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| Guadalupe |
White
Sands |
Saguaro |
Grand
Canyon |
Bryce |
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Capitol
Reef |
Arches |
Monument
Valley |
A Hotel |
Tombstone |
Misc. |
Guadalupe Mountains National Park - Texas
We rolled into the Pine Springs campground after sunset, paid the $8 fee, and set up camp. That night we experienced forty degree temperatures and strong, no, fierce gusts of wind. With the winds, the temperatures were probably below forty. It was a gut-check regardless.
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basecamp at Pine Springs campground
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On Sunday we woke just before sunrise. I woke up first and immediately went to the heated bathroom to thaw. By the time I got back to camp, the crew had started to emerge. We shook off the chill and photographed sunrise from the Pine Springs campground. Then we broke down camp and marched like zombies to the trailhead of the Guadalupe Peak Trail, which leads to Guadalupe Peak- at 8,749 feet, the highest point in Texas.
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El Capitan protruding out from the left of Guadalupe Peak. Looks can be deceiving - El Cap is actually 664 feet shorter.
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sunrise at basecamp
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Up the trail a bit and camp seems quite small. The three white specs in that circular area below are RVs!
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In preparing for the summit, I frequented the website summitpost.com. On this site, while it did warn of high winds and remote conditions with little opportunity for water, all of the climbers who posted reviews of the summit referred to it as an easy climb – that it took about 3.5 to 4.5 hours. We left the base at about 7:30 AM and didn’t see the base again until about 4:30 PM! That’s nine hours of climbing rocky, steep, and windy-as-hell terrain. Granted, we took a lot of photos, which accounts for most of our lag, and we rested frequently. Several spry parties passed us on the way up, but for hours we saw no one coming down. There was no way to gauge the distance to the top unless we could talk to someone coming down. After a few hours, this lack of any down traffic worried us. I attempted to use the topographical map (a map that I spent hours pasting together on my computer back home), but the truth is, you have to know how to use a compass to use a topo map. You have to know how to figure out where you are, where you’re heading to find a bearing. I thought I knew what I was doing, but did not. It’s not as though we were lost though. There is only one trail. It is clear and obvious, but we never knew how close we were to the top.
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Jeremy (left) and Taylor (right) find it impossible to hide their frustration/exhaustion. We had no idea it would take this long to summit Guadalupe Peak.
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Finally, after about five hours of climbing and after turning past the 100th false peak, Jeremy and Parker called it quits. I have to admit, it is demoralizing to continually think that you’re close to the peak, only to find out that there’s more climbing. I literally ran the rest of the way, to the top of the mountain. Turns out that we were only about twenty minutes (walking) from the top!
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Parker calls it quits and for some reason decides to place a rock on his head.
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Finally I reached the peak. Luckily for me, a nice couple was at the top and took my photo. The plaque depicts a stagecoach and an airplane with the dates 1858 and 1958 under each respectively. It reads, “DEDICATED TO THE AIRMEN WHO, LIKE THE STAGE DRIVERS BEFORE THEM, CHALLENGED THE ELEMENTS THROUGH THIS PASS WITH THE PIONEER SPIRIT AND COURAGE WHICH RESULTED IN A VAST SYSTEM OF AIRLINE TRANSPORT KNOWN AS AMERICAN AIRLINES“. On the other side of the marker is another plaque depicting a horse flying over a mountain range. It reads, "POST OFFICE DEPARTMENT - UNITED STATES OF AMERICA."
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(click image for full panorama) I pinned my hat down with a large rock to keep it from blowing back to camp, and I circled the peak, taking photos on each side. Later I would paste these 8 photos together in Photoshop to create a 360 degree panorama of the view from atop Guadalupe Peak.
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Hiking down should have been much easier, but on the way up I must have pulled or pinched something in my left knee. Every other step resulted in a piercing pain. The thrift store boots that I had bought for such a great deal in New Orleans were wrecking my knee, and the damage done during that summit would plague me for the rest of the trip. When we finally reached the bottom, we sat on a bench at the trailhead and remained still for about ten minutes. Exhausted, we slowly loaded the car and split. We spent the rest of the day driving to Las Cruces, NM via Hwy. 62/180 through the panhandle and El Paso, TX. We pampered ourselves with a hotel room in Las Cruces.
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| Guadalupe |
White
Sands |
Saguaro |
Grand
Canyon |
Bryce |
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Capitol
Reef |
Arches |
Monument
Valley |
A Hotel |
Tombstone |
Misc. |
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