First things first, especially since I just spent a month in Texas: Remember the Alamo. One hundred ninety years now.
At dinner at our friend Judith’s home late during my visit, she served a delicious cobbler for dessert, and suggested ice cream with it. I was able to bring up that Bennett Cerf-worthy pun, remember the à la mode.
This handy list of U.S. national parks, ranked by number of visitors in 2024, tells me that if you can’t drive to the highlights of the park, people aren’t going to go. Or, if they’ve never heard of the place, they aren’t likely to go either. I can only speculate that that’s because most people spend shockingly little time poring over maps, paper or electronic.
Speculation aside, Guadalupe Mountains National Park in West Texas is the 52nd most-visited park in the current count of 63 parks, which is to say, almost in the bottom 10 least-visited parks, just behind Congaree NP, but ahead of Voyageurs NP. There is a single road that goes to GMNP from the south: the two-lane, remote as can be Texas 54, which joins US 62/180 just south of the park. That’s the way we went on February 18, traveling from Marathon by way of Marfa and Van Horn.
You can drive into the edge of the GMNP on US 62/180, stopping at Pine Springs Visitor Center. If you want to go further in, you walk, or ride a horse, I suppose. We spent a couple of hours in the park, taking short walks — totaling maybe a mile or so — near the visitors center. It was mid-afternoon when we arrived, and more importantly, we weren’t prepared for a long walk, or a horse ride either, especially on a very warm day.
But I did want to stop by, just to be sure that I’d really been to the park. That’s how I think. We might have stopped briefly in the area in August 1972 during our family cave vacation — I imagine there was a roadside stop to admire the Guadalupe Mts., at least — but maybe not. Also, a little reading tells me that the park itself didn’t formally exist in August of that year, when we went to Carlsbad Caverns, but came into being on September 30, 1972. So technically there was no park to visit at that moment. In any case, now I can say for sure that I’ve been to GMNP, as one of the 37 I’ve visited in the U.S.
Even from the visitor center, the Guadalupe Mountains are close at hand.
That is Hunter’s Peak, whose summit is 8,368 feet above sea level, and a fair ways above the visitors center, whose elevation is 5,734 feet. Not huge, but still a pretty photogenic uplift of the Earth’s crust, I’d say.
The sun was in a good position to light up that peak. Not so much for Guadalupe Peak (elev. 8,751), the highest elevation in Texas, at least from where we stood.
Flora along the way. Fauna wasn’t to be seen, except for a few bugs. But they are out there. Maybe some feral pigs.
Speaking of map ignorance, how many people in the wider world realize Texas has mountains? I knew that, of course, but only vaguely that they are relics of an ancient reef, called Capitan Reef by us clever apes; one formed 260 to 270 million years ago – before dinosaurs, even – when the area was under a shallow tropical sea. Visiting the park schools you a little on that hard-to-imagine mountain formation process, in which a thousand thousand years is a small turn of the wheel.
“Over millions of years calcareous sponges, algae and other lime-secreting marine organisms precipitated from the seawater,” notes the NPS. “Along with lime, they built to form the 400-mile-long, horseshoe shaped Capitan Reef. Eventually the sea evaporated… the reef was entombed for millions of years until a mountain-building uplift exposed part of it.”
Much more recent chemical reactions created the dazzling void we call Carlsbad Cavern inside the uplifted reef, but that’s a story for another day.
One trail from the visitor center leads to the ruins of a way station on the Butterfield stagecoach route.
Or more exactly, the epic plains and desert route used by the Overland Mail Company, whose stages did mail runs from St. Louis and Memphis to San Francisco from 1858 to 1861. Upstate New Yorker John Butterfield, a stage operator of great experience, was president of the Overland Mail Company and — incidentally — founder of American Express. Quite the story, depicted in movies of earlier times and for all I know, dime novels, though not so much any more.
That stage took passengers, too. Those who gripe about the minor discomforts of modern air travel would be advised to ponder the extreme discomforts of such a journey.
Per Wiki: “A correspondent for the New York Herald, Waterman L. Ormsby, remarked after his 2,812-mile (4,525 km) trek through the western US to San Francisco on a Butterfield Stagecoach thus: ‘Had I not just come out over the route, I would be perfectly willing to go back, but I now know what Hell is like. I’ve just had 24 days of it.’ “
