Warm, cloudy with sunny spells, windy
111 miles
I got up at 8.00, and went to the nearby filling station again to purchase both breakfast and lunch. I left at 9.20 for Guadalupe Mountains National Park, crossing back into Texas. After a quick look in the visitor centre again, taking a picture of a stuffed roadrunner in a glass case, I took the short Pinery Trail around the back of the visitor centre, past informative signs about the desert plantlife, to the low stone walls that were the ruins of The Pinery, a stagecoach horse-changing station from the days of the Butterfield Overland Stage Mail Service.
This began in 1858 as a much-needed communications route to California, previously only reachable by a lengthy sea voyage (possibly with an overland shortcut in Panama). It ran almost three thousand miles from Tipton, Missouri (the furthest reach of the eastern railway network at the time) to San Francisco, coming this far south in order to avoid the mountains. Unfortunately this also brought it into what was to become Confederate territory, and in 1861 the service was shut down.
I returned to the visitor centre and went the short distance to the trailhead for the more serious trails. I had chosen to take the route to the Devil's Hall, two miles away, with most of the route being along a dried-up stream bed. Nearer the far end of the trail, the route went into an increasingly narrow canyon, and up a series of almost staircase-like rock ledges before entering the Hall itself.
In this area, the stream ran between two towering rocks, which the seasonal stream had cut through so as to leave the appearance of well-built stone walls. I sat here at the end of the trail to eat my lunch, fending off a swarm of flies which were interested in the proceedings.
I returned along the same route for the first mile, then took a detour up the hillside along the horse route to Guadalupe Peak. I was not heading all the way to the peak, it being an eight mile round trip with a 900m climb, but merely taking a better view of my surroundings. The climb up the horse trail was strenuous enough but was worth it. I descended by the more direct route to the trailhead, which I reached around 3.00. As I signed in to report my successful return, I noted that one other person had set out on the Devil's Hall trail that day -- evidently by taking the detour on the return we had missed each other.
After a drink and a couple of biscuits to refresh myself, I drove back to White's City, and took a look in its so-called ``Million Dollar Museum'', which boasted on the window that ``We don't have the gun that killed Billy the Kid. Two other museums have it.'' The contents of the museum were evidently all the historic junk that could be accumulated by the owners, dotted around with only a vague semblance of order. However it was not uninteresting -- there were some old cars, numerous household objects dating from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, a large collection of dolls' houses, and a moose's head on the wall, bringing ``Fawlty Towers'' to mind.
I returned to the motel and decided to try the pool -- not the best I've encountered since, although warm, it was evidently in need of some cleaning or at least decent filtration. I rested in my room for a while, watching the season finale of ``Friends'', and in the evening drove downtown again for dinner.
I decided that it was my duty to pay a visit to the town's Stevens Inn, apparently named for an early inhabitant of the town. This was a fairly upmarket Best Western, and I dined in their Flume Restaurant, having a salad, a steak and an interesting German-style cake for dessert. My waitress mentioned that there was an eclipse of the moon that evening and that I should take a look as I left, which I duly did.
I returned to the motel and spent a while trying to fix a problem with my laptop before going to bed just before midnight.