Our next park up was Guadalupe Mountains in the Northwestern area of Texas, on the boarder with New Mexico. This park has both a lot of opportunities to hike and a lot of history, and we got the opportunity to explore both.
On Thursday we started by doing some of the hiking. There were a ton of good hiking option but we settled on climbing up to see the highest point in Texas. We almost turned back because we were feeling a little under the weather but we're so glad we didn't. The 3,000 feet of elevation gain over 4.2 miles up the mountain were definitely strenuous. The trail was a little bit scary at times.
The view was worth fighting through the slight illness and fear.
Unfortunately Kathleen's shoes have decided they've had about enough of hiking.
On Friday, we explored the historic aspects of the park. We started with the Frijole Ranch Historical Museum. The museum is housed in an old ranch house that was built by some of the first white settlers in the area who came to ranch cattle. The house was later expanded by the Smith family who came and built an orchard. They also added a school house which doubled as a post office and community gathering area.
Inside the house they also have information about the Mescalero Apache who lived in the area and placed great significance on the mountains, including in their origin story. Nearby parts of the park also served the Butterfield stage coach in 1858. The stagecoach was the first constant form of overland communication linking St. Louis and San Fransisco in 1858 and only ran for 11 months before a safer route opened up to the south.
After learning some of the history we took a short walk up to Smith Spring up the hill.
We ended our exploration of the park up at McKittrick Canyon, which has been said to be the must beautiful spot in Texas. It was getting late in the day and we were pretty tired so we didn't do the full hike unto the canyon. Instead we contented ourselves with a shorter four mile out and back up the trail to just get a taste of it.
There is definitely a lot to see in this park as there were tons more hikes that we didn't do. We both thought that coming back to do a backcountry backpacking trip would be a lot of fun, unfortunately since Aiden isn't allowed on most national park trails, now wasn't the time. But we felt like we saw a good amount of the park, and would love to come back in the future.
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