The Heights of Friendship – And Elsewhere!

Dear Friends and Family,

I now have much greater empathy for all the webcomic artists I follow! I follow in the footsteps of Kochab, Fairmeadow, and Welcome to Halo Head; I went on hiatus!

No, the road trip did not end when this blog last updated. On the contrary, it continued all the way until September 8th, concluding a journey of: 26,162.9 miles, ~15,000 photos, 29 states, 28 national parks, 19 joint adventures with friends and family, 6 border crossings (4 land, 2 sea), 4 new tires, 3 oil changes, 1 wedding, and 1 birthday. I have rambled back and forth, up and down, this way and that over hither and yon (and I much preferred yon). I chased sunsets into sunrises, beat the mountains into valleys with the tread of my shoes, dove and swam and drank my fill of rivers and lakes and seas all across the continent. In the words of Ursula K. LeGuin, I have “stuck my toes in the soil that is not yours, but is you.” I lived as free and unencumbered as a maple seed spinning in the wind. And I’ve never been happier 💙.

But boy is that a lot for me to fill you in on! So for sake of narrative continuity, let’s just pick up where we left off, shall we? 🙂

We shall! There are miles and words to go 💙

So when we last left off (narratively, that is), I was heading west from Prada Marfa to El Paso, Texas after several days ~~enjoying~~ experiencing water in the desert. But why was I going to El Paso?

To pick up this sprightly and wonderful friend, of course!

Readers of the blog, say hi to Cameron!

Say it louder! She’s really far away!

Cameron is a dear and lovely friend of mine and the first of many to meet me out on the road! She is also the most appreciative of deserts, which is why she decided to meet me ~~at the ass end of nowheresville~~ all the way out in this ~~Godforsaken dust-up’d wasteland~~ unique environment of the Trans-Pecos.

Before we left the city, we visited the El Paso Sugar House, which is suburban home that’s been delightfully decorated with thousands of pieces of homemade ceramic. Cam found it on Atlas Obscura! It’s these kinds of small delights that make getting off the beaten path (and bringing friends with you) so worth it.

But it wasn’t long until we were really, actually off the beaten path:

We wound our way a few hours east to… somewhere. This is the part of the country where you can’t really describe where you are except in relation to something else; this is due to the vast and undulating swathes of nothingness in between everything. Nominally, this little AirBnB/camping cabin/Home Depot Shed was in a place called Dell City, Texas. But as a practical matter, it’s in the middle of nowhere. However, the edges of that nowhere were El Paso (3 hours’ drive west) and the Guadalupe Mountains (an hour’s drive east).

Not that it stopped Cam from bringing along the comforts of home!

She VOLUNTEERED to cook, thank you very much! I do not put my guests to work!

We had a gourmet taco dinner filled with fried Coyote Squash, refried beans, and not fried Mexican street corn; it was excellent eating and excellent preparation for the next day’s adventure:

Dawn over the Trans-Pecos.

The vast wastes of west Texas (referred to as the Trans-Pecos, the area beyond the Pecos River) are scarred by a peculiar mountain range cometting down from New Mexico; these are the Guadalupe Mountains, home to the so-named National Park. The mountains aren’t particularly high (rising about 3500′ out of the plains to a peak of ~8000′ above sea level), but they are the highest peaks in Texas. Naturally, we mountain-primed Virginians wanted to show these 10-gallon flatlanders what it means to hike, so we set out for the summit:

Views east.

The hike up was long only in distance, not in time; summit attempts go a lot faster when you have good company! Cam and I talked about where we’d been, what was going on back home, what we planned ot have for dinner, things of this nature. We made frequent stops to admire the sweeping views and the strange plans and animals that manage to scrape a life out of this inhospitable wasteland.

Banana Yucca, so named for the color and shape of its flower petals.

Some weird bugs, who could do well to get a room.

We made the peak after about 3-4 hours of climbing. Most state highpoints tend to have some kind of monument atop them and this peak was no exception:

The monument here was dedicated to the State of Texas, the- *checks notes* Pony Express, and the- *double-checkes notes* US Airmail service? Apparently the Guadalupe Mountains served as a significant landmark for both Pony Express riders and for interwar airmail pilots. It’s interesting, but it’s actually not why the peaks are a national park! That has to do with what you find in the rocks of the peaks themselves:

The orzo-like extrusions in the photo above are not a delicious pasta dish, but are, in fact, fossils of Permian-era nematodes. These fossils began to form 250-270 million years ago when the area of the Trans-Pecos was the coral-reefed fringe of an inland sea covering much of what would become North America. The seas eventually receded and plate tectonics eventually raised the reef skyward, taking millions of fossils with it. And those are just the visible fossils! These nematodes were packed in perhaps 10-15 per square inch, and we saw them on basically every un-foliaged surface in the park. There are thousands more examples saved of shells, shellfish, stromatolites, and other ancient creatures at the visitor’s center.

View southeast.

It was quite an interesting surprise! Here I thought Guadalupe Peaks was a National Park solely because Texas wanted a slice of that roughneck vacation pay that usually gets spent down in Carlsbad Caverns. So I was happy to see that the park had other merits to it than just, you know, being tall (by Texas standards).

We made it down the mountain a few hours later. And we came back the next day as well, in order to see some of the other washes and arroyos hidden in the folds of the peaks:

Cam is a much, much more enduring hiker than I am 😅.

This hike lead us to a remarkable area called Devil’s Hall, which had some very unique terrain gouged out of the limestone:

And hidden in the Devil’s Hall is the Devil’s Bathtub:

This itself was not very long of a hike, and we were back to the trailhead in about an hour or so.

We had a fair amount of time until our next planned activity, so we wandered up to Carlsbad, New Mexico for some lunch and sightseeing. Carlsbad was once primarily a national park tourist town, but the Permian Basin oil boom as rapidly refocused the economy onto roughnecks and other oilmen. There’s not much to see in the town itself, except for (just our luck) a beach on the Pecos River! It had been hot and dry the last several days in the West Texas desert, so we were very excited to beach it and enjoy our Hot Girl Summer™!

Here is the “beach”:

Needless to say, we were not impressed:

But we did get a good laugh out of it 🙂

Ah well ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯.

Our time a-wasted, we trekked back out of town to our last attraction for the day, Carlsbad Caverns NP.

I visited Carlsbad Caverns on the last trip, so it is not really worth reposting a bunch of the same photos of the main cavern again (the cave formations do not really change on the scale of a human lifetime). Here are just a few of the main cavern and the hike down:

However, it was still well worth seeing again! Just getting to see a dear friend enjoy a new experience was lovely in and of itself 💙

Cam, practicing her spelunking.

Buuuuut there was one more cave we got to see that was totally new to both of us!

This is King’s Cavern, a side-cave that is only accessible with a tour guide once a day. The cavern is so-named because all the little stalagmite growths resemble a “King’s Court” (each pillar is similarly named after a queen, a duke, a jester, etc.).