Guadalupe Mountains

Guadalupe Peak, also known as Signal Peak, is the highest natural point in Texas.

It's within the Guadalupe Mountains National Park and is part of the Guadalupe Mountain Range, approximately 90 miles east of El Paso.

True or false, 450,000 wasps go into the height of Guadalupe Peak.

You mean the Guadalupe Peak that's situated in the Guadalupe Mountains that's part of the Guadalupe Mountain Range?

Exactly right.

That Guadalupe? Yeah.

Yeah.

But it's essentially a White Sands, Carlsbad Cavern, uh, National Parks in New Mexico, and then Guadalupe Mountains and Big Bend National Parks in Texas.

Yeah.

And White Sands National Park is about an hour and a half drive from El Paso.

Mm-hmm.

Carlsbad Caverns and Guadalupe Mountains National Park, I wanna say it's about three to three and a half hour drive from White Sands National Park.

And White Sands became a national park quite recently.

Yes, it did.

I think you know how to answer this, but please answer carefully.

Big Bend or Guadalupe Mountains?

I made a real connection with Big Bend and Guadalupe was, I only camped outside of it.

I did find it stunning, but to be fair, I'm pretty sure I know what your answer is.

It became my life very quickly.

The same with you.

I started, it was probably 2015, 2016, and I was driving down I-10 and I saw a sign that said Guadalupe Mountains National Park.

And I started laughing and we're heading to El Paso to try to dodge a blizzard because we were heading up into New Mexico.

And it's just got an incredible diversity.

And I, I guess that if I go back to like why did bats hook me in the first place, it was, um, a Texas A&M field trip where we went to the Guadalupe Mountains and we were doing surveys for deer and other organisms as well, but then we would net bats at night.

And that's when I first got my hands on a lot of different types of, of species.

And we were photographing them, or we were bringing them back to a studio for someone to photograph, um, for the first Bats of Texas book.

And I've got this wonderful picture.

It looks up directly up looking up at the Guadalupe Mountains there.

And I believe that's the tallest mountain in Texas at 8,900 feet.

And so it's just seemed apropos.

An experiment in which life found a way to persist in the absence of everything that life is supposed to require and proved that the sun is optional.

From Romania to the American Southwest, from a flat coastal plain to the Guadalupe Mountains of southeastern New Mexico, You are inside the boundaries of Carlsbad Caverns National Park.

But you are not in the tourist area.

You are not on the paved trails of the big room.

Minerals with hexagonal crystal structure include aquamarine, emerald, quartz varieties, tourmaline, calcite, corundum, hematite, and ice.

Lechugila Cave lies deep beneath New Mexico's Guadalupe Mountains within Carlsbad Caverns National Park.

It stretches for 152 miles, making it the ninth longest explored cave in the world, with scientists estimating it formed around 5 million years ago.

The cave system represents a treasure trove of geological complexity and beauty, with formations that took millions of years to develop in complete isolation from the surface world.

Luke making that up? No, there's all kinds of mountains in Texas.

The Guadalupe Mountains, you've got the range that runs into El Paso.

Yeah, there's a lot of beautiful mountain

territory in

So I did not want to do that.

So I was actually planning on doing a backpacking trip in Guadalupe mountains national park.

And instead I did a three day hike, like a loop hike in that area on the New Mexico side, like in that area.

It's a, I mean, if you've been to the slaughter Canyon trail and you know, I think it's actually a pretty, that is one, honestly, one of the most underrated

I'm sure there's an obvious one I'm missing in this exercise, but let's just throw in Mesa Verde, even though I don't think Mesa Verde really counts.

Let's say five.

There are two national parks in the Guads, right? You have Carlsbad Caverns, which has a lot of surface area, and Guadalupe Mountains National Park.

To me, that's actually really impressive that for such a small mountain range, you have two national parks, whereas something as scenic and as wonderful as the Rocky Mountains, you only have five, right? I think that speaks to the beauty of the Guads.