A little family history

I got a copy of this photo while visiting my uncle in Colorado this week:

The parents in the photo are Mr. and Mrs. Smith, my great grandparents. The pretty little girl in the right side of the photo is Mamie, my maternal grandmother.

Now look again at the mom. Her name was Sally Vermillion Smith, and her brother (not in the photo) is by sheer coincidence also named Vermillion, and he lived on a ranch at the base of the Guadalupe mountains back in the day. He is one of the cowboys who saw the bat flight from the cavern looking like smoke, and made several trips to the natural entrance to watch the bats exit the cave close up.

It was he who took Abijah Long to see this phenomenon, and (according to one version of the story), Mr. Long suggested to Mr. Vermillion that there could be some profit made by mining all that guano, but Mr. Vermillion thought it was silly, and so Mr. Long filed the mining claim in his own name.

The other version is that Abijah offered to go to Carlsbad and file the claim on both of their behalf, but then filed it in his own name, thus cheating Vermillion out of his share. This is the version I had always heard, but actually the version above makes more sense to me having heard it - even though Mr. Long's book makes it obvious to anyone familiar with the cave that he never visited beyond the bat cave section until it had paved trails and lighting, contrary to his claims about exploring it - and thus exposing himself as being at least a little dishonest.

But then again, who wouldn't stretch the truth a little when something as famous as Carlsbad is concerned? And besides, the dude hired Jim White, which led to the world knowing about this wonderful cave - so in a way he has a firm place in the cave's history.

Too bad nobody remembers Vermillion's first name. Note to all: write down that oral history.

You are looking at the bottom of a very long formation set above Longfellow's Bathtub in Carlsbad Cavern, toward the end of the Big Room tour, shortly after Rock of Ages. The Cave Research Foundation completed a project last year that has been underway for ten years, cleaning the mud and silt from the bottom of this pool. We took advantage of the unusually dry state of the cave (which has lasted well over a decade) to painstakingly transfer water to a dry pool, remove mud, and move it back by the end of each long holiday weekend we spent in the cave. The results have been spectacular; if you could see the before and after shots, you would agree.

Thanksgiving weekend we worked on the Red Pools area (which will now have to be renamed, or they will when we finish removing the red clay that has discolored them). But while we were working, we checked the Bathtub to see how it looks. It has begun refilling! The shiny look of the flowstone tells you that it is active and wet. The pool is being dripped in, and the water level is already several inches higher than it was. And that wall has been dry for about thirty years - I last saw that wall wet that long ago.

We got it done just in time. It is now too deep to transfer enough water to nearby pools.