Taking in the top of Texas
Guadalupe Mountains National Park is not for the faint of heart, and visitors must earn its incredible views
At the end of April, a week or two before summer’s heat would detonate across the Southwest, my husband and I stopped to acclimate to the thin, crisp air of an alpine summit. Under the shade of ponderosa pines and Douglas firs, we laid out our rain jackets like blankets and fished snacks out of our daypacks and turned over fossils, wondering what otherworldly beings had been there before us.
As we continued on, through a gently sloping backcountry meadow, I tried to reconcile where we were — the middle of a cool, dense coniferous forest, home to black bears, mountain lions and elk — with where we also were; that is, high above one of the emptiest stretches of arid, cactus-covered West Texas. We may have been some 2,500 metres above sea level, but it was no altitudeinduced mirage — our fatigued legs assured us of that. Nearly three hours earlier, we had set out from a trailhead just off a rapidly warming blacktop in the Chihuahuan Desert to climb an all-tooreal, feel-the-burn, 750-metre ascent to scale the peaks of Guadalupe Mountains National Park.
Before we drove the 800 kilometres from Austin to spend a few days amid the anomalous archipelago of “sky islands” that the 86,000-acre park protects, I had heard two things about Guadalupe: Most people come here to hike to the highest point in Texas. And hardly anybody comes here.
This is not well-trod ground. Guadalupe is one of the least visited of the country’s 60 national parks, welcoming just 225,257 people in 2017. By comparison, several million more people swarmed the perennially popular Great Smoky Mountains National Park last year than have wandered out to Guadalupe in the last 47.
If you have spent any time in sparsely populated, hauntingly sublime far West Texas, you know that this is DIY country. Unlike at Big Bend, Texas’ other (and larger and better known) national park about four hours south, there are no roofs to sleep under here or hot meals to order or waiters to refill your post-hike glass of wine.
If Guadalupe’s first-come, first-served campsites and RV spots are already taken — or you would like to shower — you will have to drive to Whites City, N.M., (56 km), or the tiny Texas towns of Dell City (70 km) or Van Horn (103 km) for lodging. Same goes if you need food or gas.
As one park volunteer put it to me, “This isn’t a theme park; it’s a wilderness park.” He seemed slightly annoyed that you might come all this way and expect it to be anything else.
The land here bears compelling witness to some of the powerful geological forces that have shaped our planet. Two hundred and 60 million years ago, in the age of supercontinent Pangea, this region was not terra firma but a tropical inland sea teeming with still-evolving life-forms; a proto-Vegas pool party of single-celled organisms, algae and sponges with skeletons.
Over millions of years, these marine creatures formed a 645-km-long reef, which ringed the sea’s shoreline. The sea eventually dried up, some 90 per cent of all life mysteriously went extinct at the end of the Permian era and the horseshoe-shaped reef was buried for eons beneath mineral salts and sediments.
And then, many more millennia later, large chunks of it were exhumed as uplift pushed its fossil-studded remains skyward and erosion dusted them off. Now, geologists (and the oil and gas companies that employ them) come from around the world to study the wellpreserved stratotypes in this extensive desert laboratory.
The reconfigured landscape, with its tiers of divergent ecosystems, is a bit of a mind-bender. The lower elevations look like what most people assume all of Texas looks like: scrubby flatlands light on trees, thick with prickly things. But then you find yourself amid verdant pockets nurtured by springs and seeps, as in McKittrick Canyon, where mule deer and ringtails slink through groves of bigtooth maples and chinquapin oaks and velvet ash that blaze with colour each fall.
The highest elevations, which are officially classified as “an isolated extension of the Rocky Mountains” and are prone to winter snowstorms and made lush by rain, might as well be in Canada. It is a strange thing to look up and see evergreens raised to the West Texas sky like sweet treats being offered to a desert deity.
And at Guadalupe, you do a lot of looking up. In addition to 2,667-metre Guadalupe Peak — the Instagram influencer that everyone wants a selfie with — the park is also home to the next three highest points in the state (not to mention nine of the highest 10, if unofficially).
Collectively advertised as “the top of Texas,” the climbable, though strenuous, summits are dangled like medals to lure both box-checking climbers aiming to reach each state’s highest point and Texans whose natal pride leaves them vulnerable to a challenge.
With more than 130 km of trails and a number of way-off-the-grid backcountry campgrounds, Guadalupe has a reputation for being a hardcore hiker’s paradise.
(The ultra hardcore can now tackle the 160-km Guadalupe Ridge Trail, which starts in the park and ends just past Carlsbad Caverns; you will need to hire an outfitter to drop water caches along the route.)
If I were to boil down my own philosophy on ideal outdoor recreation, à la Michael Pollan, it would be, “Long walks. Not too difficult. Mostly shaded.” So, a few phrases jumped out as I skimmed a brochure promoting the park’s day hikes: “Extremely rocky.” “Avoid in midday heat.” “No trail the last 1/4 mile.” “Avoid during high winds.” “Involves some scrambling.” There was a chance that I might not be the park’s target audience.
I had heard two things about Guadalupe: Most people come here to hike to the highest point in Texas. And hardly anybody comes here
One morning at the Pine Springs Visitor Center, we overheard a man asking where to start the drive through the park. The ranger broke it to him gently: There are not any roads through Guadalupe. Its splendour does not fully unfold until you get well off the pavement. To get to the remote Dog Canyon campgrounds, an isolationist’s Eden near the park’s northern edge, you either have to backpack 24 km or else drive up into New Mexico and then back down into Texas, a nearly three-hour excursion.
On our last morning, a funny thing happened on the way to the park. Because the Pine Springs campsites had filled quickly for the weekend, we had been happily ensconced at the Hotel El Capitan, in Van Horn. It was an hour’s drive away, but the commute gave me time to plot each day’s itinerary — and to fall awestruck anew each time the Guads rose into view from the highway. (And, since the park is just within the Mountain time zone, we would arrive each morning at the same time as when we had left the hotel.) We had our sights set on conquering Guadalupe Peak, but as I flipped through my notes, I began to realize something. I had asked just about everyone we had met — rangers, volunteers, friendly strangers — what their favourite parts of Guadalupe were. Not a single person mentioned the hike that everyone comes here to do.
Guadalupe Peak may be the hook that draws visitors in, but it is just the tip of the park’s sublime iceberg. One route recommended repeatedly was the nearly 14-km loop through the Bowl, the alpine island in the sky, to Hunter Peak (at 2,553 metres, merely the sixth-highest in Texas). The vistas, we were assured, were even more stunning, plus we wouldn’t have to do any backtracking (though we would have to trudge up one of the steepest grades in the park) and it was far less trafficked. By all accounts, it would be more bang for our buck. I queried the park ranger on duty at the visitor centre: Was there any convincing reason we should hike to Guadalupe Peak instead? “Well, you would have that accomplishment,” she said.
I could collect my “top of Texas” medal another time. We were off to the Bowl. The march up Bear Canyon, basically a 3-km StairMaster session in full sun, was as gruelling as we had been warned it would be. When we were nearly to the top (or so I kept telling myself), a sonic boom rippled through the air, momentarily interrupting the birdsong echoing off the canyon’s upper reaches. And then, another one. About 56 km away, Jeff Bezos’ suborbital Blue Origin “space vehicle” and its rocket booster had landed on the Amazon billionaire’s West Texas ranch after another successful test launch. We continued our own mission skyward.
That evening, after eight hours and four minutes on the trail, as we limped back into the hotel, we passed the Blue Origin team. They were gathered around the courtyard’s fountain, drinking celebratory beers, seemingly as giddy with relief as we were to have made it back down in one piece.
In the early ’70s, there was talk of installing a tramway that would take visitors to just below Guadalupe Peak, allowing many more people to revel in the beauty of the lesser-seen high country. The plan was ultimately scuttled. This would be no theme park. It is a wilderness park. And long may it remain.
I had asked just about everyone we had met what their favourite parts of Guadalupe were. Not a single person mentioned the hike that everyone comes here to do