Hiking the Guadalupe Mountains - October 2010

Our friend from Houston, Jo Ann Stewart, drove to our house on Wednesday, October 6 and stayed with us so we could all get an early start on Thursday morning.  We did get away at 7:00 am and drove to Fredericksburg where we stopped at the Old German Bakery for breakfast.  The weather couldn’t be better with clear, sunny skies and a crisp morning in the 50s.  It would warm up into the 80s by afternoon and this pattern held for the entire weekend.



We drove to Interstate 10 near the town of Junction and headed west through pretty hill country.  The speed limit in this part of Texas is 80 mph on the Interstate so I set my cruise control on 85 mph and zoomed along quite nicely.  We passed Sonora and made our first stop for gasoline in Ozona.  While in Ozona I decided to drive into the old part of town and take a photo of the courthouse.  Across from the courthouse was a nice park with old, tall pecan trees and when we walked through the park we noticed several monarch butterflies fly up from the grass.  Looking up into the trees we were amazed to find thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of migrating monarchs.  We normally see them flying by our house this time of the year but this was the biggest concentration of monarchs any of us had ever seen.  We spent quite a lot of time and pixels taking photos that would not adequately portray what we saw in person.



Finally continuing on I-10, we ran into many more monarchs flying south to Mexico.  Unfortunately several were hit by cars and trucks and never made their trip.  Our windshield was a blurry mess by the time we arrived in Fort Stockton where we stopped to wash it off.  In Fort Stockton we took photos of the giant roadrunner and had a decent hamburger at Zoe’s Diner.  From here we turned north on highway 285 to Pecos, Texas, located near the Pecos River.  We drove around town but could not find much of interest except their sign proclaiming Pecos to be the home of the first rodeo.  It seems like I’ve heard that story somewhere else, several other places in fact.   



We continued on into New Mexico and Mountain Central Time and checked into the hike headquarters, the Best Western Motel in Carlsbad, New Mexico.  Happily for Rita and me, the motel upgraded us to a fairly nice two-room suite.  We drove around exploring Carlsbad which didn’t take long.  It’s a pleasant little town but not very big.  We ended up having dinner at the motel restaurant called The Flume.  A flume is a sort of aqueduct or water canal and there is one in Carlsbad that is sort of a landmark.  There is a lot of irrigation in this area with cotton being a major crop.  Anyway, Rita and I had mountain trout which came with vegetables, soup and salad for an adequate meal.



Friday’s hike at McKittric Canyon started at 11:00 am so we didn’t have to get up early and rush.  Breakfast was included with our room and was a standard motel breakfast buffet with non-interesting and mostly non-healthy items.  We left the motel about 9:00 am and drove to Guadalupe Mountains National Park in Texas which took about an hour.  We started our hike at 11:00 am and all three hiked together.  It was an out and back hike about 13 kilometers or 7.8 miles long.  It had some areas that were uphill and that caused us to sweat in the warm, dry climate.  Oh, I forgot, men sweat while women perspire.  The first stop was at the Pratt cabin which was built by a Houston geologist for Humble Oil, Wallace Pratt, back in the 30s.  The cabin is unusual for its stone roof.  By 1960 Mr. Pratt donated the property to the National Park Service.  We hiked a bit further to the end of today’s hike at a place called the Grotto.  It is a small natural cave carved out by water over time and it was here we stopped for snacks and refreshments.  The hike was very nice with rare madrone trees, alligator juniper and Ponderosa pines mixed in among the sage and cactus.  We completed the hike by 4:00 pm and drove back to Carlsbad with a stop for a six-pack of beer.  After we had our beer we cleaned up and drove into town where we had made reservations at the Trinity Hotel restaurant which is probably the nicest in town.  We had good food and split a bottle of pinot noir which went down well.  We all turned in early in preparation for tomorrow’s early morning hike.



Our hike started at 8:00 am on Saturday morning so we had to get up about 5:30 am in order to eat breakfast and drive to the hike location which was in the Lincoln National Forest in New Mexico.  It was called the Sitting Bull Falls hike and we all three started off together on a fairly steep uphill climb over loose rocks.  At the 5 kilometer check point, Rita decided not to continue but to return to the campground.  Jo Ann and I continued on the 14 kilometer, 8.4 mile, hike which took us into the White Oak Canyon.  The trail was strenuous with many up and down trails in moderate heat.  After the hike we all walked over to view the falls which we thought would be on the hike but which was a short distance from the parking area.  We drove back to the motel, had another beer and met for dinner after cleaning up.  This evening we ate early at Danny’s Barbecue and afterwards went to Kaleidoscoops for rich ice cream.  Early to bed again. 



Sunday was our last and most strenuous hike of the weekend.  Again we had to get up early in order to get to the trail by 8:00 am when the hike started.  Rita decided to opt out of this hike and Jo Ann and I had to encourage each other to try it.  Rita did a difficult hike on her own to Devils Hall which was 12 kilometers or 7.2 miles in length.  Jo Ann and I took about three hours, fifteen minutes to reach the top of Guadalupe Peak, the highest point in Texas at 8,749 feet.  We only climbed 3,000 feet to the “Top of Texas” but it was a hard, steady climb.  The views were fantastic.  We looked down on the feature known as El Capitan.  We could see salt and alkali flats on the Butterfield stage route and it was so clear we could view the Davis Mountains in the far distance.  I heard that 29 of the 30 hikers who set out on this hike succeeded.  We all had our photos taken at the monument erected by American Airlines to commemorate the first transcontinental mail route which went through Guadalupe Pass.  And most of us took out our cell phones and made phone calls about our exploit.  On the way back to the motel we stopped for another six-pack of beer to celebrate and to numb the pain in our legs, backs, feet and shoulders.  We cleaned up and just went a block away to Chili’s for a quick dinner and then to early bed. 





After a dead man’s sleep, we limped into the motel dining hall one last time for one last breakfast.  We checked out of the motel and departed fairly early heading back to Pecos, Texas, where we picked up Interstate 20 east.  Rita and I had not been to this area before so we stopped first in Odessa where we took photos of ourselves with the giant jackrabbit that is the city’s mascot.  We drove around the central district then on to Midland where we stopped again to look at some nice 1920s architecture.  We took highway 158 to San Angelo – about 100 miles of nothing but creosote bush, cactus, greasewood, and mesquite on flat land.  We stopped in San Angelo for lunch at Fuentes, a Tex-Mex restaurant Rita and I discovered the last time we were there.  Then we took Jo Ann to see the old Cactus Hotel which was opened by Conrad Hilton for the first two years back in the 1920s.  We picked up highway 87 south through Eden and stopped in Brady, the geographic center of Texas, to photograph the courthouse.  In Mason we stopped again for Jo Ann to get a photo of the courthouse there (I have one) and to show her the restored Fort Mason where both Robert E. Lee and Albert Sidney Johnson served.  We also stopped to photograph the statue of Old Yeller in front of the library.  Fred Gipson, who wrote the book “Old Yeller”, was a native of Mason, Texas.  In Fredericksburg we stopped for a small dinner at the Auslander German restaurant before heading back to our house in Wimberley.  We arrived shortly after sunset and were greeted with thunder and lightning but no rain. 



Tuesday morning Jo Ann headed back to Houston while we took it easy the whole day doing nothing more strenuous than downloading photos to the Internet and writing up this story.  The sore muscles will heal and the memories will remain a long time.