Whites City, which is not a city at all, is the turning point along Highway-180, The National Parks Hwy, for Carlsbad Caverns. The RV park here is not spectacular, but it is convenient to both Carlsbad Caverns and Guadalupe Mountains National Park. We are going to hang out here for one week so we can visit both parks and do some hiking.

We drove into the park today, but won’t have an entrance ticket to The Cave until tomorrow. It’s busier on the weekends. We stopped at Walnut Canyon Nature Trail and the Walnut Canyon Vista Trail before reaching the visitor’s center.

The visitor’s center has a nature trail as well. It leads to a cave entrance in chain link and barbed-wire fencing with a strong smell of guano. This is where guano was hauled out of the cavern to be sold as fertilizer in California in the early 1900s before commercial fertilizers were made. The Old Guano Trail ends in our campground 3.7 miles away. We turned around to follow the nature trail to the bat viewing amphitheater and the natural entrance where we will come tomorrow with our tickets.

As we drove back to Whites City, a herd of Aoudad sheep stopped traffic in the Walnut Canyon. I still think they look like goats:)