Guadalupe Mountains & Caprock Canyons
Driving from El Paso to Caprock Canyons State Park, Texas | Guadalupe National Park | Caprock Canyons State Park | December 2023
After our night camping in Pancho Villa, it was once again time to take on the beast set before us: another long drive across Texas. We planned a route that would get us new counties, a national park, and that would take us back through a place we had enjoyed on our drive down. We would take 3 days to make the drive, making it more tolerable, and limit driving in cities or interstates as much as possible.
We completed our drive across NM-9, and then entered Texas near El Paso — our first time back to the city as adults. When we were in high school, we traveled here twice with our church to work with Casas Por Cristo to build houses in Juarez. Our memories of the city were vague, we remember sleeping in a round orange church on the nights before entering and after leaving Juarez. The church was at the base of a hill, and at the top of the hill was a small structure that supposedly had killer bees inside, so we weren’t allowed to go up there. We also remember sampling cow tongue at a Mexican buffet. One memory that sticks out from our trips to Mexico is that we both participated in a challenge where we didn’t shower for the entirety of our time across the border. The irony in that is that today when we drove through the city, we had gone more days without showers than we had back then… (We do, however, use wipes to clean ourselves now, which was against the rules of the club back then).
To get across the city, we chose to drive over the Franklin Mountains rather than taking I-10. We had thought they looked interesting to hike or even camp in, but discovered that the highway going over is a four lane freeway with Texas truck boys flying past, functioning more as a city by-pass than a scenic drive. Additionally, the trails are rather steep and aren’t ideal for our blind puppy. So instead we simply drove through, enjoyed the scenery for what it is, and took US-62 East out of the city.
On both of our previous trips to El Paso, we were able to visit Carlsbad Caverns National Park on the return trip. So this probably wasn’t our first time driving on this highway, but back then neither of us cared about highways, mountains, or counties that much, which made it all seem new. The highway was much quieter than the roads around El Paso, so we were content. Since we do remember visiting Carlsbad Caverns and hiking down into the cavern and on the “Bottomless Pit” trail, we decided to skip that park today and instead stopped at Guadalupe National Park for our first time.
We learned when we stopped here that Guadalupe became a national park because of the fossils. All we knew about it before today was that it was home to Guadalupe Peak, the highest mountain in Texas. Obviously we would have loved to hike to the peak and claim a new state high point, but Charlotte isn’t allowed on that trail, and it would have been much too long for her anyway. We are also committed to doing the state high points together, so we’ll come back another day and hike the peak together. Instead, we walked the only trail that Charlotte could hike, which started behind the visitor center. We enjoyed the views of the surrounding peaks and being surrounded by a new desert. The park is really best experienced by hiking on its many trails even without the high point, so we’ll definitely have to come back someday to really get to know it and appreciate it. For today, it just made for a nice break in the driving, and a scenic spot to stop for lunch.
Once we were finished, we continued on US-62 into New Mexico, and ended up finding a spot in a free campground in BLM land Northeast of Carlsbad. The campground was pretty nice for being free, and we were the only ones there that evening.
The next morning, we woke up to find the area covered in a thick blanket of fog that persitted well into the afternoon — we didn’t know it yet, but that would sum up much of the remainder of our drive home. It’s definitely preferred over driving through snow or ice though! We re-entered Texas on US-62, then made our way Northeast to Lubbock, snagging as many new counties as we could. From here, we thought about visiting another new-to-us state park, but ended up deciding to return to Caprock Canyons State Park because it was more on the way, and we knew it had good camping and hot showers.
This time, we opted to stay in Little Red Campground, which didn’t have the wide canyon view that South Prong Campground had, but it was still scenic, not as far of a drive, and had cleaner bathrooms. It was also across the road from the North Prong Spur Trail, which we hiked as far back as the primitive camping area before turning around. We really enjoyed this trail and the views it gave of the red rocks surrounding us. It was a pleasant and overall uneventful walk, right until we neared the end and saw a large bison waiting at the trailhead for us. She seemed pretty content to stand there and rub her stomach against a wooden post, so we ended up going off trail, giving her a wide berth, and carrying Charlotte back to the van just to be safe.
