Essays

Moseying: Locations of Interest

The Guadalupe Mountains
July 24, 2002

The Guadalupe Mountains are harsh – definitely not a lush mountain paradise. Wind in the Guadalupes does not blow or gust, it howls. Summer thunderstorms do not gently shower every afternoon, but grow from the bellies of the canyons as growling, lightning-bolt hurling tempests, sending even the bravest camper cowering. Torrential rains come every few years, filling the canyon bottoms with roaring water until rocks the size of pickup trucks rock about and finally roll. At other times, droughts lengthen until the greenbottle carrion flies investigate even living creatures’ nostrils and mouths.

Canyons in the Guadalupes are deep. Most are a thousand feet deep, and several are deeper. The canyon walls are often too steep to climb except in the most laborious fashion. No one is unaffected by a Guadalupe climb. The statement “an acre of land area contains a square mile of land surface” is not terribly excessive hyperbole. The higher the walls are, the less likely the chance of recent human visitation. New plant species have been discovered in the last decade, and new cave systems are still being discovered, for the land surface of the mountains is still not fully explored.

When driving toward the Guadalupes, a traveler gazes at a substantial massif. It is not quite a wall, for it is interrupted by canyons. The mountain at the very southern tip of the range (El Capitan) forms a prow which cuts into some of the fiercest winds anywhere, including those of Cape Horn or the North Atlantic. When driving by the mountains at 70 miles an hour, the traveler sees what appear to be mostly bare hills. A keen eye spots some of the big pines 1500 feet above. A keener eye can make out a trail leading up and up. A few miles west of the mountains, the same traveler crosses a salt flat and takes a last look at the mountains, shivering from the stark view.

More than a million people visit the Guadalupe Mountains each year. Over ninety percent come to the Carlsbad Caverns National Park to stroll about underground among some of the most glorious cave formations in the world. More places have been given names underground in the mountains than above ground. In the fall, Guadalupe National Park has its only traffic jam on weekends when the red and golden foliage of the big tooth maples is as glorious as that of the maples of New England. A majority of visitors only come at that time, and only come once, for Guadalupe National Park is strictly a hiking and backpacking park. The rougher regions of the mountains can truly be considered empty of people. There are places that do not get visited by anyone for years, even by Lincoln National Forest employees who watch over the land between the national parks.

When I first began to visit the Guadalupes, I was attracted to Rim Road, a gravel road that runs along the top of a 1500-foot escarpment in the national forest on the west side of the mountains. A person can see the Magdalena Mountains 250 miles to the west, limned by the setting sun. Daydreaming there, I felt as if I was seeing the whole world from the sky. I would park on the rim, play Wagner’s “Die Walkure,” Beethoven’s Ninth, Pink Floyd’s “Ummagumma” and other powerfully-driven, heavily-orchestrated romantic music and soar into the future. In high school, I received the dubious reputation of taking a girl on the craziest first date when I took Deborah on a 400-mile, 9-hour first date to the rim. All we did was watch the sun go down and listen to music – she was too nice to tell me that she hated Pink Floyd, but, boy do I know it now.

The Guadalupe Mountains are islands; biological islands in the sea of the Chihuahuan Desert. For years, I went to the “islands” to goof off – to hang out and forget the worries of my work-a-day life. For years, I backpacked into the canyons. I went visited the islands every month of the year: after 16-inch snowfalls and 17-inch rains and during 70 mile-an-hour windstorms.

Normally, no water can be found along the trails, so a two-day hike is a long way to carry what is needed for the trip. It is easy to slip into the fantasy of pioneering. A backpacker discovers the mountains anew, surviving terrible thirsts, terrible strains, and terrible stresses. The physical satisfaction of conquering stress can keep people coming back for years. It did me.

By visiting the same area year after year, a person becomes aware of the constant changes that take place in the natural world. Something new happened before each trip. Seeps and springs would quit running, and then, years later would begin running again. Ecological mini-tragedies occur every few years – a rockslide would fill the bottom of a canyon with thirty feet of rock and splintered trees. A population of a rare species of Salvia would disappear, covered by four feet of gravel washed down the canyon from a downpour generated by a Baja hurricane. A horrible winter ice storm would splinter a 6-foot thick ponderosa pine, and its trunk would become the new bridge over a chasm. The mountains can change people, too.

When a person listens to the mountains the ego is quieted. The forces of nature march on, implacable, unstoppable, and so much more powerful than mere humans. To spend a week out of sight and out of hearing of other people – except for a companion or two – one’s troubles and worries are put into perspective. Solutions to problems in the everyday world become accessible. When personal transformation occurs at a particular place, the site is remembered as the destination of a pilgrimage. The location and its surroundings become sacred and holy. The Earth is a gift – a blessing beyond compare – and the Guadalupe Mountains are where I have been most humbled by that fact.