Continuing my post-Christmas Texas/New Mexico park extravaganza, Felix and I headed to Guadalupe Mountains National Park. This park is in Texas right on the border to New Mexico. Also, this park is in Mountain Time but it’s right on the border to central time so my phone was constantly switching time zones and I never knew what time it was…

The most popular hike in Guadalupe Mountains is to hike to Guadalupe Peak, the highest point in Texas. That hike is 8.5 miles with 3,000 ft of elevation gain. I said “no thank you” to that hike, and instead, we started with another popular activity in the park: hiking to the Devil’s Hall. This trail is 4.2 miles and takes you through a wash with lots of big boulders. It was a fun rock scramble. 

The destination of the hike is a rock staircase and a canyon with steep walls forming a “hallway”. I thought the rocks were pretty cool. 

Next we stopped at the Pine Springs visitor center which has a short hike to the ruins of Pinery Station, a stop on an 1800s mail delivery route. Not very exciting. 

Going into this, I wasn’t super excited for this park because it doesn’t offer the kinds of activities that I enjoy. It has a lot of long, strenuous hikes through the mountains, and not a lot of short or medium hikes, or sightseeing by car. The park has some gypsum sand dunes on the west side of the mountains. It takes a whole hour to drive to this trailhead from the main visitor center, but we opted to do this since there wasn’t much else to do.

There’s a great view of the mountains from the west where you can clearly see all the peaks. Guadalupe Peak is the second peak from the right and you can see that it is only just slightly higher than it’s neighbors. 

There’s a 1.5 mile trail to the dunes. The Park says that the dirt around the trail has a special cryptobiotic crust that you shouldn’t step on, but the dunes are a free for all. Once there, we had a lot of fun playing around in the dunes. There were a lot of tumble weeds and I kept throwing them trying to get them to roll (pretty hard, you need a steep slope). Also a good spot for acro. 

I want to note that these dunes are gypsum so they’re supposed to be white (like the ones at white sands) but I thought they were just regular sand color. The sunset over the dunes was nice. 

Felix is banishing the sun?

We realized on the drive back to our hotel that it was New Year’s Eve. I was pretty disconnected from the world on this trip. Felix got sparkling cider to eat with our microwaved dinner and I was in bed by 10. 

The next day we started by hiking the McKittrick Canyon trail. The Guadalupe Mountains are part of the Chihuahuan desert (the US has four deserts), but the mountains create a different climate such that you see plants and animals that you wouldn’t expect in the desert. McKittrick Canyon has enough water to support a stream and a forest of deciduous trees. It’s supposed to be a very nice place in fall. 

We hiked until we reached the Pratt Cabin, which was built by the guy who donated this land to be a national park. I didn’t really care about the cabin. It just marked a good point for us to turn around. The canyon was fine. It was a very easy 4-mile hike.  

Next, we did the McKittrick Canyon Nature Trail. I love doing nature trails, and this was the worst one I’ve experienced. It was super overgrown with thorny bushes, and half of the plaques seemed to have been installed a long time ago in front of plants that have since died. The plaques don’t have any pictures on them, so it’s very hard to tell which plant they’re talking about, or if it’s still there. Hated it. 

For our last hike of the day, we did the Smith Springs trail. It’s a 2.3-mile loop trail in the foothills of the mountains and takes you to two springs. The first spring was called Manzanita Spring. Water…wow.

It was quite windy.

The second spring, Smith Spring, had a cute stream through a forest with a bunch of maple trees. It reminded me a little of New England. It would have been a very sparse forest for New England. 

That was it for Guadalupe Mountains! As we were leaving we got a cool view of El Capitan. There had been clouds over the mountains all day. It was windy and we could see the clouds moving quickly and dissipating after they left the mountains, but more clouds always followed. The mountains seem to have their own climate.

On to our final park: White Sands! We drove to Alamogordo, NM, and stayed the night. White Sands is pretty small for a national park. It has one road, and five hiking trails, one of which was closed potentially due to a missile incident? The park is next to a missile testing range. I figured we didn’t need the whole day in the park, so we started with an activity that was recommended by our hotel clerk: checking out the Valley of Fires Recreation Area. It’s an hour north of Alamogordo and it’s an area that has the remains of a lava flow. 

The lava erupted from vents about 5,000 years ago, making it a very young lava flow. There’s a short nature trail and they let you walk around on the lava. It’s cool but it’s also one-note. Once you’ve seen it, you’ve seen it. 

We drove back to Alamogordo and into White Sands, which turned out to be extremely popular on this day. We went to the visitor center, rented sleds for sand sledding, and then had to wait in a long line to enter the park. There were a lot of families around, some of which had set up umbrellas on the dunes and camped out for the day. It felt like we were going to the beach. This is a National Park where it’s totally acceptable to not bring shoes on a hike.

Wouldn’t you think there was an ocean just beyond those dunes?

We got in around 1pm and had to return the sleds at 4, so our first priority was sledding. We found some sufficiently sleep dunes and sled down them. Quite fun!

We walked deeper into the desert to find more secluded dunes, and it was amazing. Absolutely stunning. The sand is so pure white. It’s otherworldly. I loved it. 

We were not on any particular trail but we had to walk pretty far to encounter any sand that didn’t already have footprints in it. When we did, we had some fun taking acro photos. 

When we’d had our fill, we made our way back to the car, sledding down every dune. It was great.

We had to exit the park to return our sleds and get our deposit back. This was super frustrating because it meant we had to get back in the long line to re-enter. I later learned there was a sled donation box were you could drop your sleds if you were willing to forfeit your deposit ($10), which I totally would have done to save myself the hassle. 

I had intended to hike some of the trails in the park but it was nearing sunset and I was running out of time. We started hiking the Dune Life Nature trail, which is located closer to entrance of the park, where the dunes have more plant life on them. The plaques on this trail were too childish for my liking so we quickly gave up and instead did the Playa trail. The Playa trail is 0.5 miles and goes to a playa, which is a dry lake bed. It was totally try so this was not exciting. I was pretty stressed about getting a good spot for sunset so we spent a total of 6 minutes doing this whole trail (Felix timed it). 

It was very important to me that I saw the sunset in White Sands because I’d heard it’s spectacular, and clearly other people were thinking the same because as we drove through the park, there was not a dune we could see that didn’t have people on it. We stopped at the Alkali Flats trail head and walked until we found an acceptable spot. The setting sun really accentuates the shadows of the dunes. 

I think it was most beautiful right after the sun set. There was a pink ring around the horizon and the sand looked lavender in the twilight. Also there was a full moon! My pictures don’t do it justice. 

 I saved White Sands for last because I thought it would be my favorite park, and it was. I wish I hadn’t seen Valley of Fire because I think I could’ve made a whole day out of wandering and sledding on the dunes. It was magical.

Felix and I drove to El Paso and flew back to Boston the next day. Back to our beloved cats! I’ve now visited 23 out of 63 National Parks. A third of the way there! Thanks for reading!