Guadalupe Mountains Self-Guided Audio Driving Tour

Chihuahua is the largest desert in North America. Like many deserts, it’s a place of extremes, with blistering hot days and cold nights.

The tour is over 132 miles long, with more than 40+ audio stories, and takes about 2-3 hours to complete.

MicKittrick Canyon, one of the park’s best attractions. This canyon is like a hidden world inside the arid Chihuahua Desert. The steep canyon walls shelter a surprising variety of plants, animals, and waterways.

The Museum is open seasonally depending on staff availability and tells the story of human habitation in this spring-fed desert oasis, from Native peoples through the Smith family. The grounds are open year-round and contain picnic tables under the shady trees.

This stone cabin is a 5-mile round trip from the Visitor Center trailhead and is a moderately difficult hike. It takes most people around two hours to complete.

This is a great place to walk around and explore. It generally takes visitors about an hour to visit the house and orchard.

This is also the starting point for the popular Smith Spring Loop Trail. This trail takes about an hour and provides an easy loop of just a little over two miles.

the old Frijole Ranch house, which is open for visitors! Now a museum, this house shows what ranching life was like far back into the 1800s.

It’s part of the 2,800-mile route built for the Butterfield Stagecoach Route in 1858 to carry the mail cross-country. Stagecoaches made the grueling trip from San Francisco to St. Louis every two weeks to deliver mail across the fast-growing West.

Pine Springs Trail is a major north-south trail route through the park and connects to various other trails along the way. The main route returns us to McKittrick Canyon and is a challenging hike that takes 12 hours and covers almost 19 miles of rocky, steep terrain.

Guadalupe Peak is the highest natural point in Texas, with an elevation of 8,751 feet.

Along with Guadalupe Peak, El Capitan is one of the most famous peaks in Guadalupe Mountains National Park. It’s the tenth-highest peak in Texas, but it’s more famous for the hidden treasure found inside - a fossilized reef.

The Salt Basin dunes provide another clue to the desert’s ancient past.

As we drive, you can see the rugged peaks of El Capitan and Guadalupe Peak rising above flat, whitish terrain. We’re entering the Salt Basin, which is a relatively new addition to the complicated geology of Guadalupe Mountains National Park.

Cornudas is Spanish for “horn” - probably referring to the way the mountains thrust up from the desert floor. Like the Guadalupe Mountains, the Cornudas contain sedimentary deposits from the Permian era.