Guadalupe Mountain NP, TX
2022 Parks Road Trip Diary: Days 1-3
Guadalupe National Park set the bar high for the rest of our road trip. Seeing the view from a mountain peak is always great, but there’s something really special about the feeling when it’s flat everywhere else as far as you can see.
Not a good start
The excitement of heading out onto the open road was immediately killed by the car alert noise: tire pressure low in front left tire. With some inspection, the cause was apparent. Nail that we must’ve driven over the night before.
If you’ve gotten a tire nail before you’ll know that a nail near the center of the tread is fortunately repairable, so we drove to a tire place and got it fixed. Waiting put us ~2 hours behind schedule.
Hitting an unforeseen problem in literally the first minutes of the trip made me want to rethink how probable these kinds of time-eating issues would be for us…
Day 1: To Guadalupe
Anyway, we forged on, and stared at mostly-unchanging scenery for 8 hours.
There was one awe-inspiring stretch passing through a huge windmill farm, with hundreds of giant windmills. I couldn’t get a good picture of a large cluster from the car, but just imagine these dotting the landscape.
We arrived at Guadalupe Mountains National Park just before sunset. Because of the tire nail, this was hours later than anticipated, so while the scenery was pretty, we were kind of just focused on setting up camp before dark. And then dinner after that. Cooking at night isn’t ideal but we’re not about to go to sleep hungry.
Day 2: Guadalupe peak
The feeing of a warm, sunny morning in nature with a beautiful view in the background was a really nice reward after the previous day of bad luck and mostly boring driving. Definitely looking forward to more of this!
We woke up with the sun. I always love how easy it is to fall asleep not long after dark and wake up at sunrise when you’re camping. It also helped that we were driving west and crossed a time zone. Our sleep schedule immediately shifted from 12a - 8a to 10:30p - 6:30a.
After breakfast we set off to Guadalupe peak, an 8.6mi hike with ~3000 ft elevation gain. For us that’s in the “fun but challenging” range of day hikes. This peak is the highest point in Texas.
And you can tell.
Day 3: Devil’s Hall then on to White Sands
The next day, we hit the trail early since we needed to check out of our site by noon. We planned to do a short hike: 4.4mi with only 800ft elevation gain but a decent amount of rock scrambling.
40% of this hike was an easy stroll through the yuccas, 55% making your way through medium-large rocks as the path follows a wash, and the last 5% was the cool part where you finally understand how the hike’s name originates.
The hike was short so we packed up camp after that, and left by noon. On to New Mexico and White Sands!
post originally written 6/27, backdated to match reality