We spent a great week bouldering at Hueco with our friends Ben and Aram. Hueco Tanks Historical Park is about 25 miles east of El Paso, Texas. It’s an international destination for bouldering, believe it or not! It’s also an important site for Native American pictographs. Because it became so popular, there’s now a strict limit on the number of people who are allowed to enter the park per day. If you want to climb there you either have to make a reservation, or show up before the gates open and hope to be one of the 10 people they let in without reservations. Made for some early mornings for us! We developed a good system, though. Get up early, eat breakfast and drive to the park to line up, then go find a nice sunny place in the park to nap for a couple of hours! It was perfect.
The bouldering was a lot of fun, and we really enjoyed hanging out with Ben and Aram. Plus, we had amazing weather! Beautiful sunny days, nights that stayed above freezing….bliss!
On one of our rest days we took a trip down the road an hour or so to Guadalupe Mountains National Park. We took a 9 mile hike up to Hunter’s Peak, the second highest point in Texas. It was a great hike, though a little more than we reckoned for. The scenery was beautiful, we even saw some cliffs that looked like they were begging to be climbed, but they were too far away to explore. We finished hiking out just after dark…..9 miles and 2,500 feet of elevation gain (and loss) in 5 hours.
We climbed until the very last minute, ran back to the campground to pack up the car, and hit the road about 5:00. Next stop…back west to Tuscon, Arizona to go to a friend’s wedding. On the road again!
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