Week #24: Guadalupe Mountains, Carlsbad Caverns and White Sands National Parks

We returned to the US with the intentions of only visiting Big Bend National Park and then got hooked in by all the other national parks nearby. Thank goodness that happened as we've been having lots of fun exploring the national parks of Texas and New Mexico. Many of these parks are not that well known which keeps them under the radar and fairly lightly visited by tourists. 

Guadalupe Mountains National Park was our first stop late last week and had been told by a fellow camper that the mountains were an ancient reef from millions of years ago when the continent was beneath the ocean. The headline act and main attraction to this park is to hike Guadalupe Peak which at 8,751 feet above sea level makes it the highest point in Texas. We enjoyed the hike, the view and were a little surprised that it wasn't harder. We had read that it takes most people 6-8 hours to complete the round trip hike and we were up and down in about 4 hours. Ginny was the one pushing the pace too because I was dragging a bit as I was feeling tired from a couple long training days in 90-100 degree temps leading up to the hike. See photos below of the hike as well as the Prada Marfa art installation which is actually in Valentine, TX on the side of the highway.     






Right across the state line in New Mexico, Carlsbad Caverns National Park is just down the road from the Guadalupe Mountains so we just kept piling on to the national park extravaganza! I had been to Carlsbad Caverns as a kid with my sister and my Tante Marijke. Ginny hadn't visited before although we have gone to some pretty spectacular caves in China and Vietnam. Carlsbad manages the flow of people through the cavern by having a reservation system which seems to work quite well. Corbett, table for 2 near the monster stalagmite please! The caverns were really amazing and the photos below really don't do it justice as it's pretty dark and the sheer scale of the cavern can only be captured by visiting it yourself. It was fun to walk through and I kept expecting to see Yoda or Jabba the Hut lurking in the depths of the cavern.   







Our last national park stop was at White Sands National Park which I had also visited as a kid and had memories of blindly white sand, really HOT weather and cool looking shade structures. Well, everything that I remembered was still there plus the Instagramming influencers who fortunately didn't exist back in 1988. See photo below of Ginny doing her best (Gen X-er) Instagram pose in White Sands! We started to hightail it west after White Sands but had some really great boondocking campsites outside of Las Cruces, NM and Tucson, AZ (see photos below).  






This week concludes this chapter of our van travels as we're back in Southern California now and are planning to spend the next month or so helping my aunt and uncle fix up their ranch up in the San Bernardino Mountains. We'll probably also do some van maintenance on Gemma as the roads in Mexico took their toll and we have a running list of repairs and deferred maintenance. So our next month will not be as action packed as the past several so I will likely drop the frequency of my posts to fortnightly. Until next time...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pacific Northwest and Vancouver Island

Image
We’ve been back in the van for about three weeks so it feels like it’s time to fire up the Tumbleweed Blog again. I’m sure you’ve missed it sorely but please do not fret as it’ll be coming to your inbox intermittently for the next three months or so. After a soggy winter parked at our friend Susie’s house in Lakeside, CA, Gemma was in fairly good condition. We had to jumpstart Gemma to get her started as the battery was dead, which had happened last year as well. The bigger issue though was that we discovered mold all over a couple of our sleeping cushions, the interior siding and the bench. We’ve had a small roof leak ever since we bought the van and despite our best efforts to fix it, it obviously still persists. We were fortunately able to buy some foam in Santa Monica to replace the moldy cushions and we spent a couple of days sanding and treating the moldy wood to rid our van of all of the mildew. We’re hoping to find covered parking for our van this coming winter since that’s p...
Read more

Canadian Rockies

Image
We’ve been in Canada for over a month now and have thoroughly enjoyed our visit. The wildlife alone is worth the visit – we’ve seen mountain goats, moose, elk, bald eagles, red tailed hawk, caribou and both black and grizzly bears (the grizzlies viewed from inside our van thankfully!). A number of places we visited on Vancouver Island had recent cougar sightings, but we fortunately didn’t see any. We’ve also gotten good at talking to ourselves and generally making lots of noise when walking through grizzly country to let them know we’re coming and avoid any surprise encounters. And of course the scenery is incredible as you can see from some of the photos below. Ginny and me in Banff National Park Banff is crowded but the scenery is spectacular At first blush, it can be challenging to find many differences between Canada and the USA – even the Canadian accent is virtually identical to the American accent for crying out loud! And of course they love ice hockey more than any other spor...
Read more

Guangzhou and Guilin, China

Image
Ginny and I recently took advantage of China's visa-free transit policy and spent 10 days in China. We were mostly visiting Ginny's folks in Guilin but we also did a couple of side trips to play tourist for a day or two. It had been 11 years since we last visited China and some things had changed quite a bit while other things seemed pretty much the same. China's transportation system, for instance, has been completely transformed over the past couple of decades (more on that below) but many Chinese men still smoke like chimneys.  We took three different trips on China's high speed rail network and each trip was a breeze. The trains are well utilized but also very comfortable and far superior to flying in my opinion. The national network includes approximately 48,000 km of high speed rail lines connecting all major cities across 31 provinces. China has plans to expand the network to 70,000 km of high speed rail lines by 2035 so they have truly been bitten by the high s...
Read more