Guadalupe Mountains day 3: McKittrick Canyon

 

On our last full day in Guadalupe, we had a very leisurely morning, a lengthy breakfast, and then meandered our way over to McKittrick Canyon--which we regretted as soon as we saw that McKittrick Canyon has gates which it locks at 5 PM! We were planning to do a much longer hike but cut it short because some of the kids were a little anxious about the timing (we ended up leaving at 3:30 so we totally could have gone another couple miles, darn it!). 

Most of the first two miles of this hike is soooo boring, you're basically just walking down an old access road with the sun beating down on you. There are a couple of stream crossings though which are fun. 

And then about 2 miles in you come to the Pratt cabin! Which has the coolest limestone roof so that it fully blends in with its surroundings. I loved the interior of this, I thought it was so fun. 

This was used as ranger housing for a few years after it was donated to the park. 



I would totally love this as a weekend home up in the mountains!

I mean, maybe update a few things...(and add a toilet back in, the ranger said they had to take it out because visitors kept using it even though it wasn't connected to anything, yikes). 



Seriously such a cool roof. 



After the cabin, the canyon got SO much prettier (the photo at the top is from this section). It was amazing how different the landscape here was from the other side of Guadalupe where we were camping and hiking the previous couple of days. This felt much more like the Rockies. 

I read that this is one of the few places in Texas that actually has fall colors with deciduous hardwood trees in the canyon, so it's really popular in autumn. 



And lots of wildflowers!

The next waypoint another mile up the trail is the Grotto, which was not at all what we were expecting and was so cool. It was a fun preview of Carlsbad the next day--same type of stone, same fossilized reef, just exposed to air instead of having its little acid bath for a few million years. 

All around the Grotto were these very cool stone picnic tables. We had a snack there and then Luke, Neil, Nathan, and I decided to check out the spur trail to the Hunter line cabin. 

And it was such a gorgeous backdrop! Again, felt right out of a Louis L'Amour novel (by this point I'd finished Jubal Sackett and was on to The Daybreakers, which I borrowed from Luke). 

Luke and Neil walked around the back of the cabin (Luke following Neil) and Neil was back to the path when we heard Luke yell "There's a rattlesnake!" He jumped back and the other three of us ran over and we watched it slither away. Luke said he heard it rattling right as he was about to step on it. 

Not to be too punny, but I definitely felt rattled after that and every stick I saw looked like a snake (Luke said he was feeling the same way and when we got back to the table he pulled his feet up under him!). Then I was just feeling pretty anxious about staying in that area so we got everyone back on the trail again. We decided not to go up to the Notch (which I was sooooooo bummed about) in the interests of time. I am basically the queen of saying "oh it's only going to be a few miles" and then adding on like...eight more, which everyone in my family knows, so it's probably good that they reined me in here. 

So on the way back to Pine Springs, we stopped off at the Frijole Ranch, which was very very cool! (The springhouse pumps out 6 gallons of water a minute, which absolutely fascinated Matthew.) 

They also had this display of branding irons; I took a picture for all my Western novel-loving family but never sent it to them. 

Then we went back to our campsite; I had to go do some work stuff again with the visitor's center WiFi and none of the kids wanted to go, so Neil and I went down together. We walked the Pinery trail (which was pretty anticlimactic) to see the ruins of the Pinery mail station, pictured above (Neil: "That's it? That's the payoff?")

And then it was time to head back to camp for our last night and start some packing up! Next up: Carlsbad Caverns, the last park of the trip! 

Guadalupe Mountains day 2: Guadalupe Peak

On our second day, we opted to hike Guadalupe Peak, which is the highest point in Texas. Here's my thoughts on that--it's cool to do because it's the highest point in Texas, and it has a cool little monument thingy on top, but the hike itself is frankly not that exciting and I think another hike (probably to the Bowl or all the way up McKittrick Ridge) would be much prettier. But having said that, I also think this is an iconic one that if you say you've been to this park, everyone's going to ask if you did this hike. Do with that what you will. 


Anyway, it's 8.4 miles with 3k of elevation gain. It honestly goes pretty quickly, I think we were up and down in less than 6 hours even with breaks. The trail gets a little rocky at the very end and there are a couple of sticky spots where it would be absolutely unsafe to hike if it's a windy day (people have been blown off this trail; 80 mph wind gusts are not uncommon. One trail report I read talked about people crawling around some of the more exposed parts). 



But our resident 6-year-old was just fine. (Note the napping Juliet at his feet.) 

Here's the view looking down on El Capitan; there's no established trail made by the park service, but there's a pretty well-defined social trail if you really feel like you must climb both. 

And here's a little Matthew with El Capitan in the background; on the right side you can see the gypsum sand dunes which are a smaller version of White Sands! (We didn't feel a need to visit that side of the park since we'd just been to White Sands the day before.) 

And here's the view looking down into the valley where the trailhead is...

One of the prettier bits of trail. It's pretty even BUT we saw people's headlamps coming down the trail around 10 pm and I definitely would not do that, too many cliff edges, bridges, and stairs. Plus mountain lions. 

The part of the trail to the left of Jules is the one that felt the most exposed to me and the part that would be really scary on a windy day. It was fine, maybe two feet where it felt a little "whoa okay," but again, wind would make it a very different story. 

Here's a better look at the path--fine in good weather, scary in bad weather. 

It was pretty chilly up at the summit! It was in the 60s on the day we hiked it, so really nice weather, but this would be brutal in summer because there's so little shade. 

For the first couple of miles you can see the valley laid out below you and we had fun always looking for our big orange tent!

Luke turned into an ooze ball for about a mile of this hike, so Neil was with Matty and I was with Luke and everyone else was chomping at the bit up ahead. 

Pretty cute for an ooze ball. 

And then we got back and it was still pretty early, maybe like 3? So we went to the visitor's center (Nathan reading his book the whole way, please note that multiple children brought books on hikes and would pull them out whenever we made them stop so people could catch up). 

Matty got his Junior Ranger stuff and then Neil took all the kids back to the campsite; I stayed behind at the visitor's center for a few hours to grade project proposals and respond to emails. 



And then when I got back to camp around 6, Neil had dinner ready AND had heated water for a shower! Luxury! Except it was in the 30s by this point and the water had cooled off more quickly than either of us had anticipated. He thought I was exaggerating my yelps while I was showering and then he had the same chilly experience later...but it always feels sooo good to be clean! We showered every day in Big Bend but I only managed to talk myself into one while we were in Guadalupe--just soooo much colder!

You know what a PhD and an extensive knowledge of heat transfer is good for? Making Jiffy Pop on a camp stove, that's what. (He came to my rescue on the second and third batch, the first one was...not good.) 

Meanwhile Nathan was happily reading in the hammock (the next morning the ranger very politely informed us that we could not hang hammocks on the trees but that we were welcome to hang them anywhere else. She suggested the fence as an alternative, I'm still not sure how that would work, so we just took them down). 




And out of order, but Matty had the best bedhead that day. Definitely worth memorializing. 

 

Guadalupe Mountains day 1: Devil’s Hall

After waking up in Alamagordo (and eating our hotel's really delicious cooked-to-order breakfast, so much fun Southwestern stuff on the menu!), we drove three hours to Guadalupe Mountains National Park. So if you're keeping track, we started in Texas (Big Bend), went to New Mexico (White Sands), then back to Texas (Guadalupe) and then we would finish up in New Mexico (Carlsbad Caverns). We spent a long time trying to figure out the best route and I don't know if this was it, but it worked. 




This was the very charming little walk to our campsite from the car. I was not super thrilled about the walk-in thing when we pulled up, but then I ended up really loving it to the point that we booked a walk-in campsite at Shenandoah for this fall. 



Barely managed to fit both tents but we did it! Neil did a stellar job of researching this campsite and picking out the only one that could fit both tents, we went for a walk to check out the other sites and they were sooo tiny. And for some reason I always love seeing our tents nestled in among whatever foliage that park sports. (Thankfully we had more room on our site than at Many Glacier last summer.) One other thing to note is that neither of the campgrounds allowed open fires (so no sitting around the fire when it gets cold in the evenings, which it really did!!) and Guadalupe didn't allow briquettes, so it's camp stoves only. It makes sense because of the fire danger, but I really missed those campfire evenings--those are usually everyone's favorite bit (and when it's in the 30s at night, you REALLY miss it!). 



We set up camp and then headed up the canyon to check out Devil's Hall. This park has pretty low visitation, especially when you compare it to some of the behemoths like Yellowstone. Our campground is the only one which has reservable sites (and there are only 20); there's another campground in the park with 11 sites (walk-up only). The trailhead parking has maaaybe 40 spots? Maybe? So we didn't see very many people there which was nice. But a surprising amount of people showed up without a campsite reservation and expected to be able to find one, so...don't do that. Plan ahead and book on recreation.gov because the options are super limited! 

Anyway, the first mile or so of Devil's Hall is pretty chill, just walking on a rocky trail. 



Then the trail curves up a wash and you're just climbing over boulders for a mile. It was really fun for about the first quarter-mile but then it was pretty exhausting (maybe that was just me, I was so worried I was going to snap my tibia or break an ankle. Too many weak spots on my body). 



Luke found an iPhone at the bottom of one of the boulders and we managed to find its owner, which felt pretty miraculous! (He never ever would have found it, I don't know how Luke spotted it--the guy told us he'd jumped off the top of a boulder and Luke found it way way down in a little spot about 20 feet off the trail.) 



The kids loved it and felt like they needed more climbing in their lives, so they climbed up and down every rock of sufficient size to do so. 



And then we got to the end! There's no sign or anything like that, but I'd looked it up on AllTrails so I knew what to expect. (I had a conversation with a woman that night while we were both washing dishes where these pics came in handy; I was able to show her where the trail terminus was. And then we talked forever once we realized she was from Utah Valley and we knew people in common. The very very small world of LDS-dom.) 

So here's Luke sitting by the tank (or tinaja) in Devil's Hall...

And here's the approach (it's easiest if you go up the left side and then you only have to climb over like 2 rock layers, we saw someone climbing up the center and they were pretty petrified and it took them forever). 




And here's everyone taking a snack break on the other side. 

Then we headed back to our campsite for dinner (you can see our car kind of in the distance behind Jules). 

Mmmm tikka masala and Asian crunch salad. 



And then I tried making rice pudding in the cast-iron skillet with the leftover rice (plus honey, milk, and raisins from our snack box) and it actually turned out really well! 

After dinner the kids started playing games and Neil & I walked down to the visitor's center to check the hours (and so I could respond to student emails with the great Wifi signal there) and there was the prettiest sunset on our way back!

 

Then the boys went to bed and the girls went to read in their tent and Neil and I sat in the car and read for an hour while we ate York peppermint patties, which is always a really great part of any camping trip. Yum yum yum. But I still missed the fire!