This week on the Travelling Bradbury show we’ll be scaling the highest peak in Texas, descending to the deepest caves in the North Americas, cycling across a missile range and still find time to visit Walmart!

Picked up Reg who had had a few of his ailments fixed, not though the most irritating ones such as the extractor hood fan, the fridge light and the front hob burner (well they’re irritating for the one who does most of the cooking). We set off for Guadalupe Mountains National Park in Texas, which is home to Guadalupe Peak at 8,751ft (2,667m) the highest peak in Texas.  We arrived late to find no spaces available in the main camping area, we were then directed to the ‘overflow’ parking which was the car park at Frijoles Ranch just down the road and was ‘primitive’ with no electricity, water or sewerage; we’re a self contained RV so no great problem unless you want to shower more than once or wash up more than twice, hmmm … we’ll see how we get on.

So to warm up we walked the Spring Trail from Frijole Ranch, which was once the only building in the region, in the evening and settled down for the night on our lopsided car park.  The next morning we drove back to the main campsite, which is really another car park that is tarmacked and level, bagsy a ‘site’ for the grand total of $8 and set off on the Guadalupe Peak Trail, a mere 8.4mile round trip which was uphill (and quite steep for some of it) for the first 4.2miles.  While it was harder than we expected the views of El Capitan, the mountainous outcrop next to the peak, and of the Chihuahua Dessert stretching into the distance along with the flora (apart from one deer and a couple of mockingbirds there wasn’t much fauna) were worth it.  The trail snakes up the mountain, switching backwards and forwards to scale the gradient, across a trestle bridge and at times across rock screes to reach the top where we had a picnic looking over Texas and New Mexico in the sunshine with what was ominously a building wind.  After 4.5 hours we had gone up and come down again and had an incredible sense of accomplishment and were completely knackered.  We retired to Reg to relax and whilst there the weather closed in, the wind began to really blow and it rained.  We watched as others, who had set off later than us, straggled in wet and windblown.  We switched on the TV to catch a weather report to discover that Texas and New Mexico had both had tornado and severe thunderstorm warnings for the afternoon and into the night.  The night was interesting as the wind howled (with peaks up to 65 miles an hour) and Reg rocked from side to side, such that in the middle of the night we pulled in his ‘extensions’ to reduced our size in the wind.

We woke on Wednesday morning, tired from the night and down to very little water in our tank, such that I had to go backwards and forwards to a standpipe with our one empty 1.5 litre water bottle to get enough water to washup and clean our teeth.  You’ll be pleased to hear we had our one shower after returning from the walk the day before.  After breakfast we set off to do what is described (by whom, I have no idea) as the ‘best’ trail in Texas, the McKittrick Canyon Trail, which winds along a canyon formed by a river millions of years ago.  It was a pretty trail, and would be even prettier if the flowers were all out or the leaves autumnal, i.e. times of the year that we won’t be there, but we enjoyed it as it was only a 400 foot gradient increase, somewhat less than the 3,000 feet we climbed on Monday. 

Highest and best trails completed in Texas, off to New Mexico. a new state for both of us, and the Carlsbad Caverns.  We’ve both done ‘caves’ before, me the Jenolan Caves near Sydney, and Alex Wookey Hole in Somerset.  Neither are quite the same as the Carlsbad Caverns, which while they include only the fourth largest cave in the world (as the longest cave at Carlsbad is 128miles long the other three must be something else), are a Unesco World Heritage site and are quite overwhelming.  We arrived later than planned and could only take the elevator down to the Big Room cave.  The elevator, constructed in a time before people worried about the environmental impact to a pristine environment of tunnelling, is the equivalent of 77 stories deep into the mountain.  You exit into a visitor centre and then walk a one mile long self guided route through part of the Big Cave, which is 30 miles long in total (the 128 mile long cave is not open to the public) past incredible formations of stalagmites (going upwards), stalactites (going downwards), soda straws (really thin stalactites), drapes (they really do look like curtains) and other shapes created through the millennia by the interaction of the limestone and water.  It is all tastefully lit and is overwhelming in its scale and the thought that they have existed for such a long time in complete darkness.  This is one place that we would both like to come back to to undertake some of the ranger led tours (which were fully booked and we typically hadn’t organised earlier) and to get even more overawed by the whole environment.  The only disappointment for Alex was there was no witch like at Wookey Hole (that last sentence may have been untrue).

We spent the night in the Brantley Lake State Park, next to a man made lake surrounded by the dessert and thousands of remarkably tame bunny rabbits, why they’re so tame when generally the Americans love to shoot anything that moves I have no idea.  Thankfully the winds had died down considerably and we got a good night’s sleep.

Thursday was sunny and windless and we set off after a leisurely morning, after a run and bicycle ride of course, to our next campsite at Oliver Lee Memorial State Park in Alamogordo New Mexico.  What we didn’t expect was the spectacular trip across the top of the Sacramento Mountain range along highway 82, where Reg laboured up and down the hills until we reached a verdant green valley with a stream running through it that reminded me of alpine mountains.  We continued upwards and the slopes became covered with pine forests (not surprising as we passed a sign saying welcome to the Lincoln National Forest!) and then it was pine forests covered in snow.  We’d inadvertently taken a route that took us from the dessert up into the snow-covered mountains and a temperature range from about 25 degrees centigrade to about 2 degrees!  The trip was capped by seeing a ski run in a village called Cloudcroft.  On the way down we went through a tunnel in the mountain and emerged to what looked like a valley of snow in the distance, this though was not snow but the white sands of the originally titled White Sands National Monument in the distance and our destination for the next few days, Alamogordo.

Oliver Lee Memorial State Park is at the entrance to Dog Canyon underneath the Sacramento Mountains on the Tularosa Basin (that should keep you all occupied on the geography and geology!).  The basin is important as it provides the correct environment to create a landscape of gypsum sand dunes, in particular the Tularosa Basin contains the White Sands National Monument which is 275 square miles of gypsum sand dunes and famously also a United States Missile Range (the first nuclear bomb test was 50 miles to the north), which is still in use today.  On arrival we found the site we had booked had no water or power, which was problematic as our water pump had stopped working, so we snuck into a vacant site with both and fortunately were able to stay for both Thursday and Friday nights.  We also managed to locate the water pump (in the barbecue storage area if you’re interested) and got it working again.

Of course the park has a trail which leads up into the mountains and we promptly set off to climb up it, we are learning though and decided we would turn back with half an hour before sunset to enable us to get down in the light and with a reduced opportunity for me to turn my ankle in darkness (invariably this happens at inappropriate times and always followed by a string of invective and foul temper).  Again, we’d managed to find a location with beautiful scenery and the sun setting across the basin on the San Andres mountains (the thing about a basin is there are mountains all around it) was something to see.

Friday dawned and we were in the shade of the mountains and as the morning went on the winds increased which determined we didn’t want to go to a park full of sand dunes during a gale so we spent the time visiting our most popular shop, Walmart, grocery shopping at Albertsons (one for Sally) and buying a new rucksack in a sports store.

Saturday was a better day and we left Oliver Lee and drove to the White Sands National Monument, past a sign explaining that during missile tests both the park and highway 70, which it is off, are closed in case of mishap (they really do fire missiles over the top of an area of outstanding natural beauty).  We watched a good video at the visitor centre on the formation of the dunes along with the plant and wildlife that life there and that have adapted to the dunes.  What is amazing is they have only been in existence for up to 10,000 years, a blink of the eye in the history of Earth and that humans hunted mammoth in the region until the end of the last ice age and before the dunes were created.

We parked Reg at the end of the shod road and got the Thompson Twins down to cycle the rest of the scenic loop, we stopped along the route and walked out on to the dunes which are incredible, very like those in Dubai, however these are from gypsum rather than silicon and have more vegetation in the interdune gaps.  The park was really popular with people, probably more so than any other, there were people sledding down the dunes, barbecuing and a lot of people setting up camp for the night in tents on the dunes.  We took the sunset walk with a ranger to learn more from someone who was really passionate about the park and its environment. 

We parked overnight in the Alamogordo KOA and on Sunday did those exciting but necessary chores such as laundry and cleaning Reg, which entails me getting completely soaked after the washer failed on my hose attachable brush, nonetheless he looked better for the scrub while we looked better for the clean clothes!

M