My Limit Reached

Adventure Location: Dog Canyon Campground, Gumo, Texas

 The drive is long and on highway 137.  You drive through about 50 miles of NM to get there.  As you start down into Dog Canyon this is the view from the road.  As you can see the road disappears up into the mountains.

 From that view point it is about twelve miles to the entrance to the campground in Texas.  And Texas starts at the fence line.  New Mexico is nice to furnish a road to get to Gumo from this side.

 The goal today was to test my abilities at handling the altitude after a few weeks at higher altitudes than Rockport’s 7 feet while hiking. I failed.  On arriving at the campground a stop was made to visit with the Ranger and super friendly dog named Casper.  Casper is a large Weimaraner and just about the most pleasant pup you could hope to pet.

The Ranger explained about the difference in the two trails leading up the mountains.  The trail chosen was the Bush Mountain trail.  Supposedly it started to gain altitude faster than the Tejas trail.  This next picture was taken about fifteen minutes into the hike.

The trail was in decent shape and not at all that steep.  My feet plodded on up the trail for a good while.  The water in my bottle was being carefully monitored to prevent running out.  It turns out there was no need to worry.  My altitude sickness kicked in way before the water ran out.  Only a half mile or so was hiked.  From the map at hand the elevation at the turnaround point (TAR) was only 6500 feet.  But my body was spent and acting up so it was back down to the parking lot. Here was the TAR point.  This was a sad performance on my part.

When the Team headed back this was our view.  My hopes were to get to the top of the mesa.  It is at the 7000 feet plus elevation.  It will not happen without a helicopter to carry me up there.

All was not lost though.  There was a greeting committee of one waiting for me at the culvert that crosses back to the parking lot.

My walking stick was used to tumble it tail over teakettle into the ditch and off the path.  That snake did not like getting flipped like that.

Sitting around in the parking lot for a good bit was needed before the long drive back to the Castle started.  The parking lot is at 6290 feet elevation.  After an hour or so my body seemed ok to head back and we did.  This elevation mess certainly makes a WORLD CLASS WIMP out of me in a hurry.  But it did not stop me from trying to have tooooo much fun. TheOFM.