Guadalupe Peak

From the first time I laid my eyes on mountains, I remember thinking to myself "how cool it would be to climb one." Since my family travels a lot during the summer months I have seen many mountains before but I had never had a good opportunity to actually challenge myself to reach a summit. Whenever I travel with my mom and sister it is usually a very planned out trip in which I do not get much say in what we do, but I'd much prefer that then sitting at home. The weekend before spring break this year I was finally able to talk one of my friends into going to the Guadalupe Mountains National Park to climb Guadalupe Mountain. Since it was the highest peak in Texas, naturally we had to climb it! With no previous climbing experience and neither of us being in great physical condition, I knew in the back of my mind it was a terrible idea. But nevertheless the Friday he got out of class I picked him up from Lamar University and we made the eleven hour drive to west Texas. It is hard to realize how big Texas is until you drive across it, it amazes me how vast it is. That night when we pulled into the National Park it was already about 9 o' clock and we did not think all of the camping sites would be completely filled so we did the next best thing and slept in my car. As I reclined the seat in my small 2 door car, all I wanted was a sun roof and it would have been perfect. I'm actually glad we slept in the car, because it got COLD that night. We had 2 big blankets each but it was not enough. Every few hours I would wake up and turn on the car and blast the heater until it was hard to breath because it was so hot. Luckily we made it through the night and woke up to the view of Guadalupe Mountain, or so we thought. We stepped out of the car to the frigid air and started stuffing our backpacks with 10 water bottles and a few bags of almonds, pistachios, and beef jerky. Once we finished getting everything ready and signed the hiker's sheet to state when we expected to return, we headed off down the trail. It was 8:30 in the morning and the sun had yet to come over the mountains, so we were both freezing. As we kept walking, I could not help but look up every few seconds at the massive size of what we were attempting to climb. About thirty minutes into the climb we took a break and a few sips of water, we looked back down the trail at our progress and I was impressed. We could see my car in the distance and it was tiny! Nearly two hours passed and we had almost reached the summit, which I thought was strange because I read that the round trip hike would take about 8 hours. I thought that we were almost god-like as we got to the highest part of the trail that we could see, I did not think that we would have made it up to the top so fast! As we approached the top of the trail, we were able to see off in the distance another peak that seemed to be twice as high. It did not occur to me that the mountain we were walking on was hiding an even bigger mountain behind it! We were devastated, we decided to take another break and think about how we just got tricked by mother nature. We sat for a few minutes eating beef jerky, and by this time I had gone through about 2 bottles of water. On the trail behind us were a father and his 8 year old son that had been walking a good ways behind us for an hour or so, they stopped and talked with us for a few minutes and told us that they were avid climbers. The father also let us know that the peak that we saw in the distance was still not the Guadalupe peak which we were trying to reach. Once they walked off we started laughing and realized how far in over our heads we had gotten, but we could not give up now! We kept on going and pushed ourselves harder than ever before, stopping every 10 minutes to sit on a boulder that paved the trail. After another hour and a half of hiking we reached a campsite that was on top of one of the lower peaks. This is where I realized I was starting to get a pretty gnarly blister on my right foot. I decided the best option was to take off my boot and continue on only wearing a sock. I took about 2 steps and realized that was a terrible idea and that I would have to suck up the pain and deal with the consequences later. We continued on for another good two hours and around every corner the trail seemed to get steeper and steeper. This was about the time when the father and son were making their way down, and let us know we only had about 20 more minutes to go to the summit! We did a few calculations and figured that 20 minutes for them was about 45 for us. But we were too close to even consider turning around now. After countless more stops and my legs about to fall off, the peak was in our sights. After more strenuous hiking and at one pointing crawling on my hands and knees we finally made it to the top. The first few minutes on the top I was not able to enjoy it because I felt like I was about to die but once I caught my breath and stood up, the view was absolutely gorgeous and I could not believe that we had actually made it. After a 4 mile hike up hill with a total elevation gain of three thousand feet, a ten year dream of mine was finally accomplished. It made me realize just how out of shape I was and needless to say I have tremendous respect for anyone who partakes in this activity! Once we took it all in we realized that we had another 4 miles of hiking to do, but fortunately it was mostly downhill. I cannot wait to climb another mountain one day, and I plan to do so in Alaska this summer!