On to West Texas and WIND!

We rose early on Sunday morning to head west. Our final destination was Guadalupe Mountains National Park in far west Texas, very near the border of New Mexico. We had to plan carefully to make sure that we were going to be able to keep our charge since we were heading into a far more sparsely populated area. Fortunately, we had 3 successful charging sessions on our trip there. 

We had never seen an 80mph sign before - a telltale sign that you are in a sparsely populated area!

I didn't get many pictures, but it is clear that energy production is the name of the game in this area. Not just oil and gas, but also wind and solar. We saw massive solar arrays and windmill farms on our travels. The land became more desert-like the farther we traveled west, as we moved into the Chihuahuan desert. 

We had been monitoring the weather and saw that there was a burn ban in the park; I had wrongly assumed this was due solely to dry conditions. While conditions were certainly dry, what drove the warnings was the extremely high winds that were happening there. When we arrived in the park at 4pm, it was the time of highest winds. There were steady winds of 20 to 30 mph, and gusts to 65 mph. It was really something - certainly made everything we wanted to do challenging.

We were permitted to use our camp stove, but the winds were so strong that I had to set up the "kitchen" in the back of the car to cook dinner.

I tried to eat dinner at the picnic table but the wind was too much for me. Shortly after this picture was taken, I retreated to the front seat of the car.

This picture was taken on the approach to the park. The mountains were really striking. We learned that they were actually an undersea reef created when this was an inland sea about 250 million years ago.

We turned in after dark, staying up late enough to get a little bit of stargazing since this is the first "dark skies" park we were visiting. Alas the wind was still very strong, so we turned in just short of 9pm.