Today we left Carlsbad, New Mexico and drove down the highway to explore the foothills of the Guadelupe mountains in the Chihuahuan desert. Our goal: find a place to camp on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land relatively close to the famous caverns here - you can do what's called "dispersed camping" for free on BLM land if you can find it, and free is good! Carr had located a map showing the locations of public land, and we used it to try and find a place to spend a couple of nights in the desert.
The landscape here is beautiful but harsh - cacti of all sorts, dry/sharp grasses, thorny bushes, tumbleweeds - it feels like almost every plant here has thorns or spikes. We saw a roadrunner, a pair of javelinas (a kind of peccary), cool black coots swimming in a local oasis shaded by cottonwood trees, several birds of prey flying above, and a dead coyote. We're on the lookout for rattlesnakes and desert foxes and the elusive ringtail...
After a couple hours of searching down dirt roads we were relieved to find a nice location up in the foothills, affording us a beautiful view of the desert. We set up camp and felt like we had arrived. I went off searching for firewood (mostly branches from dead ocotillo, a thorny plant) in the sunshine with a great sense of joy in my heart, and afterward we just hung out admiring the landscape together, talking or in silence. Being in a place like this is such a pleasure, and with being here together with Carr renders it many times more special and meaningful.
As the sun went down it grew colder and colder. We cooked up some delicious tacos on our campstove behind a stone windbreak, and then lit the fire which burned surprisingly warm. By the time we got in bed it was very cold out, probably at the freezing point, but under our copious covers it was warm! (see below for more pictures)
The landscape here is beautiful but harsh - cacti of all sorts, dry/sharp grasses, thorny bushes, tumbleweeds - it feels like almost every plant here has thorns or spikes. We saw a roadrunner, a pair of javelinas (a kind of peccary), cool black coots swimming in a local oasis shaded by cottonwood trees, several birds of prey flying above, and a dead coyote. We're on the lookout for rattlesnakes and desert foxes and the elusive ringtail...
After a couple hours of searching down dirt roads we were relieved to find a nice location up in the foothills, affording us a beautiful view of the desert. We set up camp and felt like we had arrived. I went off searching for firewood (mostly branches from dead ocotillo, a thorny plant) in the sunshine with a great sense of joy in my heart, and afterward we just hung out admiring the landscape together, talking or in silence. Being in a place like this is such a pleasure, and with being here together with Carr renders it many times more special and meaningful.
As the sun went down it grew colder and colder. We cooked up some delicious tacos on our campstove behind a stone windbreak, and then lit the fire which burned surprisingly warm. By the time we got in bed it was very cold out, probably at the freezing point, but under our copious covers it was warm! (see below for more pictures)