhausted. I drove home and got in the pool. Leah and Katrina were there, and I hadn't seen them in a few weeks. It was relaxing.

At about 19:00, John and I drove back to Los Alamos. I won't be back in Carlsbad for a long time.

Saturday, July 22

So today is my first of two days of hardcore caving. Today I went to the Hall of the White Giant in Carlsbad Cavern. This is a somewhat challenging trip involving some tight squeezes. Most of the trip is relatively undecorated, but it ends in a room which is exquisitely decorated. The white giant is a huge stalagmite, gleaming white.

From the Hall, I could see the trail which I know goes down to the Guadalupe Room. I want to go there so badly. Oh well.

The White Giant tour took about four hours. And as we came back out into the natural entrance passage, they had already shut off the lights. Walking down that familiar trail without the artificial lighting was a new and different experience.

Returning home, it was definitely time for a swim. I was already getting sore from several hours of crawling around. Richard Farrell had his daughters, Karen and Baressa, over and John's goddaughter and godson, Christina and John, were there as well. The pool was full of kids, most of whom seemed to want to throw pool toys at me. Not as relaxing as I planned, but still fun.

My legions of screaming fans email me at all hours of the night. My latest piece of fanmail:

From: Brandon Hamm
the guy on riplys belive it or not is way better than you you stupid faget

Learn to spell, genius...

So Stan, Liana, Christy, Jessi, and I just got back from a trip to Hell's Hole.

We made a very thourough exploration of the rubble cave, locating the large room towards the bottom which Rob and Mike had told me about. Below the large-ish room behind the big room Jessi found some leads with lots of airflow. Eventually, she found a hole that led out onto a ledge far down the cliff.

The cliff ledge had no safe climb up or down, making the cave a very cool way to reach this spot. After determining that there was no way to go but back up through the cave, we made our way through the rough boulders back to the surface. By then, it was dark and we were very exhausted.

31 Flavors sells a pint of ice cream for three bucks. How great is that??

Once I take my qualifier in September, I hope to get work started on the railgun again. While I'm here, I thought I'd try to find the people that are working on the Los Alamos railgun. However, I think it's a DOD project and all hush-hush. I can't even figure out what group it is. It would be cool to sit down with one of them and just talk about my railgun.

So Friday I slept in. I went by Guadalupe Mountain Outfitters to get some hiking boots, but the kind I wanted just started using marking soles this year, and the only other kind they had were $180 bucks. So I just bought some topo maps and left.

Eventually, Stan and Liana showed up and we all went to Wall Mart to get supplies. We found cheap synthetic pants (mine had detachable legs, making them insti-shorts; Stan's had detachable legs and swimsuit webbing! three-in-one! only 15 bucks! I get excited about stupid shit), synthetic jackets, belt pouches, knee pads, flashlights, batteries, granola bars, apples, coke, and IBC black cherry.

We swam in the pool and ordered a pizza, waiting for Jessi and Christy to show up. They arrived late, so we went straight to bed, anticipating the 6:00am wakeup tomorrow.

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Sleeping on the couch sucks. And at 6:00am, I was not ready to get up. But the cave was calling to me so I begrudgingly stumbled off the couch and woke everyone else up.

Denny's was, well... pretty much what you'd expect. Note to self: don't ever order the farmer slam again.

The hike to the cave was basically uneventful. We did see an injured Texas Horned Lizard, which was a strange looking creature. It had blood on its head and seemed to be trailing some of its inards. It was sort of gross and sad.

The entrance to Black Cave had the usual infestation of harvestman spiders which we managed to get by without incident. Within the cave, we explored the length of the first parallel passage, then we split up into two groups.

We only had three caving helmets between us, so Jessi and Christy had to wear biking helmets instead. These are less safe, so we would swap helmets depending on who was doing something more likely of bonking their head. Stan, Liana, and I took the caving helmets first and went down a crack at the back of the first parallel passage into a much smaller area below.

Unlike the first passage, which is a long open tunnel, the lower passage is more like a series of rooms connected by small holes. After going through four or five of these rooms, we got to a particularly small hole. Liana stuck her upper-body through and had a look around. It looked like a dead-end and we had been split up from Jessi and Christy for over an hour, so we turned back.

The lower passage connects to the upper one in several places through holes far too small to traverse. We did, however, managed to talk to the other two through the holes on a couple of occasions.

While we were underneath, Christy and Jessi had explored the gypsum deposits in the second parallel passage. When we climbed back up and rejoined them, we all went back outside and had some lunch. Apples and granola somehow constituted lunch.

Returning to the cave, we climbed down the short wall to the third parallel passage, and circumnavigated the small pool. This gave us access to the fourth parallel passage, which Stan and Christy explored while Jesse, Liana, and I looked around the third parallel.

The third parallel passage is the one I had read about sometime ago, having a wide chimney over a deep pool. I wasn't going to leave without trying this traverse, so off I went. In places, it was just a wide chimney, where I was pulling groin muscles in order to keep pressure on the walls. In other places, it expanded to being too wide for my legs, so I had to switch over to having both hands on one wall and both feet on the other. There I was, spread out across this crevice with dark forboding water about 3 meters below me.

Crossing this pool was the most physically challenging thing I'd ever done, and afterwards, I felt like I had been run over by a truck. The far side of the pool, unfortunately, is somewhat disappointing. The passage ends about 3 meters after the pool, but continues back at a higher point, forcing my to chimney up again. This continuation leads another few meters before it dead-ends. There is a possibility that side passages exist in the crevice higher up. The passage is very tall, and I was only high enough to get over the pool safely.

No one else wanted to try the traverse, so I had to return after a short rest. It was painful.

Afterwards, I did a quick inspection of the fourth parallel passage and then we left the cave. We were all exhausted and very dirty. The two kilometers back to the truck seemed to go on forever.

We drove back out of the mountains and over the Sitting Bull Falls. It was a lot more busy than the last time I was there, which takes away from its beauty considerably. We went up to the waterfall and examined the cave entrance behind the water. I shined my flashlight in and looked around. It is much larger than I expected! There is a pool to one side that looks to be very deep, and a passage that goes back at least 20 meters. There are numerous side passages visable from the entrance.

I must get a permit for this cave and explore it! It is very fairy-tale-esque. Cave behind a waterfall, etc.

Now, very hungry an tired, we returned home to eat and swim. What a great day.

Yesterday, we all got up early and I saw everyone off on their trip the Carlsbad Cavern. I stayed home to clean up and prepare for my drive back to Albuquerque. It was the scariest drive of my life. I was so tired and exhausted that I was having a hard time staying awake. I had to stop in every town I passed to find some coffee or cola or something to wake me up. I kept finding myself nodding off while driving. It was creepy. But I survived.

I retrieved John from the airport and we went to have a fancy dinner at "Texas Land & Cattle" in Albuquerque. Huge Cheesecake. Huge.

Turns out there was a puncture in the left rear tire of the truck! It was a slow leak, but it was showing signs of flattness, so we called off our trip to the movie theater to watch X-Men and filled the tire instead. On the drive home to Los Alamos, I was out like a light - despite the thunderstorm all around us.

So today I drive John down to Albuquerque and drop him off at the airport. He's going on vacation with his wife in Vegas.

Afterwards, I'm driving back to Santa Fe to visit Stan and Liana, who recently flew in from Boston. Tommorow, we're all going down to Carlsbad. Jessi and Christy from the Los Alamos ultimate team are driving down as well, and on Saturday, the five of us are going caving.

Can't wait!

----------------

I met up with Stan and Liana at their motel, and the three of us waited for Matt and Barbara, a couple of MIT alumni who now live in Albuquerque. They accompanied us to Gabreil's for some of that great guacamole. It turns out Matt was one of the people who helped deploy the CP Car hack (in my opionion, the greatest hack at MIT ever). The five of us spent hours trading hacking stories, it was a lot of fun.

I was the first to leave, I wanted to get to Carlsbad that night and it was already 10:30pm. The drive from Santa Fe to Carlsbad takes about four hours and fifteen minutes at high speed. And a late-night drive like this is perfect for high speed. Highway 285 is pretty much devoid of cars at night and most of it is freshly resurfaced. A great drive. I arrived just before 3:00am.

So my advisor from MIT, Molvig, is in town for the week. John and I just had dinner with him. And he said the most confidence-boosting thing I've ever heard. We were discussing what areas my thesis topic could cover, and he said, "Well it can be about anything you want within computational physics. All you have to worry about in terms of nuclear engineering is passing this damn qualifyer! I shouldn't say it like that, you will pass."

In fact, he mentioned it twice. That I would pass. Not a statement of confidence, but a declaration. Meaning he's going to do everything in his power to see that it happens.

Before dinner today, I held little hope of passing. I do not think I'll get a high enough grade to pass on performance alone. But the grading system is highly subjective, and with Molvig there, willing it to happen, I can do it. Current outlook: I still need to do a lot of studying, even Molvig can't champion me through if I get 30% or something. But everything is looking a whole lot better.

The mountains surrounding Los Alamos are completely black. For the most part, they are currently devoid of life.

Concerned about flooding, the city has contracted Aero Tech, Inc. to continuously fly four tanker airplanes out over the mountains and dump a mixture of seed, mulch, fiber, and water all over the place to help the regrowth process.

I went out to the airport yesterday on my lunch break and watched them fly. I tried to get a picture of them spewing this green funk out over the mountains, but they were too far away. The areas where they're dropping mulch have this weird artificial astroturf look to them right now. Even the burned tree trunks are a funny green color.

I just splurged and purchased five DVDs. They were on sale for a good price, so why not.

Brazil (Criterion Collection) Terry Gilliam is my favorite director by far, and this is his finest piece of work. The people at Criterion put so many special features onto this DVD that they had to use three discs! One particularly interesting feature is the "Love Conquers All" version of the film (yes, a complete second edit of the film is in there), created by Universal Studios in an attempt to make the movie more palatable to the masses. It, well, sucks. Although there is no footage added to the film, this version is somehow a completely different story with a happy ending and everything. Amazing what editing and bad taste can do.

Time Bandits (Criterion Collection) Another fine piece of Terry Gilliam's work. This DVD lacks the special features of Brazil, but is worthwhile nonetheless. The extra features provided by Criterion include several commentary tracks and the "Time Bandits Scrapbook," whatever that is.

Tron Well, here's a DVD with no features but it's a great remaster of the original film de la dork. While it suffers from being pressed with a non-digital master, it has a great 2.20:1 aspect and the redone sound is wonderful.

Metropolis Certainly my favorite silent movie. And yes, they actually put out a DVD of it. Special features... well, it has the movie poster. That's it. But what a great film. Look at those sets and think to yourself that this was made in 1927. Unbelievable.

Heavy Metal I can't describe what it is about this cartoon that I like. It's really not a very good movie. It's like a sci-fi, fantasy, soft-porn, action, adventure piece of crap. But for some reason I watch it. Over and over.

Yes. Five movies, none of them released after 1985. For some reason I was in the mood for vintage nerd classics.

So the situation at Chiliworks is really getting sad. They're not just aware of what my order is going to be, they actually make me my sausage, red, cheese with crispy hash as soon as they see me walk in the door. When I get to the front of the line, they just take my 4 bucks and hand me a breakfast buritto, no questions asked, no waiting. There's something about this that just isn't right.

Aaron has posted his review of the 4th of July Ubertrip, with pictures!

OK, so the maid here must have waxed the kitchen floor while I was out. And it must have been some new-and-improved super wax made with space-aged polymers.

For the second time today, I put one foot down on the linoleum and went straight down onto my ass. And this time, I landed an entire glass of water on my head.

I know several people at MIT who grew up in the Los Alamos area, and a couple of them told me I should visit a few caves they knew of in the area. So today I finally had a chance to take a break and drive the Bronco down to White Rock and visit Hell's Hole.

It took awhile to find using the vague instructions Mike sent me, but I managed to find the small inconspicuous hole in the boulders with lots of spray paint around it indicating that this was the entrance. Hell's Hole isn't really a cave, so much as it is just some interstitial space between rocks in the boulder field. In that sense, it's very similar to the caving I did with Cyrus, Stan, and Z at Pergatory Chasm in western Massachusetts.

But this boulder field includes huge boulders, and it's very deep. Hell's Hole just goes on forever. I managed to make it about 15 meters down, and there were numerous side passages I didn't investigate. I turned back without spending too much time down in there because I was alone and sooner or later, I'd drop the car keys down a crevice or something.

I also took a moment to investigate a strange grating I found in one of the roads in town. It was very large, and through it I could see a storm drain room. I found the discharge of the drain and stuck my head in for a peak. I had my caving gear with me, so I figured what the hay. Urban exploration can be just as fun as caving.

It's July 8th!! This may mean nothing to you, but to me it means that there are only two months left before I take my doctoral qualifying exams. And for the next two months there's going to be an overabundance of posts to this page about how much more I need to learn before I can pass.

I'm getting ulcers already just thinking about it. Current outlook: I do not expect to pass unless Evan can pull off a miracle and teach me some of this stuff that I just don't get.

In light of the recent security problems at Los Alamos National Laboratory, lab employees have had to undergo some rather strict new security procedures. No division has been affected more strongly than the applied physics division (X division), where I work.

The lastest new rule states that, if you open your secure materials safe, you cannot leave your office until you've closed it and someone else has verified that it is securly shut. This means that if you needed to go to the bathroom, for instance, you have to call someone to come look at your safe before you can leave the office.

What the people who set up the rule didn't realize is that this rule sets up a race condition which could lead to the following situation: everyone could get stuck in their offices with their safes open at the same time!

If you and I go in on the weekend to get some extra work done, and we go into our offices and open our safes, we're stuck. We have to call around and try to get someone to drive into the lab to let us out. We could be there all weekend.

Hrmm... maybe there was some reasoning behind this afterall...

So I had a long chat with Professor Wendroff today. He wants me to port one of his astrophysics models. woo!

Ubertrip, Day 3:

We had to get up early in order to get to Carlsbad Cavern by 9:00am for our private tour. We met Tom "Boomer" Bemis, got our helmets, signed the permit, and off we went. The tour of Lower Cave was the deluxe version, much better than the trip I took earlier this year.

We got to go down to the bottom of the National Geographic Expedition ladder, which you can see from the Big Room. Also, insead of the little crawl after the Colonel Boles formation, we took the scenic route through a large collection of tunnels that run all the way to underneath the Mabel Room. There was lots of boneyard and aragonite, I loved it.

At one point, we sat in complete darkness while Boomer told stories about the Hodag (sp?). Lukas especially loved this. After the tour was done, we had lunch in the underground cafeteria, including the world's largest chef salads.

Having filled up on olives and lettuce, we returned to the surface and went into the cave through the natural entrance. The cave swallows were out in force. The natural entrance route is a great trail. The rooms just gets larger and larger and the decorations more and more impressive. There was no sign of the collapse that occurred on Monday.

Reaching the Big Room, we made our way around. At the top of the cross, we stopped for a rest on the rows of stone benches there. Aaron and I fell asleep. All this hiking and climbing is exhausting.

After leaving the cavern, we had several hours to waste before the bat flight, so we drove down to Rattlesnake Springs. The springs themselves are a bit of a let-down, but the irrigation canal proved entertaining... Aaron and I built a dam and then releasted the water which flowed down the canal in a big soliton. Probably not the highlight of the trip, but it kept us occupied for a couple hours. Oh, and also, we spent about 20 minutes messing with a colony of bull ants, trying to get the big warrior ants to come out. Didn't work.

The bat flight was the best I had seen yet. Very dense.

When we returned to Carlsbad, Lukas and Allana again fell asleep immediately. Aaron and I waited for Nichol to arrive. When she did, the three of us went swimming. A great way to relax after a day of hiking.

Ubertrip, Day 4:

White Sands National Monument only takes reservations for their back-country camping day-of, and it's at least a four hour drive from Carlsbad, so we got up really early to drive over and make our reservations.

With Nichol having joined us, and having brought my rental car, we were now a two vehicle caravan. We used Lukas' two-way radios to tell jokes back and forth between the cars and do Star Wars impressions.

Just like last year's trip, it turned out that hardly anyone had made reservations for the campsites at White Sands. There was only one site taken when we arrived. I grabbed the site farthest away from the road (about one half mile). We played around on the dunes for awhile, but the 100+ F heat was unbearable, so we went back to Alamogordo. We bought supplies (including 8 gallons of water) and had lunch. Then we were stuck with nothing to do until the heat subsided.

We went to the movie theater, but we the next showings weren't until dinnertime, so it wasn't worth it. Instead, we drove up to the space museum and investigated the IMAX theater there. We had just missed the space shuttle one, which I have seen before but I really really like it, so we had to settle for the one about wildfires. In the introduction, they made a point of saying that this was the smallest IMAX theater in the world. And the seats proved it. Aaron, Nichol, and I, all over six feet tall, were chewing on our knees the whole time.

The movie was a little over-sensational, and there was a lot of nervous laughter when they brought up controlled burns, considering the recent tragedy in Los Alamos. But overall, I enjoyed it.

Finally, it was cool enough to return to the dunes. We hiked back to our campsite, carrying a gallon of water each. Setting up the tents was 10,000x easier this year because of the lack of wind. In the time between when we got our camp set up and when the sun set, Lukas and Allana went on a long hike while Aaron, Nichol and I engaged in a healthy dose of dune jumping.

The windward side of the dunes are not steep at all and are packed hard by the wind. The leeward side, however, is very steep and composed mostly of very soft powder. By running up the windward side and then jumping off the ridge, the leeward slope drops away beneath you and you can quickly find yourself about 15 feet above the surface. The sand is so fine and the slope so steep that the landings are painless. The only difficult part is getting back up the slope to jump again. Now that's a workout!

When the sun began to set, we grabbed our cameras and sat on the dune to watch it happen. A very thin crescent moon appeared just above the mountains and the clouds were neon pink and orange.

Despite a small mesquito problem, we stayed on top of the dune to watch the stars come out and the fireworks over Alamogordo.

Ubertrip Day 5:

Aaron and I woke up just in time to see the sun rise.

It was very cold in the early morning, but as soon as the sun began to shine on us it warmed up quickly.

And without further delay, we were dune jumping again. This time, everyone got involved. We found a steeper dune and Aaron achieved a new distance record of at least 35 feet. Lukas even attempted diving head first. I thought he was going to kill himself, but he escaped unscathed.

I sustained one minor injury on my first jump. The dune was still unmarred by foot prints, so it had a thin hard crust on it which had to be broken up in order for the landings to really be soft. I landed on my ass and slid down the slope, cutting a path through the hard crust like and ice-breaker ship in the arctic sea. Now I have a huge raspberry on the back of my upper thigh, which took the brunt of the impact. After that jump, the crusty bit was mashed up enough to not be a problem.

Getting up at 5:45am makes the morning seem to last forever. We continued jumping until we were all exhausted and the air started to get prohibitively hot.

The dune jumping was so fun that it was hard to get ourselves to pack up and leave, but we were getting hungry and sick of eating nothing but granola bars and apples.

So, the tents came down, we hiked back to the cars, and drove back to civilization for a great breakfast at Ramona's. They served a "breakfast buritto" but it paled in comparison to the fine work of art that Chili Works offers. It lacked hash browns and chili, making it just eggs and bacon in a tortilla. ...weak...

Now, the plan was for us to drive up to the VLA and meet there.

But I screwed it up really bad. Aaron was driving my rental, and I fell asleep in the back seet without telling him where the next turn was. Lukas was driving very fast and was out of site when he made the turn onto 308. They woke me up when 54 ran into 285, approximately 100 miles after our turn. We decided to still go to the VLA, but by a very circuitious route. We wasted about 3 hours by driving the scenic route on highway 60.

By the time we got to the VLA, Lukas and Allana had alreay left. They were trying to get to Flagstaff by nightfall. So our parting was a bit anticlimatic. The last things we said to each other was over the radios and was something like, "You're clear to pass that guy, there's no one in the other lane for at least a mile." I still have Lukas' radio and discman, he has my map of Carlsbad Caverns. Doh.

We saw that Lukas and Allana had signed in at the visitor's center of the VLA, but they were long gone.

After our breif stop at the VLA, we drove on to Santa Fe and ate at Gabriel's, then it was to the White Rock Overlook to watch the stars and the Santa Fe fireworks.

We missed the fireworks, but the stars were great. We saw multiple meteorites and a few satellites. Being thouroughly exhausted, we retired to my apartment for the night.

Ubertrip Day 6:

Everyone was pretty tired, and Aaron and Nichol's planes left from Albuquerque at 4:30pm, so we didn't do a lot. We drove around and looked at the caldera and the soda dam, then went to the Overlook again and did a little bit of hiking. I showed Aaron the great climbing cliffs there.

We did, however, get to eat at Chili Works. And that's always a good thing.

We drove down to Albuquerque and parted on our separate ways.

Despite a number of things going wrong and some people not being able to make it, this was a fantastic experience. I think everyone had a great time and I'm definitely going to plan something like this again next year. Not sure how I can improve on this one tho...

Ubertrip, Day 2:

Lukas set the air conditioner in the hotel room to about 4 Kelvin, which made getting out of bed after only four hours of sleep that much more painful. We went to the airport to get Aaron. Luckily, he arrived on time and without a problem.

Finally, we got ahold of someone at the house Nichol was supposed to be staying at. She wasn't there, but he confirmed that she was in town, so it was all clear for me to drop off my rental car and for the trip to begin in ernest.

The drive down to carlsbad was the usual 4.5 hours of total boredom. Aaron and Lukas had a lengthy discussion of movies and we all listened to a selection of electronic and industrial music prepared by Luke and A-ron.

I was really worried that someone would find the Roswell alien schtik "cute" and would want to stop there. Luckily, however, everyone was as repulsed by it as I was.

Arriving at the Dark Canyon lookout tower at about 4:45pm, we began the hike to Black Cave. This is where I made my first major blunder of the trip. We left everything we wouldn't need in the cave back in the Blazer, and this included my emptying my pockets of everything including the cave gate key. We got all the way to the entrance (1.5 miles) before I realized this. Aaron and I walked all the way back just to get the key, then all the way to the entrance again. This was a 40 minute delay.

The cave entrance, like last time, was full of harvester (daddy long-legs) spiders. Aaron brushed them away with a stick and braved the gate to open the lock. Once inside and the gate locked behind us, we left our hiking gear behind and got ready for some real wild caving.

The entry room was somewhat uninspiring. It had a flat dirt floor, a low ceiling, no formations, and was rather small. There were small holes at each end, one with the gate and the other leading farther into the cave. Once we went through this little opening, however, the cave suddenly became amazing.

There were formations everywhere, and it was very active. The main passage continued straight back into the mountain for a long long ways. Several side passages broke away from the main passage, but we kept going forwards until we reached the end of the flagged trail. There was at least one passage that continued on in that direction, but it was not flagged so we didn't continue. The side passages proved to be dead ends with the exception of one, which led to a small room with a pool at the bottom and exits in every direction. Getting over the pool required some technical climbing and the group as a whole wasn't up for it, so we didn't explore any of these passages.

We spent about two hours in this cave, and everyone had a great time. I expected the cave to be smaller than it was. The others, not having been caving before, thought it was huge.

When we left the cave, we found that the sun had set and that darkness was quickly encroaching. In the 20 minutes it took to return to the lookout tower, it became completely dark. We tried to search for the entrance to Cottonwood Cave, but couldn't see any trail that led in the right direction. We did find some birds sleeping on the ground who's eyes glowed in the flashlights from a distance.

Giving up on Cottonwood, we headed back down the mountain and to John's place in Carlsbad. Lukas and Allana went immediately to sleep; Aaron and I went for a quick swim in the pool.

Ubertrip, Day 1:

Lukas and Allana arrived and we went off to D.O.M.E. to buy CamelBaks. I showed them the burn damage in town, and then we drove off to the caldera.

They were both impressed. Even though the government recently bought the land, the midget cows were still there.

We drove on to the East Fork trailhead and made our way to trail 137, which goes down to the East Fork River. The river winds between deep cliffs, and required in many places removing our shoes and wading up through the water. It was a strenuous hike and we quickly depleated our CamelBaks.

After four hours of hiking and wading, we made our way back to the car and drove to the White Rock overlook. I wanted them to see this in the light before we went to eat dinner. Dinner, of course, was at Gabriel's. The guacamole was the usual extraordinary.

At 10:45, we drove down to Albuquerque to meet nichol, who supposedly had just flown in from Minneapolis. However, when we arrived at the house she instructed us to go to, it was empty. Furthermore, the phoneline was busy.

We tried to sleep in our cars, but after an hour and a half of this, we gave up and got a motel. Got to sleep at about 3:30am.