Guadalupe National Park, TX–White Sands National Park, NM

We’re on our way to El Paso, having left our lovely campsite in Guadalupe National Park. Apparently, everyone else thought it was lovely too, because both nights some campers pulled in past dark, drove around the entire campground, and pitched camp right across from site. Out of a whole campground, why did they have to be so close to us? At least they were mostly interested in sleeping, so they didn’t bother us too much.

We arrived at Guadalupe National Park at two in the afternoon day before yesterday. We hadn’t even heard of the park before we began looking for a place to camp near Carlsbad Caverns. We had an afternoon to kill before going to the Caverns the next day, so we thought we’d look around the park.

We picked the shortest trail to hike, a four mile round trip to “Devil’s Hall.” Most of the trail was up a dry wash and involved as much scrambling over white rocks as actual hiking. The trail didn’t rise much in elevation, which was nice. We followed the dry creek bed to the right when the valley forked. When that valley seemed to veer to the left, the way narrowed to a gap between two natural pillars of stone. Then it turned sharply to the left up a 15 feet wide and 10 feet high staircase of broken sedimentary layers of rock. We climbed up it, wondering what this place would look like in a flash flood. Another five minutes up the path, and the trail was walled in on either side by a narrow canyon, ten to twelve feet wide. The narrow canyon was about 50 feet long. We climbed up the boulders at the other end of the narrow passage to find a sign saying, “END OF TRAIL.” We hiked back before the sun set.

Now we’re heading north through New Mexico. We stopped by White Sands today. Gypsum sand is really cool. It’s water soluble, but White Sands is in a basin that water doesn’t escape, so the gypsum dries and gets blown into huge sand dunes. Gypsum sand is really easy to walk on if it has rained and then dried because it stays clumped. The roads throughout the park are just packed sand, probably snowplowed down. We trudged up a really big dune and overlooked the park … then slid down the other side.