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Todd
After Elephant Butte, we headed to Carlsbad Caverns via El Paso, Texas. El Paso’s traffic on I-10 seemed crazy-busy to us compared to Albuquerque or Santa Fe. No surprise, since the El Paso-Juárez area is home to about 2.7 million people, where the Albuquerque metro is about 1.2 million. The area is also home to the U.S. Army’s Fort Bliss, which houses about 11,000 people.
One might think that the tallest sand dunes on the continent would be in some exotic beach location that few people visit such as the Bering Strait of Alaska, or along the hurricane-ravaged southeastern coasts of the United States. I was surprised to learn that they are located hundreds of miles from the nearest ocean in, of all places, southern Colorado. President Herbert Hoover declared the Great Sand Dunes a National Monument in 1932…
We left the beautiful Custer State Park and made our way over the state line into Wyoming to cross another item off our bucket lists: Devil’s Tower. It is also known by other names given to it by the Native Americans, such as Bear’s Tipi, Home of the Bears, Bear’s Lodge, and a few others. The bear-related names arise from one legend that a giant bear clawed grooves into the mountainside…