Tag Archives: hiking

Emory Peak in the Chisos Mountains

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The day after Thanksgiving in 1957, Bob and Ann piled the kids in the station wagon and drove from Sanderson, Texas, to Big Bend National Park. Sanderson to Jacksboro was too far a drive for the family to make for the holiday, so they stayed down on the border and made a true holiday of it by visiting the park.

Santa Elena Canyon, 1957 (notice the height of the people standing by the river, on the right)

For the last leg of my West Texas Interlude trip with Pat and Randy, we ended up at the Chisos Mountain Lodge in the national park — Bob and Ann had made a day trip of it, going all the way to Santa Elena Canyon on the west side of the park and back to Sanderson in one day, but we opted to stop for a couple of nights in the mountains. Shortly after we arrived, we went out for a 1.5 mile loop hike near the lodge and visitor’s center, taking in views of the Window below us. As we set out on the loop, we paused at the map posted at the trailhead, and I recalled a vivid memory of standing in that place with Jen and Janel a year and a half ago, after we’d finished our 5 mile hike to the Window and back. I remembered looking at the dotted lines on the map for the South Rim and Emory Peak and hoping that I would get to come back and see more of the park.

And in that moment of remembrance, I decided that I needed to make it happen. I needed to climb up to the top of Emory Peak. So the next morning, I took my laptop out of my backpack, put in a few snacks and a couple of water bottles instead, and I set off. I tried not to focus too much on the signs posted several times in the first mile of my trip, warning that this is bear and mountain lion country.

I’ll be very honest — I hope I never, ever see a bear or mountain lion. My fear of them is very rational (they’re predators!), so it’s not at all a phobia. Pretty much every step of the way to the top and back I was certain that something was about to lunge for me from the forest. I heard growling a few times (maybe). I also heard something swishing along in the brush beside me once or twice, in step with me, stalking me, stopping when I stopped. It turned out to be my ponytail swishing against the top of my backpack, but for a few moments I was sure my time was up.

Texas Mandrone and agave, on the Pinnacles Trail leading to Emory Peak Trail

For more than an hour, I hiked without seeing another soul coming or going. I was beginning to wonder if I’d made a mistake in coming up there on my own — Pat and Randy and I all felt that it would be crowded enough on the last weekend of spring break that I wouldn’t actually be hiking alone all day. Nine miles is a long way by yourself, just you and the predators. During that first hour I sang to myself and the trees and the Mexican bluejays that hopped along the trail in front of me. After that, I leapfrogged with a couple of families and passed a few other people on the way to and from the top, solitary no more. My thoughts changed from certainty that I was being stalked, to wondering will my size in comparison with the others make me easy prey, or will it make me look less appetizing (I don’t exactly have a lot of meat on my bones)?

Four-and-a-half miles later, I reached the top of Emory Peak. Technically, I didn’t go all the way to the highest point. The last 20 or 25 feet are a scramble up some rocks where you get a 360 degree view — but I and a few others in the groups I’d arrived with were satisfied to watch the brave few climb up there while we enjoyed our slightly-less-than 360 degree view. I am unashamed that I only made it to 7800 feet and not 7825.

view from Emory Peak

I sat down on a rock to snack and rest and chat with the others before heading back down, when I realized I got a cell signal for the first time since we’d arrived in the park. I had received text and voice messages, and with my phone to my ear I heard the guy next to me say, “You’re getting a signal up here? Is that why you made the hike?”

“Yeah, I came up here to check my voicemail.”

view of the Chihuahuan Desert from Emory Peak

I made it back down to the lodge without seeing any bears or mountain lions, nor any prickly pear in bloom (almost, but not quite). Sitting at the restaurant patio with cold drinks later in the afternoon, Randy told me about this article about a mountain lion attacking a 6-year-old kid in February, causing them to close all the Chisos Mountain trails while they tracked the lion — which they didn’t find. Turns out the kid was attacked between the lodge and the restaurant. I later dug around on the NPS website and found a listing of mountain lion sightings in Big Bend for the month of February — one of the seven sightings for the month was at “Chisos Mountains Lodge, room 206, top of stairs.” I was sitting on my bed in room 215 when I read this. I guess I’m just as safe on Emory Peak as I am on the way to breakfast.

(For anyone who ended up at this blog because you’re looking to hike Emory Peak, I did the 9 mile round-trip hike with a 2500 foot elevation gain in 5.5 hours — and I highly recommend it, especially if you’ve already been on a lot of the other trails in the park. It’s amazing to stand at the top and look down at the places where you’ve already hiked.)

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Snowshoeing in Wenatchee National Forest

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It had been a while since I’d taken a day off work to spend outdoors, so when my friend Laura and her parents invited me to go snowshoeing last Friday, I jumped at the chance to clear my schedule and spend a day away from my computer.

Laura’s parents are friends with a family who go regularly throughout the winter to cross-country ski in the Wenatchee National Forest. They have the key to an old cabin owned by the US Forest Service, which they make their base on weekend skiing excursions. The cabin is three miles off the highway, meaning visitors have to pack in their supplies in the winter when the forest service road and hiking trail are snowed over. For our day out in the woods, there were four of us on snowshoes with smaller packs who were only going for the day, three with large packs on skis, and one chocolate lab who didn’t seem to mind that she was the only one tromping through the snow without something on her feet to keep her from post-holing every step.

This was my first time on snowshoes and my first time to see SO MUCH SNOW. Feet and feet of it. It didn’t occur to me until Laura pointed it out — we were passing snow covered treetops at ankle-level. After I realized that, I kept thinking about being on this trail during the summer and looking up overhead to see where we had been walking in the air on this February afternoon.

When we got out of our cars at the trailhead on the highway, the man who had invited us all along pointed out that “This is not a beginner trail.” Great. My first time on snowshoes and it’s not a beginner trail. I think he mostly meant that in regards to anyone on skis, since as we soon found out the trail was uphill most of the way to the cabin. 1000 feet in elevation gain over the 3 miles. Rather exhausting, and torturous for my poor feet in borrowed snow boots that didn’t fit well at all. But the experience was worth the pain in my toes and my ankles (I might not have said that if I’d been injured that day, but I wasn’t, so it doesn’t matter now). It snowed most of the way up to the cabin, six inches by the time we got back to the car — you can see what had accumulated on my backpack after the first three miles. Our hats were covered with a layer as well.

We passed one privately owned cabin (pictured below) on our way to the much more rustic forest service cabin. With the falling snow and drifts on the roof, I dreamed of spending a weekend in such a cabin, cozy in front of the fire, tucked in the forest away from cell signals and traffic noises.

With daylight ending fast, we stayed at the forest service cabin only long enough to sign the guest book, eat a snack, and dry off for a moment in front of the wood-burning stove. During the summer, there are four steps up from the ground to the cabin door. You can see from the photo below, snow had drifted up around the cabin, and we had to step down from the drifts to get in the door. It was unreal to me to be inside a building with such a view out the window.

After our quick rest, the four of us who weren’t staying the weekend put our gear back on and started back the three miles to the highway, the snow still coming down around us. Not long into the return trip, it became dark enough that we needed to put on headlamps, and we finished out our trip with the odd vista of falling flakes illuminated directly in front of our eyes, the darkness of the forest on a snowy, cloudy night surrounding us from all sides. Aside from the crunching of our snowshoes, the forest was silent. All of the usual night sounds in a forest were covered with feet of snow.

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History and Hiking in West Virginia

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Before my niece’s spring break started last week, I made use of the first few days of my time on the east coast to drive up to Martinsburg, West Virginia, to visit some good friends. These are the same friends I stayed with last summer in Kotzebue, Alaska, and it’s been a whole seven months since I’ve seen them — definitely time for a visit!

On my first day in Martinsburg, the three girls in the family had school, so their mother and I spent a quiet morning at the house before going out for lunch and shopping in the historic downtown area. Pretty much every old town in the east has a historic downtown, some more historic than others. Martinsburg was fun, but we got quite a bit more history on the second day of my visit.

The girls were out of school for the day, so we packed a picnic and headed out to Charles Town and Harpers Ferry. After a walking tour of Charles Town (including the home of Charles Washington, brother of George, and the courthouse where John Brown was tried and sentenced to be hanged), we began another walking tour through Harpers Ferry National Historical Park. We didn’t realize it before we made our plans to go, but the day following our visit would be the 150th anniversary celebration for the beginning of the Civil War — and Harpers Ferry was a pretty big deal at the beginning of the Civil War. Aside from a few tents sent up for the next day’s events, the town seemed pretty quiet and subdued, and we enjoyed walking up and down the old roads and alleys and looking in the historic stone buildings at the various museums and displays.

This day trip ended up being a bookend of sorts to my trip through Oregon a few weeks back. On that trip, I went to the Lewis and Clark National Historical Park at the site of the Corps of Discovery’s winter camp on the Pacific Ocean before they returned to report their findings to President Jefferson. What a pleasant surprise to stumble upon a Lewis and Clark exhibit in Harpers Ferry, the town where Lewis bought provisions and arms for their expedition! I also got to snap a photo of this sign for the Lewis and Clark Trail that I see all the time on the highway in the Tri-Cities, Washington, area where I live. Pretty fun to have visited both the beginning and the end of the trail.

We had another fun surprise when we looked at the map of the town to plan our hiking route for the afternoon. All we knew before going to Harpers Ferry was that there are trails in the area and that we should go see Jefferson Rock overlooking the Shenandoah River.view from Jefferson Rock

It turns out that the trail to Jefferson Rock is part of the Appalachian Trail, and not much further from the rock is the Appalachian Trail Visitor Center at Harpers Ferry, “the psychological halfway point” of the 2,181 mile trail from Georgia to Maine. So we went to the rock, then to the visitors center, where we chatted for a while with the volunteers at the front desk. They showed us the color coded notebooks with photos of all of the hikers who have done the trail since the 1970s. They’re just getting into the peak season for the visitors center — as of April 19, five thru-hikers had already made it to Harpers Ferry from Georgia, but no one from the north yet this year. Since we had three young girls with us, the volunteers were eager to show us the photo of a 9-year-old boy who hiked the entire AT last year, halfway with his mom and halfway with his dad. Man, I wasn’t anywhere near that focused as a 9-year-old.at the AT visitors center

So, within the last month I have walked three miles of the Pacific Crest Trail and about two miles of the Appalachian Trail. Just 2,647 more miles until I finish the PCT and 2,179 for the AT, if anyone is keeping track (and I am).

 

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Hiking in Oregon, Pt 2

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(Continued from Part 1…)

After leaving the Oregon coast to head back to the Tri-Cities area, our choices only continued. We decided to head back up from Cannon Beach to Astoria so that we could follow the Columbia River all the way from its mouth at the Pacific to my new home in Kennewick. But where would we stop along the way, with only a day to see this vast area?

The night before we took off in the direction of Kennewick, we flipped through our library books and checked out a few sites online for ideas of where to hike in the gorge, and in all the bajillion miles of trails we looked at, we found out that a section of the Pacific Crest Trail is easily accessible from Cascade Locks, Oregon, right on our route home. Columbia River Gorge, the PCT, a waterfall, an unexpectedly sunny afternoon — we had found the perfect combination for an afternoon of walking.

The Pacific Crest Trail runs 2,650 miles from the border of Mexico into British Columbia, crossing through California, Oregon, and Washington. Erin and I spent most of our hike that afternoon discussing the possibilities, oh the endless possibilities this trail holds. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to walk the entire PCT in Oregon? Cascade Locks is the lowest point on the entire trail — we can only go up from here. It wouldn’t have to involve a huge time commitment where you walk the whole thing at once, but in sections — day hikes or short backpacking trips. Or what about walking the whole trail in Washington? It would take you back to the Snoqualmie Pass that I was so worried about having to drive through on the way to Seattle. An interesting thought.

I don’t have a time frame for making any such goal (right now I’ll be happy to reach my goal of finishing the Badger Mountain Challenge 15k this weekend), but it’s fun to think of all the high points that await along this trail.

After getting back to the Tri-Cities, we found a list of blogs on the Pacific Crest Trail Association’s official site, and I’ll be following a couple of the thru-hikers as they document their journey from south to north when the 2011 season starts in April. Sounds exciting!

 

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Hiking in Oregon, Pt 1

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My first visitor in the Northwest arrived last Saturday (if you don’t count my dad, who didn’t so much come up here to visit me as to make sure I arrived safely in the first place), and I had to drive to Seattle to meet her flight. Like my last road trip in January, on Saturday I was checking weather forecasts and road conditions up until the last minute in order to make the right decision about which route to take across the state through potentially snowy mountains. The night before I left for Seattle, the Washington State Traveler Information website said there was heavy snow in Snoqualmie Pass, and I spent the entire next morning watching their notifications as they changed from “snow chains required” to “snow chains must be carried” to “no restrictions” by the time I left the house around noon. It’s an adjustment for me in travel planning — once upon a time, I obsessively watched for fog and rain that would keep planes from landing and taking off in Yunnan when I expected visitors. Now it’s snow and ice on roads.

So, I made it to Seattle without problems, and we headed for the Oregon coast and my first time to hike in the Northwest, outside of my weekly training at Badger Mountain. To help us decide which trails we wanted to do, I checked out a stack of books from the library and had my previous suspicions confirmed: I’ve got a lot of hiking ahead of me.

The options seem to be limitless. Looking at the maps and the lists of trails, I felt a bit like those times when I have just come back to America from living overseas and have to buy breakfast cereal for the first time. I’m used to there not being so many options, and having to make a choice can be overwhelming. An entire aisle of cereal, when all I could buy for months on end was a Chinese version of either Frosted Flakes or Froot Loops. Where do you even begin to decide? Mini-wheats? Bran flakes? With or without raisins? Granola? Cinnamon Life?

It’s the same when a girl from Fort Worth moves to the Northwest. Where do you begin with hiking in Oregon? The Columbia River Gorge? The High Desert? Mt. Hood? The Wallowa Mountains?

We started on the Oregon coast.

Our time along the coast mostly involved walking in the area right around Cannon Beach and Haystack Rock (including a cold and rainy 3 mile morning run on the sand), with a longer hike at Cape Lookout to look for migrating whales. We had a break in the typical Pacific Northwest rain for most of that hike, but we still got to experience the mud. It slowed us down, especially at first when we were picking our way daintily through what we thought were just a few muddy patches, trying not to get our pants too dirty. Soon we accepted that those “muddy patches” were closer and closer and in reality the entire hike would be sticky and slippery. So we changed our tactic to plowing through the mud as quickly as we could without falling down. Pants can always be washed. We didn’t see any whales, but the views of the coast from the height at the end of the trail were still worth every splashing step through the mud to get there.

More tomorrow…

 

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Jen’s Journey and a Challenge

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My good friend Jen, who I’ve mentioned on the blog before, celebrated her 39th birthday earlier this week. She has set a goal to get into the best shape of her life this year and is training for several races and triathlons, along with making plans to hike the Inca Trail in Peru to celebrate her 40th birthday. To document the year, she started a blog, Jen’s Journey to 40, where she will be posting about her training progress. I’m pretty excited for her — welcome to the blogosphere, Jen, and best wishes on the journey!

I’ve decided to take up a challenge of my own, though not quite so monumental (I just have a regular old birthday this year, for one thing, and why do something monumental on a regular old year?). Last weekend, the lady I’m staying with showed me the trail at Badger Mountain, about 20 minutes from her house. I saw a notice posted on the board at the trailhead for the Badger Mountain Challenge at the end of March. It’s a trail run with 15k, 50k, and 100 mile distances. 50k or 100 miles sounds absolutely ridiculous for anyone to do ever — EVER — but 15k is doable. I have two months to train and should have decent weather most of that time, which is much more reasonable than when I started training in rainy, cold, windy Kotzebue last summer, a month before their half marathon. I quit after only a few days, probably the smartest thing I’ve done in a while.

But this race is shorter, and the website says the 15k distance of the Challenge is for running or hiking, so I won’t feel bad if I have to slow down for the uphill parts. Plus, 15k is only a mile longer than the hike up Guadalupe Peak last October, and I didn’t train for that at all.

I think I can do this!

So, now I’m off to write up my first trail run training schedule…

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60 Hikes Within 60 Miles

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For anyone reading this in the North Texas area, I would like to recommend the guidebook 60 Hikes Within 60 Miles: Dallas/Fort Worth, by Joanie Sanchez.  I picked it up on a whim when I was browsing through a bookstore in downtown Fort Worth last spring, and it’s turned out to be a fun guide to have on my shelf when I’m back home.  My mom and I have been making a point of trying out different day hikes from the book when we get a chance, all on the western half of the map of the Metroplex, since we’re more of a Fort Worth bunch than Dallas.  So far we’ve done walks in Lake Mineral Wells State Park, the Trinity River Trail in Oakmont Park, and a modified (read: much shorter) walk in Dinosaur Valley State Park.

We did the Dinosaur Valley trip one fine day last month with my little cousins, one of whom asked a while back to legally change his first name to T-Rex.  The state park is along the Paluxy River, and though quite chilly at 40-something degrees in October, the day was sunny and beautiful for a walk in the woods by the river.  At one point along the dirt path, I said something about how we were hiking, and little 4-year-old T-Rex said to me, “But I don’t know how to hike.  I’ve never been hiking before.”

“Well, we’re doing it right now,” I said.  “This is hiking.”

A new vocabulary word.  What’s the difference between hiking and walking?

My mother probably didn’t consider herself much of a hiker until I subjected her to—and she survived—two days of extreme heat and height and rocky trails in Tiger Leaping Gorge a couple of years back (click here to read part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4 of that trip).  Now she says she can do any hikes North Texas has to throw at her—nothing could compare in difficulty to the high road above the Yangtze River in northern Yunnan.

Next up for us from 60 Hikes Within 60 Miles?  We’re still trying to decide between Cleburne State Park, the Fort Worth Nature Center, and the Caddo-LBJ National Grasslands.

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Camping Observations from West Texas

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our campsite at Guadalupe Mountains

The final entry from the road trip series “The West Texas Idea”

I thought it would be fun to end this series of blogs on my road trip in West Texas by listing some observations about camping that Janel, Jen, and I made over the course of our trip.  I don’t think I’ve ever included a bullet-pointed list in my blog before.  Enjoy this “first” for me; it may also be a last.

You see lots of different types of campers at national park campgrounds, especially if you plant yourself and observe the comings and goings for several days at one campsite.  Here are some of the people we saw at Big Bend and Guadalupe Mountains:

The Block Party Family—They camped in a tent, not an RV, but otherwise they had pretty much the same amenities you would find in a suburban home.  Mom covered the wooden picnic table with a tablecloth at each meal, and she set up a clothesline from the table to the grill.  Their site was lit up with several lanterns at night, and at first glance I thought maybe they had strung twinkle lights in the trees for what appeared to be a party to which all the other campers in our campground had been invited.  Nope, that’s just all their lanterns.

The Bikers—On our first night at Big Bend, the site nearest to us was occupied by three middle-aged men on Harleys.  Unlike other bikers we saw on this trip (and we saw a lot of bikers), these guys weren’t pulling their bikes on trailers behind an SUV from place to place and then riding through the scenic parts of the park.  All of their camping gear fit with them on their bikes.  I was impressed.  Early that first morning, I waited for the coffee to boil in our percolator and watched them pack up their site, fighting off the covetousness in my heart over one bright red retro bike in particular.  When they were ready to go, one of the guys announced to the other two, “Time to wake up the camp,” and they started their engines and were off with a roar.  “Well, girls,” I said to Jen and Janel, “we just missed our chance to see the park on the back of those bikes.”

The Germans in a Van—I also had a problem coveting the van of a German couple we ran into a couple of times at Guadalupe Mountains.  I keep threatening to buy a van to live out of instead of finding a house to rent, and this German set-up would be perfect.  They actually brought the van over from Germany, and who knows where all they have already gone in the States—probably more places than I’ve been.  They parked near our tent site and planned to stay the night, and by craning our necks as inconspicuously as possible we were able to see in the side door as they were getting stuff out to cook dinner.  Surprisingly, the van was very organized inside.  A place for everything, and everything in its place—made me want that van even more.  Jen got a better view of the interior when our lighter gave out while trying to get the burner on our camp stove lit for dinner, and she went over to borrow some matches.  Sadly, when the campground host made her rounds that evening, she declared the van to belong in the RV category, and the Germans had to move from the tent section to the RV section, which is much less picturesque.

The Americans in a Minivan—On our last night at Big Bend, we observed a couple camping in a minivan in the tent site directly between us and the toilet.  With three girls in our group, there was a lot of walking back and forth from our tent to the toilet, so we made quite a few observations of this couple.  It didn’t take us long to figure out that they hadn’t really planned their trip.  I’m not sure how one ends up this far south on the Mexican border without planning, but somehow they did.  They slept in the minivan that night, and the next morning we were quite intrigued by the items we saw outside the minivan at their picnic table: approximately 15 bags of chips, a ladder, and a brand new electric coffee maker that I’m guessing came from a WalMart in Midland.  Janel said she saw the lady walking back from the bathroom holding the empty coffee maker in one hand and its box in the other.  It never occurred to me to bring an electric coffee maker to the park and try to plug it in in the bathroom—but who am I to judge?

In addition to our observations about the people around us, we also noted a few lessons we learned over the course of our trip.  First, and props to my dad for this one, it’s good to organize all your miscellaneous gear and cooking utensils in an action packer-type box that you can take in and out of the back of your vehicle easily when you’re car camping.  I use the word organize loosely—our stuff started out organized in the box, but by the end of the week we were throwing it back in the box however we could make it fit and still get the lid to shut.  But at least it made it much easier to get stuff in and out of the car than if we were throwing it directly into the backseat instead.

Second, car camping with just girls is OK, but if you’re going to do any backcountry camping, it’s probably better to have a boyfriend along.  I don’t mean a friend who’s a boy, because chances are he isn’t going to feel obligated to carry any of your junk for you.  But from personal experience, and observation of a couple we met who camped near the top of Guadalupe Peak, when backpacks and boyfriends are involved, I know who’s going to end up carrying 50 pounds of gear for bragging rights and who’s going to have a daypack with a change of clothes and a toothbrush.

I loved camping and hiking with Jen and Janel, but they never would carry my stuff for me.

And lastly, even though they might make you move your uber cool German van to the RV section, we learned it’s good to make friends with the campground hosts.  Partly because they might loan you a lighter when you accidentally break the matches from your new German friends and still can’t get your camp stove lit for dinner.  Partly because they have lots of stories to tell from all the places they’ve been since retiring.  And partly because they get lonely and bored living in these remote parks, and it’s a nice gesture to talk to lonely, bored people.

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Guadalupe Mountains

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view of El Capitan from Guadalupe Peak

Part 9 from the road trip series “The West Texas Idea”

Before my aunt told us, “Hey, you should climb Guadalupe Peak while you’re out there in West Texas,” none of us going on this road trip knew anything about that peak.  I assumed it was in Big Bend.  It’s not.  It’s in Guadalupe Mountains National Park, a few hours northwest of Big Bend and an hour from Carlsbad, New Mexico.

I had no idea that there were two national parks in Texas.  I am embarrassed to admit that, but it’s true.  Apparently, I’m not the only person who hasn’t heard of it, and it’s somewhat difficult to find good information on the park.  I turned to  Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan’s coffee table book companion to Burns’s PBS documentary, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, for enlightenment about Guadalupe Mountains.  In 402 pages of stunning photos and inspirational prose, the book has one image from the park (with El Capitan partly obscured by clouds!) and the following paragraph (one paragraph in 402 pages!):

“In West Texas, the Guadalupe Mountains, the ancient remains of an ocean reef rising out of the desert, had once been the home of grizzly bears, wolves, and buffalo, as well as the Mescalero Apaches, who used the mountain oasis as a refuge until they, too, were driven out.  ‘My Lord,’ [JFK’s Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall] said when he first saw it, ‘what a paradise that place is.’  Then he got Congress to save it as a national park.”

Talk about understatement.  Folks, I’m here to tell you today, Texas has two national parks, not just one.  And Guadalupe Mountains National Park definitely is a mountain oasis paradise rising out of the Chihuahuan Desert below.

When we were planning our hike up Guadalupe Peak, our research online and in guidebooks turned up statistic after statistic about how little known and how remote the park is.  Guadalupe Mountains frequently shows up on lists of least visited national parks in the U.S., with only 165,000 visitors in 2007 compared to over 9 million at Great Smoky Mountains.  (Side note: The number one least visited national park is Kobuk Valley in Alaska, with 847 visitors in 2007.  You can read about my visit this summer to Kobuk Valley National Park here and here.  Yes, I’m bragging.)

It’s understandable that people wouldn’t make it all the way out to Guadalupe Mountains for a visit considering what an unpopulated and remote part of the country it is in.  One guidebook said the population density of the area around the park is comparable to the Sahara Desert, but not as sparse as Greenland.

What isn’t understandable is that over 400,000 people a year are willing to drive to Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico, but they aren’t willing to drive another 60 miles to Guadalupe Mountains.  Maybe they would be willing if they knew it existed.  Chances are, like me, they’d never heard of it.

More statistics.  Guadalupe Peak is the highest point in Texas at 8,751 feet.  The hike to the top is 4.2 miles, gains 3,000 feet of elevation, and it took us 4 hours with lots of stopping to catch our breath and take photos.  Photos pale in comparison to experiencing the view in person.  Guadalupe Peak is considered pretty short when compared to mountains in other states—but it’s surrounded by desert and has nothing to obstruct your view for 100 miles, and on a clear day like the one we had, you can see a really, really, really long ways in Texas, New Mexico, and Mexico.

Unlike Carlsbad Caverns, there isn’t an elevator at Guadalupe Peak.  That may be another reason so many fewer people come there.  But after seeing the cheesy souvenir shops and fluorescent green alien statues outside the caverns the day after climbing the peak, we decided that we’d seen the better park and started our drive back down to El Paso.

NEXT in The West Texas Idea

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Big Bend National Park, Pt 2

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hiking in Boquillas Canyon, Big Bend National Park

Part 5 from the road trip series “The West Texas Idea”

We did several good hikes in the park, including the popular Window trail in the Chisos Mountains, the trail to Boquillas Canyon along the Rio Grande, and a longer river hike to J.O. Langford’s hot spring and beyond.  Our hike to the hot spring was the first time we encountered the unique system of selling souvenirs devised by the people of Boquillas village across the river in Mexico.

As we were walking toward the hot spring, an older couple was walking back towards the trailhead, and the lady said to Janel as she passed, “The vendor is sitting across the river from the hot spring.”

The couple kept going, and Janel repeated the statement to us in a puzzled whisper.  None of us knew what this was supposed to mean.  We continued walking, and a moment later came across a small display of tacky ornaments made out of beads, in the shape of scorpions and roadrunners and other local animals.  Several walking sticks were propped against the rock, painted with cactus and roadrunners and the words “Boquillas, Mexico.”  A handwritten list of items and prices was posted next to a plastic bottle with the top cut off, which had been left there by the “vendor” to collect the money for any souvenirs one might wish to purchase on the honor system.

Just as the lady said, not one but two vendors were sitting under a tree across the river watching us.  We spent a minute or two poking around at the hot spring and decided to keep walking and stay longer at the spring on our way back.

I’ve had people try to sell me all manner of items as souvenirs in many different countries and through many different methods, but this was the first time I’ve seen this particular set-up.  I’m sure the men were just trying to make an innocent buck or five off us Americans, and I feel sorry for the loss of tourism income for these folks when the “transparent border” in the park was shut down after September 2001.  But it was more than a little creepy to be watched in silence from across the river as we hiked, especially after the news report of just a couple days earlier that an American tourist had been shot by Mexican thugs on Falcon Lake, further south on the Texas-Mexico border.

By midday the sun was blasting down on us in all her heat, and we had our fill of desert hiking for that go-round.  We turned back towards the trailhead, and there in the middle of the river was a dot moving toward the Texas side.  One of the vendors was crossing, presumably to check out their sales for the morning.  A moment later a prop plane flew overhead, and we read the words on the underside of its wings:  Border Patrol.  We made our way back to the hot spring, took our time sitting in the little shade we could find and tried to ignore the silent staring presence of the vendors (both back on the Mexican side by this time).

Hiking in the mountains the next day held less tension, given the relative distance from the border.  My main stressors from that hike were the numerous signs posted about black bears and mountain lions, combined with the ample evidence of their presence in the form of scat along the trail.  I’m glad I didn’t see the trail map at the visitor center with Post-It notes to mark recent bear and lion sightings until after we got back.

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