Hello and welcome to the newest edition of From The Vault! The series where I go back and dredge up old, lost, or unwritten stories of my travels. I thought I’d have to start over from scratch with this one, but then I found a completed unpublished copy on my laptop! What a stroke of luck. This was an epic adventure and I hope you enjoy!
There are many “panhandles” in the USA, but what I’m specifically talking about here is the Texas Panhandle. It’s most well known for having nothing! I still felt like I needed to go and see for myself and BB8 joined me.
Day 1, Valles Caldera National Preserve
Originally I wasn’t going to go to Valles Caldera National Preserve because driving through Española is one of my least favorite drives of all time, but I reconsidered after it was decided that I would be joining the family in Albuquerque. It’s on the way…either I-25 south or the dreaded Española route.
I left 30 minutes later than I expected which wasn’t terrible. It took me about 3 hours to get there. The drive was peaceful minus Española. I didn’t expect to go through Bandolier NP, but to get to the caldera you first need to go through a tiny chunk of Bandolier forest on a steep hill.
Once over that hill I was in the caldera! It was like a giant grassy field. In the distance you could see a herd of Elk lounging on the grass. The visitors center was along a short dirt road, but it was well maintained so very easy for my short car to ride on.
Once there I was greeted by the ranger who told me that I picked the perfect day to come and hike. Usually it was -2F at the bottom of the caldera with wind chill, but on this day it was a warm 35F ish. I went over the plan with the ranger and he said what I had chosen was basically impossible to do all in one day: Sulfur Springs trail (.3 miles there and back, the Hidden Valley trail (3.5 miles there and back), the Missing Cabin trail (.5 miles out and back), and the Coyote Call trail at 3 miles round trip). On paper it looked easy!
The ranger gave me a different option instead: South Mountain! We decided that Sulfur Springs and South Mountain were both doable in a day so that became the new plan and off I went. To get to south mountain I needed to get a vehicle pass in order to drive in the backcountry in the winter since the road is closed. I was allowed to go down a short section of maintained dirt road to a small parking area and the start of the trailhead. I didn’t really know what I was going to see or how long the trail was, but I had 4 hours to finish this so I figured it wouldn’t really matter. I also asked about a special van tour that you could do, but since the road was closed until summer it wasn’t available.
There was a light wind at the start and the trail was an old abandoned logging road. It had snow in some spots and a thick layer of ice in a few of the tire tracks. (They were doing contract work in a different part of the park so the road is in use at the moment.) I wasn’t really sure where to go initially, but with the help of the “Avenza Maps” app on my phone I managed to not get lost. At the visitors center the ranger suggested this app because you can use it to download live maps of National Park sites and other locations on it. Really helpful to be able to plot out a course in real time and then follow your icon as you hike the trial.
Once I got off the logging road it became apparent that my hiking boots were absolutely necessary as there was about half an inch to an inch of snow on the trail at the start. Not phased I kept going. I didn’t travel all the way through the dreaded Española pass to turn around so soon!
One thing of note was that this part of the caldera had been in a forest fire so I would be hiking through a burned out forest. It was starting to grow back, but most of the trees were still dead and many of them had fallen down from the vicious caldera wind.
Pretty soon the trail went from a little snow to a fair amount. About 1 – 2 inches. That in itself wasn’t a big deal, but the fact that most of the trees were down meant that it was sort of hard to stay on the trail since the trees that were down had the trail markers on them!
It was helpful that a guy had passed me earlier because that meant I could follow his foot prints. That helped me stay on the trail. (I realize that if he got lost…so would I most likely.)
About 3 miles in and not even reaching the tree line I started to wonder just how long the trail was. Luckily I had good cell service the entire hike so it was easy to pull up the national park website to check. It was an 8 mile round trip! Ahhhhhh! At that point I sort of debated going back down, but I needed to get to the top like it was my mission in life so I set my concerns aside and kept going.
At 12:15pm I reached the summit and that’s where it really became clear that trail markers are actually a wonderful asset while hiking. I assumed the trail was the line of snow that you see in the picture, but what if it wasn’t? Also the ground looks like a grassy field, but that was a bit deceiving as it was filled with small holes and such. The perfect place to twist an ankle!
Upon reaching the summit of 9,785ft I took break from hiking to soak in the views. Perfect place for a selfie as well. About 15 minutes into my cozy summit break the wind started to pick up and I had a mini reality check that my sweatshirt, shorts, polar bear hat, and no gloves was a rather stupid clothing selection. I was getting cold! Not wanting to risk hypothermia at 9785ft I headed back down.
Going back down wasn’t a huge challenge as long as I was careful to not slip and fall on the steep snowy trail. Once at the bottom I proceeded to walk back on the dirt road to my car and drive to Sulfur Springs.
It took about 45 minutes to get to the road it was on via the highway and a un-gated community. (Basically a private neighborhood without a locked gate.) The national park service had recently acquired the land to Sulfur Springs, but the area was so new that the road isn’t official and thus it’s considered a private access road. The dirt road to the springs trailhead started out ok, but about 1 mile before the parking area I discovered that it turned into a rough / barely maintained 1 lane road with large 1 ft deep potholes scattered around. I decided to park my car as far off the road as possible and proceed on foot. I had just hiked about 9 miles so what was another added 1 mile or two to the day?
The smell of the springs was so unbearable that I had to wear my N-95 mask + put a raincoat shrouded hand over my nose and mouth the entire time. I started smelling it about 200ft away from the actual springs and as I got closer the worse the smell got.
It was really cool to see a boiling pond in the middle of winter. There used to be a “ladies bathhouse and hot spring health resort” here but all that remains nowadays is the pond, a few boiling mud pits, some old wooden pillars, and supposedly sulfuric acid springs (although I couldn’t tell where they were). I guess when the forest fire came through this part of the park it reduced the site to almost nothing. The park ranger said that the springs had a PH level of about 1 so if you stuck your hand in then it would basically melt.
After just a few minutes of pure awfulness I walked back to my car and proceeded to go to Albuquerque to visit Brenda, Paul, and Nana for Thanksgiving. I’d say that the caldera is totally worth going to even if you can’t do the epic van tour that Paul suggested.
Day 2: Thanksgiving
I won’t go into much detail in order to keep my family life mostly private. It seems like for Thanksgiving you are either a lunch person or a dinner person. This year we had a Thanksgiving lunch! It was at the Albuquerque Country Club and it was fantastic. They had a buffet style set up with epic dishes such as prime rib, sweet potato casserole with marshmallows, and the time honored classic: turkey. I was blessed with a glass of wine as well.
After lunch we went on a tour of Albuquerque with none other than Paul! Really cool. The last thing of the day was cherry pie at the house! The pie was great, which was weird because I don’t like cherries normally. Heh. Jackson and Louie (the dogs) wanted pie too, but their request was denied.
That about wraps up Thanksgiving this year. There is more to it than this of course, but I already said I’d keep things brief.
Day 3, Texas
This morning I left at a wonderful 7:04am. The plan was 6:45am, but it was 27F and I forgot I first had to defrost the windshield on my car. Once that was complete I hit the road. There was supposedly a big snowstorm the night before across all of eastern New Mexico. I had been following the weather virtually all night and debating various contingency plans. I normally factor in my best guess to what the weather will be, but even I will never truly know what the weather will be like at any given moment.
I had been driving roughly an hour on I-40 East when I stopped at Clines Corners to get some fudge! You might remember the name from my Fudge Factory blog. There was maybe half an inch of mostly melted snow in the parking lot, but the highway was still clear. I decided my next stop wouldn’t be until I hit the Texas state line. No more wasting time!
The next stop was Vega, TX where I filled up on gas. Only about 1 and a half more hours of driving to my hotel! The problem was that at this Best Western the checkin time was 5pm. (usually it’s 3pm most places) What the heck would I do for those 2 extra hours?? Before the hotel I was going to try the BEST BBQ in Amarillo at Tyler’s BBQ. Unfortunately it was closed for Black Friday. This would turn out to be a common occurrence at many other locations and I eventually got some authentic Texas bbq at “Mitch’s Texas Style BBQ” in a Toot’n Totum gas station travel center. It wasn’t bad, but Tyler’s would’ve been awesome. Maybe next time!
Next on the Official Plan was the Carson County Square House Museum. This house was built during the westward expansion in Kansas then brought over to the town of Panhandle in the Panhandle of TX. (This was very exciting I thought…to be in the Panhandle of a Panhandle.)
The manager had never before seen a lego BB8 in the Square House, so I went over why I brought him for a bit. It is a bunch of museums that are grouped together. One has a bunch of taxidermies animals and the others have a bunch of panhandle artifacts. Really cool place to stop by!
Next was finally Borger! Just kidding. I still had 2 hours to kill before I could check into the hotel. From Borger I quickly made my way to Fritch, TX to get the stamp for Lake Meredith National Recreation Area (NRA), but it was closed for the holiday weekend! The website said it was open on Friday and only closed Thanksgiving day. Bummer! I was a bit glum, but ever hopeful that the next park would have the stamp too.
It did! After about 30 more minutes of driving I had made it to the Alibates Flint Quarries National Monument. Brief history lesson: So a few thousand years ago a bunch of Indians found flint and started mining it using bison bones and such. They crafted it into arrowheads, spearheads, tools, and other things like jewelry. (They used the term “Indians” in the park film so I’m using it here.) A couple thousand years later the National Park service acquired it and turned it into Texas’s first National Monument.
The flint that was mined here is unique and can only be found here. Flint from these quarries has been found hundreds of miles across several states, which is quite the achievement I must say. Before I left the visitors center I did the really short .3 mile hike. It was more of a “look at all these cool plants hike.”
Next I attempted to do the Mullinaw trail. I got about halfway down this dirt road before I decided to turn around and go back. The landscape was really beautiful, but not meant for a low Toyota Camry. Plus there seemed to be hunters. Imagine hiking around people with shotguns and bow / arrows??
Not really knowing what to do next I went to find the start of the Harbor Bay trail. It is near the Fritch Fortress campground and to get there you need to drive down a very outdated road through a neighborhood. I got to the trail just before it got dark, so I had the chance to see the sunset.
The trail is on a very questionable path that seemed like it would fall away at any moment, plunging me 100ft onto the rocky beach. It didn’t though no worries. A BB8 picture is almost always worth the risk. Don’t you agree?
The final stop of the day was the Best Western in Borger. I’ll be staying here until Sunday and I’m happy to say it’s a good hotel so far. I’m not really sure what I’ll do tomorrow since I did most of the stuff today. I’m sure I’ll figure it out though. See you later!
Day 4, Saturday
I slept in because I had already done most of the stuff the day before. I got up around 11:45am and left the hotel at 12:30pm. It was good to finally sleep in! Unfortunately all my outdoor plans were ruined because it was raining that morning. Looking at the radar app I decided that since it was such a big storm it would be raining all day. Bummer!
I needed more stamps and since every post office in America is closed on Saturday and Sunday I went to a UPS store in Amarillo. It was a bit out of the way, but I really didn’t have a choice.
After the stamps I decided to go past Tylers Bbq again just to see if it was open. It was! I got a pulled pork sandwich, green beans, and a modelo. After eating I met THE Tyler! He is a friend of Uncle Pablo and it was really nice to meet him. He has been to Philmont before! I’d highly recommend trying the bbq at Tyler’s next time you are in Amarillo.
Next the plan was to go to the Devil’s Rope Museum in McClean. (Aka the barbed wire museum). I got about 30 miles into the 72 mile drive when I had to turn around and go back to Amarillo. Why you ask? I forgot to get a picture with Tyler!
After the bbq picture I didn’t have enough time to make it to the Devil’s Rope museum so instead I headed north to try hiking on the Devil’s Canyon trail at the Lake Meredith NRA. It is on the other side of the lake and can only be accessed with what I assumed was a dirt road. It turns out I was right! I have a rule where I won’t take my car on a wet dirt road unless it’s absolutely necessary. Today wasn’t one of those days, so I turned around and headed back towards Borger.
It took what seemed like a longish time due to the vast fields of nothing to get to the nearest city. First I went to Stinnett to see what cool things exist there. Basically nothing. It’s kind of the size of Springer, New Mexico. The only difference is that there is a main highway running through it so more cars. While I was there I saw 3 people get pulled over for speeding in less than 15 minutes! Before I left, I got a dipped ice cream cone from a Dairy Queen.
Borger is just a 15 minute drive south of Stringett so that meant I was back to my hotel fast. I’m a bit tired still from the hike I think so I will head to sleep earlier so I will be well rested for the long day back tomorrow.
Day 5, Sunday
Ok so the plan was to see the XIT museum in Dalhart, TX and the Herzstein memorial museum in Clayton, New Mexico, but they were closed! I always do thorough research and I could’ve sworn they were open on this Sunday. Darn! Instead I just drove the 4 hours back to Philmont.
I stopped once in Clayton to get a subway sandwich (from Subway). The rest of the drive went well. I was surprised to see a lot of traffic on the Clayton to Springer road! Usually it’s just me for the full 100 miles. Anyways, that’s it for this trip! See you next time!
Trip Stats
- Estimated miles: 930.5mi
- Actual miles: 1113.5mi (got this off my google timeline)
- Cost of my on-sale Target Thanksgiving Day pants: $32
- I didn’t see any mountain lions, wolves, or black bears
- Sulphur Springs is on the top 10 worst smells of all time list
Blog Update: Work has sort of gotten in the way of posting at the previous scheduled time so I’m moving my official posting time to 6pm EST (USA) every 1st and 3rd Friday of each month.