CLIMB EVERY MOUNTAIN
Reinhold Messner has conquered the world's 14
highest mountains but isn't through climbing. Messner, who recently completed
the sweep by scaling Makalu and Lhotse in the Himalayas, was misty-eyed while
discussing his adventures at news conference Thursday in Katmandu, Nepal. "I am
not feeling like a hero," the 42-year-old Italian said. I am lucky to be alive.
I feel the big power of nature and the mountain accepted me for 16 years."
Messner also mentioned some of the things he has encountered on his climbs,
including the yeti - the abominable snowman. I will not tell you when and where
I saw the yeti," he said I know it exists. It's a mixture of a man and animal.
I need 10 more years to tell you when and when I saw it." Messner said "there
are millions of mountains left" to climb and he also wants to explore deserts
and make a fictional movie about mountaineering. |
THE DESERT PAGE by Bob Michael, SAGE
Associate Editor
PEAKBAGGING IN THE LAND OF WILLIE 'N' WAYLON:
THE
GUADALUPE MOUNTAINS |
The Guadalupes dominate the horizon on the vast
empty flats southwest of Carlsbad, New Mexico, like a gray ghost ship silently
plowing a creosote bush sea. Their ruggedness is all the more impressive
because they are the only appreciable mountains in a sizeable expanse of
northern Trans-Pecos Texas. The range increases in height from the New Mexico
border south to the cluster of 8,000-foot peaks that surround 8,751' Guadalupe
Peak. El Capitan (8,028'), a splendid sheer-walled butte in the grand Utah
desert style, is the last magnificent gesture of the range before it abruptly
subsides to uninteresting low hills south of Guadalupe Pass on US 180.
The great stack of limestone that comprises the Guadalupes is part of what may
be the world's best-preserved fossil earthscape a vast coral reef complex from
the Permian period, when this part of the planet was overlapped by a shallow
tropical sea. Although the Guadalupes have been strongly vertically uplifted,
most of the area has been little affected by the intense folding and faulting
that has rearranged other parts of the West. Now high, dry, and gullied the
many exposed micro-environments of this ancient ecosystem of subcontinental
scale are an endless delight to geologists. Trillions of creatures from
bacteria to fish lived and died for millions of years in a series of warm,
saline, stagnant, shallow marine basins that stretched east of the Guadalupe
reef. Eons of burial, heat, and pressure distilled their dead bodies into the
rich oilfields of the Permian Basin of southeast New Mexico and west Texas.
As readers may recall from my last Page most of Texas is privately owned,
and so were the Guadalupes until the 1960's when the ranch that comprises them
was providentially willed or given to the Park Service. Of course, while the
mountains were a ranch, building tourist access was hardly a priority. The Park
Service has done relatively little since acquisition, making this one of the
more primitive and less-developed parks. Access to the intimidatingly sheer
west side of the range is still very limited. The two major roadheads are on
the eastern side. To the north, near the New Mexico line, is McKittrick Canyon,
a year-round stream flowing past deeply incised walls which shade a lush
riparian lifezone with many large broadleaf trees.
The roadhead of most
interest to climbers near Guadalupe Pass is the start of the fairly short but
very steep trail to Guadalupe Peak, briefly a national summit (Confederate
States of America). The trail gains 3600 feet in about four miles through
mostly open, grassy terrain with a few pinyons, agaves, Texas madrones, and, on
top, scatted Ponderosas. The view from the summit (adorned with a curious
three-sided aluminum pyramid) is limitless in all directions; northward over
the sparsely forested crest of the range into New Mexico and south, east, and
west over a mostly flat immensity that seems "the floor of the sky".
Closer at hand to the south, the sharply canted, cliff-girt summit of El
Capitan presents an intriguing challenge about 11/2 miles to the south across a
thousand-foot gap. We headed due south off Guadalupe following the main divide
of the range, which here narrows down to almost an arete. There is no choice of
routes to the left is a steep, brushy slope ending in cliffs, while to the
right is an awesome, often perfectly vertical palisade of pale yellow limestone
at least two thousand feet high. The Class 2 route goes surprisingly easily all
the way to the summit of El Capitan. The top of this elegant butte is a bit
anticlimactic; densely overgrown with pinyon, which limits the views. On the
return, it's not necessary to re-climb Guadalupe. It's easy enough to cut
across the broken south face of the latter peak to pick up the trail down.
Now we head south to Big Bend, maybe taking the slow scenic route through
the Davis Mountains, with glimpses of 8,200' Mount Livermore behind this sort
of thing: |
POSTED MEMBER- TEXAS CATTLEMENS ASSOCIATION
NO
TRESPASSING |
What a fascinating primeval place that peak must be! (Although the
notion of a privately owned mountain range is in many ways offensive, at least
such areas will probably never look like Jawbone Canyon.) |
 |
|
