Guadalupe Day 2

Today was forecast to be very windy, up to 55 mph gusts, so we chose McKittrick Canyon as our hiking location for the day. The winds would be crossing the canyon mostly, not roaring down the canyon.

We were a little worried about parking as things were very busy yesterday, but that was also Sunday and there probably were some locals in the mix that would be working today. We arrived at 8am to a mostly empty parking lot.

We elected to do the portion of the hike out to the grotto and back. After the grotto the trail climbs up and we’ll be doing plenty of that tomorrow on the Guadalupe Peak trail.

The trail crosses the wash in the bottom of the canyon several times. Here is a detail of the limestone that the canyon is formed from.

There are many interesting textures in the limestone formed by water. In this first image the little holes are actually facing downstream, so the swirling water carved them back upstream.

The first stop on the trail is the Pratt Cabin. Wallace Pratt was a geologist who bought up a great portion of McKittrick Canyon and had a two bed two bath cabin built here out of limestone in 1931-1932. Notice that the roof is made of limestone. There were six men that built the cabin, a stone mason, a civil engineer, two ranch hands and two cowboys. The stone was hauled in from the plains a few miles east as it would fragment into uniform sheets. Pratt strongly advocated for Guadalupe National Park to be created and then donated McKittrick Canyon to the park in 1961.

He selected the site for the cabin very carefully by two streams with a great view from the front porch.

The second stop on the trail is the grotto, an undercut of the cliff wall that water dripping created the formations.

Just beyond the grotto is a hunter’s cabin, built of local limestone and a steel roof.

We didn’t see much wildlife on this hike, just some butterflies.

After completing the hike we drove southwest to see El Capitan of the Guadalupe Mountains from the viewing area.