GeoWandering

Who woulda thought Texas has some landscape-magic! Of course I’d be drawn to the tallest mountain range in this huge state! Guadalupe National Park hosted me on this Christmas Day! My hike took me boulder-hopping up a cactus strewn ravine! The destination being a high walled narrow grotto. The 200 million year old mudstone (basically petrified algal mats) contained imprints of ripple marks, petrified branches and more! During that ancient period, this part of Texas was under an ocean. Crazy.

Organ Pipe National Monument is definitely worth my 3 night stay! Hikes abound, with sunshine and near 80F temps that dosed me big with needed vitamin D! Organ Pipe got its name from pioneers that thought that when the plant dies and lay across the ground, they look like a church’s organ pipes!

Symbiotic’s at work - like the Saguaro, the bat is the Organ Pipe’s primary pollinator.

The otherworldly feeling of this place is teasing me to remain longer. If you’re a diver - this place looks like a terrestrial mix of hard and soft corals and will draw you ever inward, like how coral draws you downward and clenches you within its maze of mysterious forms.

I’m right on the edge of the Mexican border and man, talk about a huge new industry! Border wall building is a billion $ pop-up industry here. Crazy amounts of gravel and concrete trucks are crowding the roads! This is where the first section of trumps “Bollard” border wall was built (see pic). Conservationists say it cuts thru the most spectacular Sonoran desert ecosystem on the planet. Trump went around all environmental reviews to build this wall within a protected National Park, which is also a UNESCO world protected landscape (Biosphere Reserve)!

There’s also some kind of supersized MRI machine that we must pass our vehicles within if we choose to access the little border town of Lukeville. With a name like “Lukeville,” you gotta know it’s not a Mexican town 🤣 - so why the scrutiny? I wanted to use their post office, but decided not to proceed. The area had trump written all over it, which seems all the more surreal because the Park is full of chill nature lovers. Big tangent here - do you think trump has ever stepped foot on a nature trail?

Another side note, I picked up a chunk of ore rock from a historic mine that I hiked to. The oxidation and big crystals tell of a copper/gold blend. However, I’m traveling for adventure, not a payday🤣