Adventures in the Guadalupes – Bush Mountain and the Bowl
The following piece is the seventh installment in a Herald
series on hiking the trails of
Guadalupe Mountains National Park and describes
a 17-mile loop from the Pine Springs trailhead up to Bush Mountain, the
second-highest peak in Texas, and through the wooded interior of the Guadalupes
on the Blue Ridge and Tejas trails.
A late start – it’s after 1:30 p.m. when, gear assembled
and loaded up, I leave the house. But my plan for the first day of the
overnight trip is modest – just to make it to Pine Top. Without a pack, the
3.7-mile, 2,500-foot ascent on the Tejas Trail has taken me about 2 and a half
hours. Tacking on an extra hour, I should have an hour and a half at the
campsite before sunset.
It’s been a stymied morning at home, drifting from one
thing to the next, but the mountain has a way of focusing the attention, and as
I point myself in that direction I feel appropriately chastened. Driving
through the hardpan of the dunes and bleached lakebeds, for a moment I think I
know where I am, that I have a grip on the place. Then a truck passes me on the
left and I see the license plate – “Texas” – and something about the contrast
between the word and this deathless landscape jars my certainty. I drive into
Guadalupe Pass, and feel the transition: the world of limestone, the familiar
exposed rock, stacked stoned and tiered mesas and outcroppings.
As advertised, there are high winds in the pass. It’s
March 16.
I stop in and get a backcountry pass from the good people
at the visitor center, and I’m on the trail just before 3 p.m. It’s pleasantly
warm, with gentle gusts of wind, and I walk in anticipation of that golden
country up top, the forest. My imagination turns to the colors and lights from
on a November hike to the mountains and the summit of Hunter Peak – tall grass
washed in sunshine, trees sunk in darkness and shadow – and I am eager to be
there again. A half-mile up the trail and gaining elevation, I feel vaguely
elated, and not particularly mindful – the passing high of endorphins.
I come to the first of several limestone buttes or towers
that form the natural signposts along the Tejas Trail, and rounding that bend,
I get the wind, sweeping down from the head of Pine Springs Canyon. It’s a desert
wind, I feel, a Western wind, and I think of all the space, all the Western
desert out there.
Higher now, and pausing to lay down my pack and stray a
bit off the trail, I think again of how the Guadalupes seem to have their own
thing, flora-wise. The constituent of the mountains, the limestone material,
gives the Guadalupes something in common with East Texas, the Texas Hill
Country, or the eastern reaches of the Sierra Madre in Mexico, as much as with
other mountains in the arid West. (Thinking of the words “East Texas,” I find
myself chuckling. As far as I can tell, for Hudspeth County residents
everything east of Guadalupe Pass is East Texas. Alpine and Marfa residents had
a concept of “Central Texas,” referring to the Hill Country, where I grew up;
there is no such middle ground here – perhaps Alpine itself is East Texas for
some of my Dell City friends. I think of the slippery business of locating West
and East, of finding the “True West,” and of the westering history of the
country, how we have tried to out-west each other, Davy Crockett-style.)
There is agave and sotol, here on this arm or ridge, and I
look back down at the zig-zagging trail, and the little caps of exposed
limestone, four of them, that mark the flights or stories of the ridge and the
Tejas Trail. Then, nearing the top and the passage to Pine Top, I find sand
beneath my feet – the color of the trail changes, soft, orange-brown sand
mingles with the pale limestone bumps and scree.
A peak experience, Pine Top. A high stage above the canyon,
a proscenium, an altar lifted before the sun. (It seems that anyone who doesn’t
worship the sun, at least a little bit, is a fool.) Standing among the scrub
oaks and grass, the jumble and intricate splay of the Delawares is visible
below me, and in the distance the arms of the Baylors stretching out and the
northern tip of the Davis Mountains. The lumps and knolls of the Guadalupes
rise above me, across the chasm.
Turning to the north, it’s the wind in the pines, and the
gray of a weathered juniper, sending up dark, scattered clumps of new growth –
an endurance to aspire to. At my feet, blue agaves and beargrass. Looking off
toward Bush Mountain, I see gaps where the 2,000-foot cliffs of the Guadalupes’
western escarpment must be. I turn toward the massive form, the hulking mass of
Guadalupe Peak, looking august. I can see the knob of the peak itself is angled
slightly, turned to one side – as if it’s thoughtfully taking something in.
Old, and yet still green – there’s still a certain freshness there, that comes
from the sea, from its sea origins, and from the dark green that covers it.
This is a bright place, this bright lip, Pine Top, both a peak and a passage.
A steep quarter-mile up the Bush Mountain trail, and I
find my campsite. A beautiful spot: a person could stay here for days. As I’d
hoped, there’s more than an hour till sunset. Pulling out my tent, I discover I
only have two stakes. (Belatedly, uselessly, I remember a night below El
Capitan in August, when a 3 a.m. windstorm sprung my stakes free of the ground
and flung them into the brush – and how the next day I could find two of them.)
There’s always something. I put some large rocks inside the tent, at the
unsecured corners, and feel satisfied, confident. After wandering up the
mountainside and taking in the sunset light, I eat my cold burrito. I’d decided
I could go without a hot meal for a day, and left my stove at home, to lighten
my load.
It’s a brisk night, but I’m warm in my down sleeping bag
and sleep in longer than I’d expected. The sun has clicked into place in the
sky by the time I climb out of my tent. I drink my jar of cold coffee, and soon
I’m on the trail to Bush Mountain.
Again to the south and east I can see the Delaware and
Apache mountains, their complex forms revealed now by the morning light. As I
pick my way west and up the trail, I have excellent views of Guadalupe and
Shumard peaks. The trail ascends through grassy meadows, littered with smooth
juniper branches and marked by plump agaves, one still supporting a leaning,
blackening stalk. Behind me, Hunter Peak catches the morning sun; to the north,
views of what I take to be the Brokeoff Mountains and the northern reaches of
Crow Flat. Then, I’m out of the the upland meadows and passing through dark
woods, pines, a black fairy tale forest on a high ridge.
A slow, final march and I come to the summit of Bush
Mountain, a bald white mound. I move to the edge, and take in the tremendous
space. The mountain falls away almost clear to the desert floor. To the north,
a long arm, with sharp stone pillars, extends to the flats below. Tracing the
cliffs down with my eyes, the sheer drop, the extent of it, registers at some
spot deep in my brain – bringing a buzz. I sit for a few minutes on a rock at
the edge of the escarpment, quickened every few moments as I grasp the drop and
the extent of space. What space! A mile below, there is the brown desert and
bleached swaths of the empty salt lakes, the white sands a pale dusting in the
foreground, the dun folds of the Patterson Hills, the Cornudas and Cerro Alto,
the Sierra Diablo and Sierra Prieta, Sierra Blanca and Round Top mountains, 60,
70 miles away. All those mountains are diminutive from this throne.
At 8,631 feet, Bush Mountain is the second highest peak in
Texas. Guadalupe Peak – 8,749 feet – may be the premier summit, but it’s here,
on Bush Mountain, that one can get the most immediate sense of the scale and
dramatic arc of the escarpment, and the abrupt 5,000 drop from the Guadalupes’
western rim to the desert floor below.
Rising from my roost to continue on the trail, I bump into
Bryce, a young park ranger who’d checked my pass at the Pine Top campsite the
night before – he’ll be my only human sighting before the final hour of my
two-day trip. We discuss the view for a moment, before I head on.
From Bush Mountain, I drop into a shaded forest of skinny
pines. The trail skirts the escarpment two, three times, the trees framing
views of Wind Mountain and the crop circles of Dell City far below. Then I walk
along slopes, looking east and north, out at the wooded humps and the rocky
faces of the mountains, the Guadalupes’ Bowl.
Some three miles from the summit, I come to the junction
of the Bush Mountain and Blue Ridge trails, and pause there in a meadow.
Continuing on, I head east now on the Blue Ridge Trail. Soon Bryce rejoins me,
having checked on the Blue Ridge campsites. (Picking up toilet paper, he tells
me, “the part of being a ranger people don’t think about.”) A law enforcement
ranger, Bryce is on a four-day posting in the backcountry, making foot rounds
each day – some plenty arduous – through the mountains. We walk together,
talking about his past – growing up in Alaska, working at Montana’s Glacier
National Park for six years, until his recent relocation to the Guadalupes. The
trails here have surprised him, he says – with the exposed rock and steep
grades, they’re harder to walk. We both shudder recalling the agonies of the
Bear Canyon Trail, which runs less than 2 miles but involves some 2,500 feet of
elevation gain. After a lifetime of lakes and loamy earth, Bryce is,
understandably, in a state of shock at the local dryness, desolation and
solitude, but is game. (He has also been shocked, and impressed, by the
hard-working staff – some of our locals displaying a work ethic that,
apparently, is not universal among government servants.) We walk together as
far as the junction at the Tejas Trail, and he turns north, to check on
Mescalero campground. For me, the company has broken up a bit the noonday
doldrums.
Back on the Tejas Trail, it’s down, down, till the trail
reaches a rocky draw. I’m in the plumbing of the mountains’ interior. The wash,
which drains toward McKittrick Canyon, is piled at places with white boulders,
a chaos of washed stones – proof that, though it may have been before my time,
it has rained in West Texas. I’m reminded of the beautiful mess of rocks in
Pine Springs Canyon, on the Devil’s Hall Trail.
Following alongside this dry creek, the trail passes by
knotty Douglass firs and large pines, through carpets of dead leaves, the
deciduous debris and white stone giving this stretch the feel of Kentucky
woods, of Appalachia. Then, before long, I’m working my way up again, back
toward Pine Top.
Working my way up, slowly. Even in the recent past, as
recently, maybe, as my November scramble up Hunter Peak, I’d sprint up a
segment of trail – and then pause and catch my breath. There is no pausing now,
just slowing. Breathing evenly, I have breath to look up from time to time and
take things in, to see.
I’m joining the ranks of slow walkers. At several times
during the hike, I find myself thinking of my friend Ted, a writer, now 80
years old, and and a lunch he and I and my girlfriend at the time had several
years ago at a diner in Marfa, We finished our food, and an hour, than an hour
and a half in, he was still working on his liver and onions. Though I’m an
acolyte, and was eager to pay my respect, to demonstrate reverence, finally we
had to leave him – I had to go back to work. For all I know his lunch lasted another
45 minutes. He was unruffled, unapologetic for his slowness. (Turtles are a
kind of totem for Ted, and it’s an identification I can understand now, as I
picture his deliberate mastication.) I, on the other hand, am feeling some
ambivalence about my slow walking. Am I premature oldster? I don’t want some
young buck coming up the trail and seeing me like this.
Ted, after all, is a man of some wisdom, I tell myself:
there’s no reason to blush at it, this turtle pace. Basically, for me, this
activity is first of all an act of leisure – “holy leisure,” I want to say,
lifting a phrase from the Catholic monks – before it’s a workout. After many
years of adopting an attitude of defiance or denial, I’m beginning to feel
gravity, to acknowledge it, which is more honest. It’s not a flight, this
business of climbing and moving across the planet on foot (unlike driving, say)
– in fact, it’s going to be a trial, a good bit of it is going to be physically
disagreeable. Feeling it, the discomfort, tempering my habit of defiance or
denial, I notice I’m enjoying it more, the walking.
After a loop of more than 9 and a half miles, I arrive
back at Pine Top. I make the quarter-mile climb back to my campsite, and pack
up my tent and sack to head down. Another beautiful weekend in the mountains.
– Andrew Stuart
I should know this by now, or at least not feel a sense of surprise: detours can bring great rewards. Usually we're on a mission and can't be distracted by a simple green sign with an arrow saying, "Historic Marker." Appointments loom, and there isn't time for wandering. And, sometimes a marker seems to direct you to look at nothing, or at something that is no longer there. 
The Hudspeth County Courthouse in tiny Sierra Blanca is the only adobe courthouse in the state of Texas. Take the time to get off I-10 and explore this small community. Walk inside the courthouse to enjoy the spacious feel of this distinctive adobe structure.