In 1531, a Mexican peasant named Juan Diego and his uncle, Juan Bernardino, reported seeing several apparitions of the Virgin Mary, a.k.a. the Virgin of Guadalupe and Our Lady of Guadalupe, near Mexico City. Subsequently, depictions of the purported traveling virgin became iconic, and innumerable places throughout Mexico and the Southwestern U.S carry her name. On a recent outing, we visited the Guadalupe Mountains of SE New Mexico and West Texas, a National Park and home to Carlsbad Caverns and it’s Brazilian free-tailed bat population, which had already migrated south for the winter when we were there, leaving only its guano behind. Summer visitors can watch thousands of bats emerge from the cave at dusk and spiral into the night sky.
Mid- to late-November is autumn in West Texas, but fall color doesn't come to mind in the desert, so we were surprised to learn that trailheads would likely be packed with leaf-peepers. After the five-hour drive from Silver City, we walked to Smith Spring, a short hike into the foothills from a historic ranch. A ranger told us that autumn foliage at the spring was spectacular despite peaking a week or so earlier, but we were skeptical as we walked across the Chihuahuan desert towards a dry-looking canyon. But inside the canyon, clear pools of water seeping from a sandstone layer beneath limestone cliffs created a wet micro-environment supporting a lush grove of yellow Gambel’s oak, red and yellow bigtooth maple, bright green ferns and grasses, and a few pale yuccas and cacti to remind us that the desert wasn’t far away. It was surprisingly spectacular.
We spent the rest of the week exploring the Guadalupes and Carlsbad Caverns. We hiked up Guadalupe Peak, the highest point in Texas (8,751’), and looked down on a limestone buttress called El Capitan. Larry Scritchfield and I bootlegged a mountain bike ride beneath El Capitan on a rest day during a Hueco Tanks climbing trip sometime in the 1980s or 90s (I can’t remember exactly when) before the Park was so popular (and so well patrolled) and before I had a bike with shocks. Ellen and I hiked into McKittrick Canyon, another autumn color destination where a petroleum geologist named Wallace Pratt built an inviting stone cottage in the 1930s that he later donated to the Park. We climbed the three easiest rock routes in Last Chance Canyon, a limestone gorge north of the Guadalupe Mountains know for harder climbs in steep alcoves. And we hiked 750’ down into the earth through Carlsbad’s natural entrance on the switch-backing asphalt tourist trail. It led us and a bunch of other people, some making videos of every feature with their phones (I pity their friends and families), through a labyrinth of passages and rooms and eventually to the underground restrooms and snack bar (closed) near the elevator that most visitors use to exit the cave. We chose to hike out the way we’d come in and were lucky to have the cavern to ourselves after the last tourist entries at 2:30 p.m. passed us on their way down.
