Hiking in Guadalupe Mountains National Park is nonsense! There are 11 marked trails, all of them long and strenuous except the two overlooks at two different Visitor Centers. Spoiler alert – the one we chose didn’t end well.
It was a bittersweet departure from Ft. Davis at dawn. We didn’t feel like we’d spent nearly enough time exploring the West Texas triangle of Alpine, Marfa and Ft. Davis, but because the new Covid normal is camping reservations required, we are sticking to our pre-booked itinerary, which ends on May 1. Freelancing, we would have spent another day or two in Fort Davis and returned to Alpine to check out the university. We have been roaming for a few years now, but we still feel anxious without confirmed reservations in the new, post-Covid way. That is a mistake. We know it, but it is so hard to embrace the true freedom of not knowing where you will be staying tomorrow. Maybe we will get there. Try it sometime. It is harder than it sounds.
It’s 200 backroad miles from Ft. Davis to the Guadalupe Mountains Pine Springs Visitor Center. The sun rose under cloud cover, but there were pockets of rays that shone down over the barren land. With no shoulders we couldn’t pull over. Amazing what an iPhone 11 Pro can capture at 55 mph. What’s also amazing is Sirius XM radio. You can’t connect to internet or make a phone call, but you can get all the songs of the 70s and Fox News or MSNBC commentary you can handle. We passed a dilapidated roadside motel with a sign out front that read “Let lonely places stay lonely.” Traveling 90W, (west of Marfa) is as achingly beautiful and lonely as it gets in America. Sometime when you have to travel cross-country, skip Interstate 10 and take US 90 through Texas. It will add a few hours to your travels but change your perspective on what interstates have done to the country forever.
The Pine Springs Visitor Center is gorgeous from the exhibits to the souvenirs for sale. After a brief chat with the Rangers we decided to hike Devil’s Hall – 4.2 miles round trip, plus the mile from RV parking to the trailhead. She called it “adventurous,” he called it “strenuous but doable.” As recent scramblers in Big Bend at Balanced Rock and Ernest Tinaja, we were boldly confident in our bouldering ability and off we went. The new normal for temperatures was in the 50’s we bundled up. How times have changed.
Devil’s Hall starts as an up-down chatty trail through flowering cacti and blooming wildflowers over boot crunching rocky terrain. About a mile in it drops into bouldering wash and that’s were the trouble began.
There is no trail; there is only boulder. Big ones, small ones, ones you climb and ones you circumvent. A mile is not a mile on this slalom hike that punishes knees, heels, calves and glutes. As Scurry blazed a trail, Plod tried her best to keep up. 100 yards of bouldering is fun. One mile of bouldering is down right annoying.
Three hours later we reached Devil’s Staircase, the final vertical ascent to Devil’s Hall. As Scurry free-scaled the natural rock staircase, Plod watched in amazement. At the top he admired the water pool and stepped into the Hall for a look to see if there was another way for Plod to ascend. With no other way, Plod started the climb, got five feet off the ground and could not find handing or footing. Panic ensued. A fall of five feet is hardly room for panic but when frozen Plod started to cry, Scurry descended to the rescue.
Moving down the staircase like Spider-Man, and placing himself directly below her, she placed her feet on his shoulders as he glided her the five feet to safety. Hysterical at this point, Plod’s adrenaline had kicked into overdrive. The lunch break was out. The most and only important thing was to be in a boulder free zone. Plod started a mad dash to get out of the canyon, leaving Scurry behind to munch on some almonds and sip water. There would be no pictures of Devil’s Hall, just the one in Scurry’s mind. No celebration of a hideous hike. Just tears, a racing heart and a man robbed of his insta-moment. Realizing that Plod was 200 yards down the wash and never coming back, he capped the bottle of water and scurried to intercept.
The panic was familiar, reminiscent of the Double O hike in Arches three years ago. In that disaster, I, Plod added four miles to the hike because I couldn’t scale a shortcut that both elderly and children could. When you believe you can’t, your brain validates that. In both situations, I was certain I would fall to my death, or worse break a bone or perhaps twist an ankle and become a photo opportunity for other travelers in the vicinity, and that would be the end. Mental limits are far more real than physical ones.
On the hike back with my head hung low, overcome with emotion, embarrassed by my outburst and angry with the way I handled adversity, we passed parents with three grade schoolers and a couple with an infant on Mom’s back. I said good luck to all, certain they would never summit Devil’s Hall, wanting to yell at them for even trying. Why did I wish to project my failure onto them? They shot selfies and blithely bouldered along oblivious to the dangers I imagined for them.
In the final leg of the trek, an older man alone on his adventure stopped us to ask if we made it. We said we did, at least one of us did. I wanted to tell him I didn’t get to the hall, that I’d had a tantrum and killed the vibe, but I didn’t. When he revealed his wife turned back, that she wasn’t enjoying the hike, I said good for her, I didn’t like it either. In the end, irrational fear got the better of me.
Having been crushed by the boulders of Devil’s Hall, the next planned hike around a natural spring seemed too hard. Guadalupe National Park could very well turn out to be a one hike wonder. To be fair, it is kind of a so-so National Park. The Guadalupe Mountains while mountainous, are not strikingly so. And, the park sits in the shadow of Carlsbad Caverns National Park, a true natural wonder of the world just 30 miles away. Just rationalizing a bad experience? Boulderdash!
