5/18/13: Saturday, The Biggest Peaks in Texas. This is Guadalupe Mountains National Park. These mountains are in large part the remnants of Permian-era reefs, not corals but sponges, algae, and other undersea life cemented together in great calcareous reefs beneath a long-vanished sea 270-260 million years ago. As far as we know, the extinction event we use to mark the end of the Permian about 250 million years ago is the greatest of the great extinctions. My beloved trilobites were finally extinguished then, though their numbers and variety had already suffered considerable diminution. There must be wonderful fossils here.
   Now it's a high and very dry desert, part of the Chihuahuan desert. Low, scrubby vegetation carpets a landscape even less varied than the Mojave and the Great Basin. It's very arid. Up here there are some shrubs and small trees, like junipers, live oaks (succumbing to mistletoe), possibly jojoba, and many I don't recognize. Definitely a solanum with pretty purple flowers and a fruit on its dead stems that looks like apple of Sodom -- deadly nightshade?
   Very windy tonight with a bright half-moon; getting chilly. I look forward to going to the Visitor Center tomorrow, but I'm starting to wish that I'd spent an extra day in the Catalinas instead of here. And that I'd not backed into a ditch and been scared out of the Catalinas by my own ineptitude.
   Guadalupe Peak at 8749 feet is the highest peak in Texas, and it seems to be right above this campground, though not visible from it. I am too intimated by the barrenness of the place to come up with any Dragnet-style jibes tonight. The brochure calls it a magnificent desolation.
   Leaving Deming this morning, I had to stop for another bowl of chili at El Mirador. I tried the green chili -- very good but I like the red better -- and got a bowl of the red chili to go. I suppose in the interest of truth, justice, and the American way, I shall have to try some Texas chili next. All I saw of El Paso was very little: part of it from I10 looked like old Hollywood off the 110, say around Vermont and Normandie, and then U.S. Hwy. 180 sent me east through suburbs that looked like Lancaster.