Getting Lost in the Backcountry Desert of the Guadalupe Mountains

8 Hours of Raw Nature

Yesterday we got lost. Well, not really lost. The GPS could find us. The roads were stone, gravel, and dirt. We wondered a few times if we would get stuck. I love taking Rich down these back roads to find out where they go and what we will see. And this adventure did not disappoint!

The map on the left shows our campgrounds as the blue dot. We drove south to Salt Flats, then drove back roads to the Salt Basin Dunes which you can see on the right map, and continued on back roads to Dell City, (the right map is zoomed in), then up to Highway 82, right to Artesia, and back down to Carlsbad. Basically we drove a circle all the way around the Guadalupe Mountain Range.

We really have to get ourselves some kind of jeep or 4 wheel drive. We are so hard on this car.

Salt Flats

We started our adventure by driving south on Highway 62/180 past all the entrances to Guadalupe Mountains National Park to the Salt Flats.

Over a million years ago, a large shallow lake filled this area. As the lake dried up it left precious salt behind. Salt is an extremely important resource for humans. It was sacred to the Apache Indians and vital to Hispanic settlers in the area. European settlers moved in and began harvesting the salt.

In the late 1870’s, the El Paso Salt War broke out between El Paso businessmen who were trying to take over the salt beds, and the local Hispanic people who had always gathered it for free. It was a short lived war with a lot of deaths, and eventually the businessmen won out.

Salt Basin Dunes

Driving on past the salt flats, we turned north heading to the Salt Basin Dunes. We got the impression this is a part of the National Park that is no longer maintained or advertised. The road was in pretty bad shape.

We drove as far back on this gravel/dirt lane as we could go. A couple of semi-trucks passed us, and we wondered if they were cattle trucks, or harvesting salt.

There were a lot of cattle and horses roaming free, abandoned houses and trailers, and an awful lot of bumps. Rich’s favorite saying on these kind of roads is, “Hold onto your cookies!”

We even found one place that was for sale.

The Salt Basin Dunes are just a scenic area on this unnamed road. It is a basin, so the elevation is much lower than the rest of the park and it floods easily. We could not get clear back to the end of the trail with our low clearance car, but we got pretty close.

Gypsum grains form the bright-white dunes that cover about 2,000 acres and range from three feet high, heavily vegetated dunes at the south end of the area, to sixty feet high, largely non-vegetated dunes at the north end.

You can see the bright white of the gypsum in the photo above. I wish we could have driven further back, but this was as far as we went due to poor road conditions.

We turned around and headed to the town of Dell. This is not much of a town. Most of it is abandoned.

When the road reached the Texas / New Mexico state line it turned to dirt.

Sometimes we could do up to 20 mph but most of the time was spent creeping along at 5 or 10 mph.

We saw a lot of free range cattle along the way. It was a beautiful day for a long slow drive through the desert. We found some wonderful surprises along the way. Had we not been adventurous we would not have found them.

The cactus are blooming back in the desert. I have not seen any blooming yet on major roads.

Rich and his eagle eyes saw this on my side of the road. The photo below is zoomed in. At first we thought maybe it was a pronghorn, but after googling it, thought maybe it is an antelope. Then I found out it is an Oryx! A South African Oryx!

I found another blooming cactus along the way. This one is red.

Then Rich stopped the car and backed up. I thought maybe he saw another animal. It was just a huge bone laying in the middle of the road.

Then we came to a crossroads and saw a road sign. The road we were on was New Mexico Highway 506. Highway?

The terrain changed a few times along the way. We finally entered the lower hills region as we left the mountain range behind.

We even saw a herd of elk. Three of them crossed the road in front of us and we thought they were done. A fourth one jumped out and almost hit the car. We stopped and took several photos. The photos below are zoomed in.

Rich is in seventh heaven whenever we see wildlife in the wild.

After five hours of dirt, stone, and gravel roads, we reached the highway. Yes, from the time we left the Salt Basin Dunes, it took us another five hours to reach Highway 82. We headed east to Artesia and then south to Carlsbad and home.

I love days like this. Driving around an area just to see what we can see. This is the joy of being free to live this kind of life. Having no schedule to live by and no rules. We can saturate an entire area by living in it for a whole month.

Thanks for sticking around. I know this is a long article. I hope you enjoyed seeing the raw nature we experienced today. Thanks for reading.