"The Call of the Stupid" or "Next Time I'm Staying Home and Playing EA Backpacker"

We left at about 6:45 a.m., and immediately stopped at the Koffee Kup for breakfast. This is probably not the way to start a long drive that’ll take you to one of the most remote regions of the state, but we wanted donuts and other oily foods.

Smokey the Bear says
Never begin a day of hiking with a large greasy omelet full of jalapenos, onions and bell peppers. Trust Smokey on this one.




We were headed to Guadalupe Mountains National Park for a weekend of backpacking, and the plan I had laid out was kind of ambitious. Actually, you could just sub “idiotic” for “ambitious” and it’d be more accurate.

Here’s a picture of a Koffee Kup donut. I included Scott, who is 7-foot-2, in the background for scale. I’m convinced that if you threw one of these in a Krispy Kreme, the entire store would collapse into a paper-thin piece of dough.

After breakfast, we finally took off, stopping for gas a couple of times before hitting Andrews. This was my first disappointment of the day. I had wanted to introduce Scott and John to Buddy’s, a legendary West Texas eatery famous for its steak fingers. Their steak fingers are nothing like what you got in school when they blended the leftover soybean chicken fried steaks together and served it as finger food.

This was actual steak, hand-battered and fried up. I was introduced to the experience on an earlier trip with Oklahoma buddy Jeremy. Sports writers from all over the state have written about them. People from Lubbock travel hundreds of miles out of their way to try them. Texas Country Reporter even did a segment on the place.

Scott and John’s verdict? “Bland.” “Missing something.” And I couldn’t eat something that greasy at the time (see entry on omelet), so there was no way I could tell.

Eh.

I could have seen it as an omen, but that would have been stupid.

We passed through Carlsbad and arrived at GuMo at around 4:15 p.m. We hadn’t made good time. The park headquarters was about to close and we had to rush through our trip preparations with the ranger (So I had no time to make a comment on his strange looking earring) and grab T-shirts for the women back home, so they wouldn’t kill us out of anguish on our return.

Strapping on our backpacks, I was a little anxious. The sun went down around 8:30. The first part of our trip was steeply uphill with a sharp drop-off on our left. We had to climb for three miles, and it could get dangerous in the dark.

At the trailhead.

But everyone was excited to get going, and we set a pretty good pace. Things went well. We were excited to be there and had plenty of energy for what I thought would be the roughest climb of the weekend. We made it to the top just as the sun was fading out.

Here’s a shot of me going up. You’ll note the white lines cutting across the mountain. That’s the trail up and ahead.

This picture is also a pretty good illustration of the way I feel on the sad clown face days of my life.


Ahem.


There was much adolescent giggling at this point.






On with the trail. You never really appreciate dirt until you can’t walk on it. You really miss it when you’re stumbling over a trail of nothing but loose rock in the dark. Our flashlights out, we kept going until we finally reached camp (Tejas on the park map).

We then fumbled through our packs for our cooking gear, got dinner underway and set up our beds. There was not a lot of conversation -- the last two miles of stumbling around in the dark with no rest stops had been brutal.

We were joined by three deer that kept running around the camp, refusing to leave. Really, it kind of takes the fun out of seeing deer if they don’t act skittish and you have to worry about them kicking your head while you’re trying to sleep. John resorted to yelling out sound effects from “The Simpsons” to drive them off.

Stars. Lots.

All in all the first day had gone well. We had made our destination, we had full stomachs, and everyone felt pretty good. I drifted off to sleep, occasionally awakened by a birdcall or the sound of John yelling “homina-homina-homina-homina.”

Things started to go wrong the next day. The hike to our next campsite (Marcus) turned out to be much longer than I expected. We didn’t have a lot of hills to climb, but the second day is always the toughest, because your body hasn’t adjusted yet to the outdoors.

Grass in the valley.

Plus, we also began to descend out of the mountains, which meant the heat that we had so far avoided started punishing us. We got to the next camp at around 1 p.m., our water supplies dwindling. We took a nap. And I was worried about the next step. Our walk to Dog Canyon, which has a ranger station and a water supply, looked like a long freaking way to go.

I had planned all along to get water, then hike back to the campsite in time for dinner. I was beginning to have my doubts. All of us were tired and we might not feel like walking back. At least it looked like a nice, flat easy walk there.

We left for the water after a quick nap. All of us dropped most of our gear at the campsite, as there’s no need to take it if you’re just going to walk back. Heh.

About a quarter of a mile from our campsite the path (called the Bush Mountain Trail), suddenly took a sharp turn up a hill. “No problem,” I said, we’re just going to skirt this mountain.”

Then the trail took another turn. Straight up the mountain.

Another turn. Higher up the mountain.

“My God,” I thought. “The Bush Mountain Trail has a mountain on it!”

It was the worst thing that could happen. We were all tired. A rough climb would leave us with no energy. And we still had three miles to go. Our water ran out about halfway up. We tread up a little longer, before stopping under a tree for shade.

I really felt like excrement. This had been my plan. I had told both Scott and John that they would only need about a gallon of water and not to carry any more. Now they were both looking exhausted and the heat was getting to all of us.

We finally decided that I’d go ahead and get help (I’m in a little better shape as my job requires me to stay on my feet all day). I went ahead as fast as I could. The mountain topped off quickly and the long path down started. And the fear of everything that could go wrong begin to take hold of me.

I got to Dog Canyon a blathering fool and called the ranger using the pay phone emergency number. He walked out of his house nearby and came to talk to me. I told him the situation, he asked me how much water we brought with us. “One gallon.”

His eyes kind of bugged out of his head and he clenched his jaw. “That’s pretty stupid.”

Smokey the Bear says
Treat a ranger as you would a cop who just caught you doing 90 in a school zone.





“Yes sir, it sure was.”

He talked to me a little, mainly to calm me down. There was no reason to think anyone was in serious danger at the time. He told me he’d go up the trail and take water.

About the time he had dressed and made his way up to the trailhead, Scott and John stumbled in to camp. They went immediately for some water, then met me. The ranger was pleased as punch that he wouldn’t have to spend his off hours searching for some poor city slobs.

We all talked to the ranger a bit about what to do next. Our equipment was back at the campsite, and no one was in shape to make a trip back over the mountain. So, the ranger allowed us to stay in the station’s bunk house (usually used by work crews) for the night.

The accommodations, after what we’d been through, were first rate. Showers, toilets and a microwave. The ranger chatted with us for a bit, but we were all dead tired and not much for conversation, so he said goodnight.

I would have liked to talk to him more, as rangers tend to have good stories. Instead, we listlessly watched “The Princess Bride” on the cabin’s TV and crawled into bed.

Hummingbirds at the ranger station.

The next day, we split up, much like the fellowship at the end of book two in “The Lord of the Rings.” I would hike back across the park to where the car was parked and drive to Dog Canyon. Scott and John would go pick up all of our equipment and bring it back.

Damn I look creepy in this one.

We said our goodbyes and headed off.

I had a nice walk. The trail went by one mountain peak, but beyond that was pretty easy.

Walking back. Bored.

On the way back down the cliff face that we had climbed on the first day, I ran into a group of people headed up. On the entire trip, they were the only other people I saw save for the ranger. That’s one great thing about GuMo – you can practically have the whole place to yourself, even on a weekend.

I stumbled into the parking lot and immediately headed for the water fountain -- where a couple of people had decided for God knows what reason to set up their laptop computer. My apologies for splashing water were not really sincere.

Anyway, I took the hundred-mile drive back to Dog Canyon. I took a nap for a bit before Scott and John showed up. “If we found a shady spot, we were resting in it,” Scott told me.

We hadn’t kept to the plan, and we had very nearly got ourselves into some major trouble. Still, everyone was in a good mood. Like a kid whose first sled ride takes him speeding out of control, down the mountain, over the busy highway and under a moving tractor trailer into the brush beyond the road, our survival was a tangible thing to enjoy.

We’ll do it again before too long.

We stopped in Carlsbad for dinner. The town is actually a nice little desert spot. It was about 7 p.m. and the time and temperature sign said it was 102.

Main street, Carlsbad.

In the flatlands of West Texas, the sun set, and in the dark around us, lightning storms lit the sky from horizon to horizon.

We drove back to Hico, listening to a surprisingly good classic rock station out of Hobbs.

Smokey the Bear says
“Blinded by the Light” by Manfred Mann’s Earth Band says all it needs to say in the first 30 seconds, but manages to go on for about 25 minutes. You can drive across a West Texas county trying to understand the line after “Blinded by the light”, which sounds like “Caught up like the reducer on the rudder in the right”, even though you know it’s wrong and it’s driving you nuts. Sheesh.

*By the way, some of the pictures here look good. Those were taken by John.