Ouch!

We woke to a cool and cloudy morning in Guadelupe Mountains National Park. It was a good time for a hike. We were hoping to see a few birds, so we didn't try to climb to Guadelupe Peak, the highest point in Texas. Instead we did a big loop joining several lower trails.

Our original plan was to do a loop of the Foothills Trail and Frijole Trail. We started out of the campground to get to the trails with the path quickly entering an extremely large and rocky wash. It was probably as much as 100 yards across and completely covered in golfball size and larger stones. The trail continued several hundred yards in the wash before emerging on the far side and the Foothills Trail.

As we went along the trail, we met a pair of Park Service workers who were doing trail maintenance. I asked about the wash and we we told that it was the result of two 200-year floods in both 2013 and 2014. I assume that these were the same weather events that flooded out Cave Creek Canyon.

We saw only a few birds along the Foothills Trail. It came out at Frijole Ranch, a group of historic ranch buildings which have been preserved as a museum. The main building was open, so we went in to look around. It turned out that it wasn't really open, but some of the park staff were working in the ranch house. They were working in rodent elimination, something we are quite familiar with from our experiences at Buenos Aires. They were quite happy to let us look around.

When we came out of the house, we decided to add the loop trail up to Smith Spring. This was a trail we had taken on our last visit to Guadelupe NP. We did a guided bird walk on this trail, so we thought we might find a few more birds. We hadn't seen much so far, only a Canyon Towhee and a flock of meadowlarks. It is about two miles from the ranch to where the trail joins the Frijole Trail and has about 450 feet of elevation gain up to the spring which is about halfway up Smith Canyon (and about halfway along the trail).

We weren't far from the ranch when Ellen spotted a little bird hopping around in a bush. It turned out to be one of a pair of Bushtits, which are quite tiny and look and act like a plain version of a Ruby-crowned Kinglet. Not a very exciting bird, except that this was a life bird for Ellen.

We climbed the rest of the way to the spring and saw only a few Spotted Towhees. This was the sum total of birds we saw on the hike. About a half mile down from the spring, while we were going downhill on a very rocky and gravely section of trail, Ellen stepped on a rock which unexpectedly rolled out. She twisted awkwardly, went down hard and sprained her ankle. Ouch! It was still three miles back to the campground and half that was climbing another 500 feet up the Frijole Trail. It was a sore walk back and she didn't complain ... except that we didn't see any birds until we reached the campground. In all, we hiked 7.9 miles and climbed 1,259 feet and Ellen did nearly half the climbing and a third of the hiking on a badly sprained ankle.

The sprain was a bit swollen and blue by the time we got back. We got it wrapped up in an ace bandage, applied frozen corn to it (the closest thing we had to ice) and got it elevated. We kept that up until the evening, when we replaced the bandage with some stretchy (and bright blue) kinesiology tape, which made for a more comfortable compression bandage. Ellen had learned about this tape when she had her hand operation; it was used to control swelling. Luckily we have been stocking it in Speedy's first aid kit.

We are hoping that her ankle will heal quickly as it puts a real damper on her birding plans ... not to mention that she can't do any of the driving as it was her right ankle. We'll see how it looks in the morning. With her sore ankle and my sore back, we make quite a pair.

As I was transferring the hike GPS track into my Mac this evening, I went back through the map files to our first Texas trip, when we last visited Guadelupe Mountains NP. It turns out that it was five years ago on almost exactly the same dates as this vist.