Waking up each day with the birds chirping and the cool morning air streaming in the windows has been a great part of the Guadalupe Mountains experience, for me. It has been such an antidote to the heat that we’ve found everywhere else. I had been pining for a tenting trip up our local mountains in Arizona just so I could sleep in the fresh forest air without an air conditioner running, and had even pitched the idea to Eleanor. After four days in Guadalupe, the need has mostly faded. Being here has been terrific.
Our Sunday plan was really more of a wind-down. Our ambitions have weakened each day as we’ve settled into an increasingly lazy pattern. After puttering around in the morning we headed over to the Visitor Center so Emma could complete her research to achieve both Junior and Senior Ranger patches, plus a Guadalupe Mountains National Park badge to add to her collection. Eleanor says this is #65.
We also walked the Pinery Trail, but it was just a 1/3 mile nature trail which ended at the ruins of a Butterfield Stage stop. This is what I meant by not much ambition. We really should have gotten an earlier start and hiked McKittrick Canyon, which is about eight miles east of the campground. Although it runs about four or five miles, it’s not a terribly hard hike since it follows a stream through a canyon (thus not much elevation gain). It has a good reputation for scenic beauty. We’ve left it for a future visit.
Back at the campground we did finally meet up with the other Airstreamers who parked right next to us despite the largely empty RV parking area. At first I thought it was because birds of a feather flock together, but I think now that it was really just so that they’d be in the shade. The trailer turned out to be a 1974 Trade Wind.
We spent the afternoon in the Airstream, me reading, Eleanor making a big lunch and mixing up cold soft drinks, and Emma doing various kid-like things such as hunting interesting insects. I took a few shots of the more curious or colorful bugs and butterflies she found. It was rather warm in the afternoon but not intolerable even without air conditioning.
By 5:30 we had accomplished our primary goal of not doing much and took the car north to Carlsbad Caverns National Park. We had always wanted to do the 9.5-mile scenic loop drive (a rough gravel road) but never had because on all of our prior visits we’ve had the Airstream in tow. This was our chance, and it fit right into our program as a low-stress “activity” that required us only to look out the window. Of course, we did step out of the car long enough to check the Rattlesnake Trail from an overlook and ponder whether we’d want to hike that one on our next visit too. It looks interesting.
The real point of driving 45 miles up to Carlsbad was to see the evening bat flight. This is another thing we’d missed on our prior visits. If you’re interested in bats, it’s well worth the time, as a park ranger spends about 30 minutes answering questions and then everyone goes quiet as thousands of bats begin to stream out of the cavern. It takes two hours for all the bats to leave, but after about 30 minutes it’s too dark to see them anymore. No photos or even cell phones are allowed, as they disturb the bats, so if you want to see this you need to show up in person.
It was the right call to stay boondocking in Guadalupe and dismiss the Siren’s song of full hookups at White’s City (nearer Carlsbad). Our elevation was the key to comfort; at White’s City it was running 10 degrees warmer. And when we got back at night, the stars were absolutely amazing. I can’t recall such a vivid view of the Milky Way galaxy in years, even in other famous “dark sky” parks. Speaking of which, Bert Gildart has written and photographed a great article about Dark Sky Parks which will appear in the Fall 2012 issue of Airstream Life.
I’m really happy with the LED lights we recently installed. They’re working perfectly, and so efficiently that lights are no longer a factor in our power budget. We can leave as many of them on as we need, and it’s rare that they even consume a single amp. Since we’ve also put in an alternative to the power-hungry furnace (a catalytic heater), this leaves only the laptops, vent fans and water pump as major power consumers. There’s not much we can do about those items, and they don’t really matter much when the sun is shining. After four nights of boondocking, we are leaving with 79% of our battery charge still available, and in a few hours it will be back up above 90%. Based on this success I’m planning to order more LEDs to outfit the rest of this trailer and the 1968 Caravel, when we get home, which will be Tuesday.
It’s beautiful here. The RV portion of the campground is nothing special (tenters get nice sites but RVs are laid out in an asphalt parking lot separated only by white painted lines), but you come here for the scenery that surrounds you. And that is spectacular: a 2/3 bowl formed by the mountains that this park is named for, and the remaining 1/3 a crystal clear view east to west Texas. It’s one of those places where you step out of the Airstream and realize that it’s not the campsite that’s important.
I had considered spending two nights here, as we really should, but if we do that we’ll be arriving in Guadalupe on Friday night and there’s a good chance that the campground will be full. They don’t accept reservations there, and the campground is small. So our best strategy is to arrive on Thursday and squat on our site through the weekend. That will give us lots of time to go hiking and decompress from the cross-country drive. In other words, we are sacrificing Palo Duro and a few other things to get a really good visit in at Guadalupe. I think it will be worth the tradeoff.