U.S. National Parks tour: Arches; Badlands; Big Bend; Black Canyon Of The Gunnison; Bryce Canyon; Canyonlands; Capital Reef; Carlsbad Caverns; Channel Islands; Death Valley; Glacier; Grand Canyon; Grand Teton; Great Basin; Great Sand Dunes; Great Smoky Mountains; Guadalupe Mountains; Haleakala; Hawaii Volcanoes; Hot Springs; Joshua Tree; Mammoth Cave; Mesa Verde; Petrified Forest; Pinnacles; Redwood; Rocky Mountain; Saguaro; Sequoia; Shenandoah; Theodore Roosevelt; Yellowstone; Yosemite; Zion. I've already visited a couple handfuls of these, but it never hurts to explore them again.
Just got back from a quick trip to Big Bend and Guadalupe Mountains National Parks. Went with someone who was relatively unfamiliar with Big Bend, and Guadalupe Mountains was new to both of us. We were somehow able to see most everything I wanted to in Big Bend within two days and some change: The Window; South Rim; Santa Elena Canyon area; Hot Springs area; Boquillas Canyon area; and several unmarked stops along the way including rhyolitic dikes that rose out of the hills like spines, hills that shimmered silver in the sun because of the halite or gypsum (I'm rusty) that covered them, a rhyolitic dike that rises vertically and looks exactly like a petrified sequioa tree until you get up close to it, etc. We only had a day and some change in Guadalupe Mountains but we hiked most of Guadalupe Peak (highest elevation in Texas at about 7,000 ft) before turning back because we didn't have the proper shoes for the snowpack still on the trail during the last half mile of the hike (didn't feel like slipping off a mountain). We ended up going back down and hiking Devil's Hall instead, which is a dried-up wash in which some flood carried boulders that were about six meters cubed; my guess is that the climate was cooler back in the day and the snowmelt would cause large seasonal floods. The next day we hiked Mckittrick Canyon and most of the Permian Reef/El Capitan trail; El Capitan is a trail in which you hike up through time and the establishment of a large reef complex, from a tempestuous limestone breccia to a thriving barrier, that would become the greatest reservoirs for oil in Texas. Unfortunately, they close the gates to those trails at 4:30 and we planned to leave for home that night, so we couldn't reach the peak of El Capitan. Pictures to come once I upload them from my camera.
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Patman360
