Elizabeth and I first visited Guadalupe Mountains National Park on July 14, 2018. We were just kids then – dumb 20-year-olds who stayed close to 2 hours away so we could save a few bucks and didn’t show up to the trailhead until we were guaranteed to fight the worst heat of the day and monsoon thunderstorms. It was the first national park we’d ever visited; obsessive planning was only something Elizabeth liked to do, not a full-on personality trait. The hike up Guadalupe Peak was one of the great struggles of our pre-marriage relationship.
It was a great day, and nostalgia washed over me this week as I visited Guadalupe with my parents. Elizabeth would have loved to see the views and reminisce, but unfortunately she was back in Oklahoma and working on this bright (and already promising to be hot) Tuesday morning. With that said, maybe it was just as well that she wasn’t out here with us. The White’s City Inn had a fairly (very) limited spread of muffins and boxed cereal for breakfast, there was no open restaurant for miles around, and the bathroom sink didn’t really work (which still put it miles ahead of the bathroom door, which refused to open from the inside. The sound of my mom jamming on the door for a minute and then calling out “Help” in a defeated voice will stick with me for a while).
There was no Guadalupe Peak re-run on the docket today. One nice thing about re-visiting some places with my parents this week is that we managed to find something new to do in each place. It made the park both a fun trip down memory lane and also a new and unique adventure. Today’s adventure was in an area I’ve heard a lot about when it comes to Guadalupe: McKittrick Canyon. It would be a stretch to call McKittrick Canyon “more remote” than the Pine Springs/Guadalupe Peak area. There’s nothing in this national park that is not completely, ass-end-of-nowhere remote. But Pine Springs does have a frontcountry campground and a full visitor center with a little store and indoor exhibits. McKittrick Canyon is at the end of a road with a gate that closes at dark and has a couple of bathrooms, some outdoor exhibits, and a trailhead with a water spigot. It’s my kind of remote.
Our trail of the day was the main McKittrick Canyon trail as far as the Pratt Cabin and back, a roughly 5-mile hike that wouldn’t involve much elevation gain. The sun was already beating down when the three of us departed a little before 11:00 am central time. Wasn’t this supposed to be March? It was hotter than when Elizabeth and I visited in July! The broad, dry wash that the trail started on felt appropriate for this sun-baked approximation of hell. We aimed northwestward toward a point about a mile up where the wash would narrow, turn almost 90 degrees to the left, and deepen into a full canyon as it ran smack into the higher peaks of the range.
And something funny began to happen around this point. As the grade of the walls grew steeper and steeper, the narrow point along the trail started to be more vegetated, even though we weren’t going uphill. At first I chalked that up to the increased shade you’d find here in the mountains, but after rounding the bend we were surprised to find a steady trickle of water in the bottom of the wash. Turns out McKittrick Creek does in fact flow year-round, though it must dry up or go under the rocks by the time it reaches the mouth of the canyon. And I was delighted to find that when I dipped my bucket hat into the stream, the water was cool and refreshing on my head – maybe not fresh snowmelt, but definitely spring-fed from underground. “Good idea”, my dad exclaimed at the second creek crossing when he saw me crouching by the water. I don’t know if I’d be that effusive, but it was something to look forward to on the return trip.
By this point, wildlife was on the increase along our path. The initial tree cover in this canyon had been the occasional stubby pinion tree poking up among the various yuccas and sagebrush. This is already a pretty neat desert landscape (I am a certified yucca fan after this trip). But it kept getting cooler and more lush further up the canyon. There were more pinions and junipers along the creek. There were madrone trees with their weird reddish-bark.
At one point, I looked above me and exclaimed “Holy cow, that’s a Ponderosa!” And it was – my dad smelled the vanilla-y bark. How does a Ponderosa pine grow in some of the driest, most arid, hottest terrain in North America all the way at the valley floor? McKittrick Canyon is a bit of a biological miracle. I’ve heard that it’s incredible to visit during fall foliage, and that has been added accordingly to my bucket list.
About 2.5 miles into the trail we came upon our destination: the Pratt Cabin. Built by a geologist, rancher, and oil magnate named Wallace Pratt, this cabin served as his family’s summer home in the days when this portion of the Guadalupes served as his ranch land. At first it sounds ridiculous to build a summer home in an arid, nearly waterless canyon miles upon miles away from civilization. And to be honest, it kind of is. But it now serves as a great waypoint for those who are attempting the much more challenging McKittrick Canyon through-trail, or a great turnaround point for day hikers like the three of us.
The cabin itself is closed to the public, but you can sit on the porch in an Adirondack chair and savored the views that Wallace Pratt savored nearly a century ago. I didn’t really savor them myself; the flies were buzzing around far too aggressively for introspection. Besides, who could concentrate with the miserable family of four sitting next to me? Those kids were NOT enjoying their time in nature, and those parents were NOT helping ease the tension. That’s actually what got me to walk a hundred feet or so behind the property. There was a great view of South McKittrick Canyon and the mountains all around it, and just enough trees to keep it shady and comfortable. And it was right then that I got it. Wallace Pratt was right: this place NEEDED to be preserved as a national park (thanks, guy, for donating all of the land to the government).
Sometimes I think people pretend to have epiphanies to bring some deeper meaning into something because they need to feel like what they did was significant. I’m certainly guilty of it fro time to time over the last 100+ blog posts I’ve written. But this view was an honest-to-god minor epiphany.
Nothing could ruin the day after that, right? Incorrect.
My parents and I hadn’t gone more than a quarter mile or so back toward the trailhead when I heard something up ahead. To my ear, the noise was coming from off-trail to the right and sounded like a rustling noise. As the front man hiking, I froze and strained to hear more. My dad nearly bumped into me from behind. “Did you hear that?”
He had. “It sounded like someone banging rocks together ahead of us”.
This probably should have been the warning sign for me, but I was still convinced that whatever I had heard was just off the trail to the right, so I was scanning the underbrush in that direction when I took a few more steps. The noise resumed. This time I paused again and looked wider… and my blood turned cold at the sight of what was no more than eight feet in front of me.
“Jesus Christ, it’s a rattlesnake!”
Now, I am not afraid of too many animals. I have dealt with plenty of spiders in my role as The Spouse Who Kills Spiders. I am friends with the skunks in and around the National Weather Center. Hell, Elizabeth and I have had grizzly encounters in the Glacier National Park backcountry that did not leave me scared. But rattlesnakes? Hell no. I do not do rattlesnakes.
In an instant, I was backing up into my dad as quickly as I could without alarming the big snake, which was reared back and ready to strike if we got any closer. That idiot family from the Pratt Cabin came up behind us, and we waved them and their moronic children to a halt (not because I was worried about them, but because any person that sour would probably cause the snake to accidentally choke while it was eating them). The standoff remained for a couple of seconds before the snake must have realized it had driven us off. Ever so slowly, it slithered into a hole on the left side of the trail. My dad walked past first, then I took a brave stab at it myself. No further rattling ensued. Our heart rates could decrease.
I had something to be proud of. I had faced the animal I feared most, and had stayed brave throughout! For many people who hike the west, they record the first encounter with a rattler as the one where they realize that the rattler wants no part of you and lose their fear of them. As we walked through the wash and back into the unrelenting sunlight of the lower canyon, I reflected that now I could be just like those people.
Then the wind blew the strap of my camera bag and it made a scratching noise up against my shirt. I froze and spent 5 seconds scanning for snakes before I realized what had happened. This process repeated itself for another 2 miles to the end of the trail even though both of my parents were 25-50 yards ahead of me.
So maybe being brave is something for everyone else to do but me.
Our hike into McKittrick Canyon finished around 1:00 local time. It was beautiful. The views were my favorite of the trip so far. The shade had been extremely welcome with the day becoming unbelievably hot for March. That meant that the treeless lower canyon stretch was pretty brutal for the final mile or so, but I mentally made the trade-off with the sun to no more rattlesnake sightings and decided God was taking it easy on me. And at last: the shade of the McKittrick Canyon trailhead shelter, the promise of fresh water out of the spigot at the trailhead, and air conditioning in my parents’ Ford Edge.
We headed over to Pine Springs for lunch. My theory for that was: there was bound to be more space given the slightly-more-developed Visitor Center (the shelter at McKittrick was pretty crowded with hikers), my parents needed to buy their souvenirs anyway, and I wanted to show them were Elizabeth and I had gone to hike Guadalupe Peak. Our lunch was a gourmet spread from Wal-Mart (the second of three Wal-Mart meals picked up in El Paso the day before, with our final one coming for dinner tonight). Call it hiker hunger or whatever, but my caesar salad was delicious. The 99-cent S’mores pie that I’d gotten the night before was even better. It was personal-sized-ish, but probably would not have been that easy to house if this wasn’t our fourth straight day of moderate hiking.
After lunch (and a quick snake ID session with the Pine Springs interpretive rangers), one of my parents asked if we wanted to drive through the park with our afternoon. Guadalupe isn’t quite that type of national park. 95% of it remains designated wilderness to protect extremely fragile desert alpine ecosystems, so literally no roads enter the park. We drove up the remaining minute or two to the Pine Springs campground/trailhead, and that was about it.
It wasn’t the longest national park visit, but it was a fruitful one. We could now make our way back to White’s City with the knowledge that I had properly introduced my parents to one of America’s most underrated national parks. Plus the hotel room was air-conditioned in the worst heat of the afternoon, a great time for my dad to get some work done remotely. We decided to reconvene a little before 5:00 mountain time. Rumor had it that the bats had returned to Carlsbad Caverns in the last few days. The ranger-guided bat program had been one of the coolest parts of Elizabeth and my stay in the area 6 years prior, so I really hoped that my parents would get to experience that magic too.
But that’s a story for another post.
