62nd Stop - Guadalupe Mountains National Park, TX

Blog Post #73 - Written June 9, 2026

Stay: October 23-24, 2025

We bid New Mexico goodbye (for now) and ventured into the panhandle of Texas to see the Guadalupe Mountains National Park.  On our drive, we could see Mexico, but did not cross the border.  

Our campground was simple, but unique.  The owners of Mountain View RV Park installed these fun sculptures around the campsites.  The kids loved climbing on them.  I was only slightly nervous about their exploration of the campground, since the hosts said that they had seen a few rattlesnakes around. (I hadn't quite recovered from our Joshua Tree incident...)  But instead of rattlesnakes, they found 2 black widows! How exciting  ;)


We took the next day to go explore the Guadalupe Mountains National Park (which, I'll admit, I had never heard of before this trip).  The mountains are quite imposing, mostly because the rest of the landscape is extremely flat.  






The Mountains are really the remains of a fossilized reef bed.  And as you hike around, you can see evidence of all the ocean residents that used to dwell there.  


We decided to check out the Frijole Ranch, a museum honoring the original settlers to the area and the progression to a National Park.  There were some small trails that branched off the Ranch. We followed one that led us to a lovely waterhole in the shade.  We loved having some time to cool off from the heat.  




We spent the rest of our hike convincing children that we were having fun, looking for more crickets, and playing 'who can see the truck first!'  Haha not all hikes are 100% enjoyable 100% of the time.


 

 Definitely a quiet little park, but we enjoyed our stay.






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