Week 85: the one with the surprise elk!
And a palette update!
Hello, hello! Welcome back to another weekly update.
This week was another busy one and we’re still recovering! It’s also a good example of the vanlife rollercoaster. If you’ve ever wondered what it’s really like, then this post is for you. I also have the results of the palette poll at the end — so read on.
Here’s our map for the week so you can see where we’ve been:
Farewell, Fort Davis
Monday we said farewell to our campsite at Davis Mountains State Park, filled our fresh water and dumped our gray tank, and then went into town to pick up a few groceries. We were sad to go — this is a small but mighty state park!
We spent the night at the Lawrence E. Wood Picnic Area — after spending most of our lives as tent campers it still feels pretty amazing that we get to camp in places like this!
It started raining just after we got to camp and it smelled so darn good.
Tuesday: Hiking TNC’s Davis Mountains Preserve
The next morning I did a quick sketch of the view from camp and then we hiked the Madera Canyon Trail on The Nature Conservancy’s Davis Mountains Preserve — it’s adjacent to the picnic area, so we just moved the van a few hundred feet over to the trailhead and started our hike.
Hiking after last night’s rain was a special treat since it revived the lichens — they seemed to glow against the wet pine bark:
The grasses all looked amazing — they had a good year!
One of my favorite parts of the trail is getting to see the cabin that we were lucky enough to stay in back in 2006 — it’s hard to believe that’s been 20 years ago!!
We won a stay in the cabin during a Native Plant Society of Texas silent auction and we stayed there over Christmas. We had a rare snowfall and it was truly magical!
Another favorite sight is seeing Old Baldy — AKA Mount Livermore — the highest peak in the Davis Mountains:
I haven’t made it up there yet, but I will someday!
Tuesday: Pine Springs Campground, Guadalupe Mountains National Park
After our hike we drove 2 hours to Pine Springs Campground in Guadalupe Mountains National Park, passing Blue Origin Launch Site One along the way:
Blue Origin’s first human spaceflight was launched here on July 20, 2021. There’s a gated entry with a guard shack so we just stopped at the sign, took a few photos, and continued on our way.
The first glimpse of the Guadalupe Mountains never fails to lift my heart:
We wished we had time for a hike at Pine Springs, but we had to continue on to Carlsbad, New Mexico to pick up packages.
Wednesday: Carlsbad, New Mexico
Today was one of the low points on the vanlife rollercoaster.
One of the hardest parts of being a full-time traveller is getting mail. Everything we can’t get locally or that’s too niche to be found in a small town has to be mail ordered. We use a mail service for postal mail and they hold our mail until we’re somewhere that we can get it forwarded.
It kinda feels like Christmas when we sit down to open everything, ha!
We had packages waiting for us at two different locations and picked them all up.
We also had our postal mail from the past 2 months forwarded to us and I got a birthday card from my dear Aunt Ada in West Virginia! (Hi, Aunt Ada! Hi, Debbie!)
After processing the packages we went grocery shopping — it always takes us an hour minimum because we have to put everything away in the van before we can get back on the road. Our usual routine is to take things like rice, beans, and frozen fruit/vegetables out of their packages and put them away in storage containers since we don’t have trash when we’re camping off-grid. This time it took us about 2 hours since we hadn’t done a big shop for a while. Blerg.
I never realized how much I took for granted knowing what aisle things are in at my local grocery store back in Austin — grocery shopping on the road is always an adventure and it seems to take forever to find everything!
We had planned on doing laundry while we were in town too, but we were totally beat.
Some of our packages didn’t come in so we’d have to stick around town anyhow, so we headed to…
Wednesday: La Cueva Trailhead
Jason found a spot 15 minutes out of Carlsbad where we could camp for the night: La Cueva Trailhead on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land.
We got there just as the sun was setting so we didn’t get to really see where we were until the next morning.
Here was the sunrise view out the skylight window:
It looked so pretty — but the soundscape was another story! We could hear heavy machinery, the backup beep beep beep of construction vehicles, and there was dust hanging in the air.
Quite a different scene than the Davis Mountains, right? Definitely one of the saddest places we camped for a while, but hey — it was free!
After a quick breakfast we headed back to Carlsbad to pick up the last of the packages and do laundry. Glad we got that all done — and hope we don’t have to go to town for a while now. It’s always such a shock to the system hearing all the noise and traffic — we get spoiled by being out in nature.
Thursday-Sunday: Dog Canyon Campground, Guadalupe Mountains National Park
On our way to Dog Canyon Campground we saw several deer — we kept an eye out for them and lost track of how many we saw!
Then as we drove up out of a desert wash something leaped out in front of us — at first I thought it was just another deer — and then I was like NO WAY!!!
Those are ELK!!
Luckily we were only going about 30 mph so we didn’t hit it. Whew! Kudos to Jason’s fast reflexes!
I was a bundle of nerves but of course I had to take some photos! We’d never seen them here before.
I had to look up more info on elk in the Guadalupe Mountains and learned from the park website that:
The elk that were native to the Guadalupe Mountains were hunted to extinction by the late 1800’s. In 1928, rancher J.C. Hunter imported 44 elk from the Black Hills of South Dakota and released them in McKittrick Canyon. Today the population is estimated to be between 30 and 40 animals.
iNaturalist Webinar
Shortly after we arrived at the park I joined a free webinar all about iNaturalist, hosted by the Oregon Native Plant Society and Jess Beauchemin — it was so informative! You can read a summary of the article here. Thanks, Jess! By the way, if you’re not using the iNaturalist app you totally should — it’s invaluable for learning about the flora and fauna of an area.
It’s been cold here in the park, with lows in the 20s-30s and highs in the 40s. The van has been keeping us nice and toasty at night though! The first night the heater didn’t even come on since it was in the 80s when we were in Carlsbad and the van is so well insulated it kept the heat in!
Camp Days
One of the great things about staying someplace you’ve been before is that you take time to process new supplies, do what I call “admin” work (answering emails, doing the finances, etc) and relax without FOMO (fear of missing out)! We’ve been taking full advantage of that here in the campground. We hope to go for a long hike before we leave, but in the meantime we’ve been getting lotsa work done and going for shorter walks/hikes.
I thought I’d share a few of my favorite photos from our time here so far:
It’s hard to imagine this area being covered by a shallow sea — but the limestone rocks tell the story.
Love that low winter sunlight and how it makes for long shadows and a special kind of glow.
The Palette Poll Results are in!
Last week I asked for your help in choosing the last color to put on my palette — and I can’t thank everyone enough for all of your input!
Here was the final tally on Instagram:
And the tally here on Substack:
It’s interesting how different they are! And the vote was so close when you combine that polls that in the end I decided on…
…drumroll…
I hedged my bets though and made up a Pocket Palette with the other 3 colors, plus a few more that I had just taken off my old palette — quinacridone coral and new gamboge :) I got the idea from Maria when she said to put all 4 colors in mini pans — thanks, Maria!
Here are the final colors — for now, ha! All Daniel Smith unless specified, WN = Winsor & Newton, H = Holbein
Chinese white, Hansa yellow medium, nickel azo yellow
Yellow ochre (WN), Quinacridone rose (WN), deep scarlet
Transparent red oxide, Bloodstone genuine, Van Dyck brown
Cobalt turquoise light (WN), cobalt blue, French ultramarine (WN)
Phthalo blue (green shade), phthalo green (blue shade), indanthrone blue
Some of the colors may look similar in hue but they have different pigment properties such as granulation or opaqueness.
I never seem to be able to stop tinkering with my palettes — hope to get to that point someday! I guess I just like playing with color too much!
Also — as I was cleaning up my palette and refilling it I discovered that I have a tube of phthalo blue red shade — might swap that in for the phthalo blue green shade since I already have phthalo green (blue shade) on the palette.
We’ll see!
That’s a Wrap
That’s it for this week! Hope this post gave you an idea of what vanlife is like.
As always, thanks so much for following along on our adventures! It means so much to have you along for the ride. — Lisa, Jason, and Henry-the-Van
Been very fortunate! Been to all those groovy places! LOVE it!!!
GOOD for you and good FOR you!
Love the candid peek into vanlife realities. That elk encounter must have been incredble after all those deer sightings, especially knowing the reintroduction history in the Guadalupes. The contrast between Davis Mountains tranquilty and the dusty BLM spot realy captures how much location shapes the experience out there.