Guadalupe Day 3

Today we hiked up Guadalupe Peak. The trailhead doesn’t have much parking, and the previous day was very windy, so we expected that this hike would be very popular today. We tried to get going early and arrived at 7:40am getting one of the last parking spots. There is additional parking lot 2/3 of a mile away.

Looking back after about 45 minutes on the trail going up. We climb close to 2900 ft over 4.25 miles on this trail.

The trail has lots of switchbacks and is along some rather steep cliffs.

It is also pretty rocky in places.

We did see quite a number of folks on the trail, as many of them passed us going up. Donna goes fairly slow, but can keep going.

Here is a view from the bridge of the top, it doesn’t look all that far away, but it was another hour and a half to get there.

Towards the top it gets pretty rocky. In places there is a pretty steep drop off next to the trail. Donna was getting tired, so she elected to stop about 150 feet below the top. She had a great view looking south over El Capitan to the plains.

At the top, I saw this limestone that had fossils from a sea floor.

You can see the resilience of life here in the desert. This tree started growing in pretty thin soil then the roots had to go sideways.

As it turns out, we were both pretty tired when we finished after 10 hours on the trail, so it was good we didn’t have to walk the additional distance. We were pretty happy to start seeing the trailhead towards the bottom, even though we had 45 minutes more walking at this point.