Ride The Texas Mountain Trail?
Monday, March 28th, 2016
The Texas Mountain Trail.
I’ve been to Texas quite a few times but nearly always in the east or central areas. While it’s pretty flat in a lot of places there are some hills, especially in the Austin area and east over by Louisiana. But mountains? Texas has mountains?
Well, yes, it does, and I’ve now seen quite a bit of them. And they even have something called the Texas Mountain Trail, which seems like a natural draw for someone on a motorcycle. But it’s not quite that simple.
First off, these mountains are real, but they’re not like mountains in Colorado, or even in New Mexico. Whereas we have a lot of greenery, the mountains in Texas are almost entirely barren of greenery and are brown and very much like the desert. More cactus than pine, or even juniper.
That said, mountain roads inevitably have twist and turns and high vista points. Even in Texas. The other consideration is that in between the mountains it’s basically Texas, which is to say, pretty flat, dry, and hot. Even now in March we encountered temperatures as high as 98 degrees. So if you’re interested in riding the Texas Mountain Trail the time to do so is no later than March. February might be better. Or November.
We crossed into Texas just southwest of Carlsbad, New Mexico, and almost immediately reached Guadelupe Mountains National Park. These were real mountains and this is where we picked up the trail. And this was the highest point in all of Texas.
We headed south to Van Horn and then east on I-10 to Texas 118, which was where we first realized there was such a thing as the Texas Mountain Trail. We picked this route down to Fort Davis because the map showed a loop that was marked scenic. It definitely was. There was even some green in the hills. And Fort Davis was beautiful.
On from there to Alpine and we left the trail to go to Marathon and then south into Big Bend National Park. After a couple days on the east side of the park, looking across the Rio Grande about 40 feet into Mexico, we headed to the west side of the park and picked up the trail again. Coming out of the national park you’re almost immediately into Big Bend Ranch State Park. This is where the road got really extreme. At one point we passed a sign warning of 17% grades ahead. 17% grades!!
At Presidio, we and the trail turned inland again, toward Marfa, and that was really the end of the mountains as far as we could see. We followed that trail in green on the map all the rest of the way to El Paso but this was just gaps between the high points. So take the idea of this trail with a grain of salt.
Still, if you can get the bike out of the winter down to where it’s warm, at least some portions of the Texas Mountain Trail would offer a good destination. Just be ready to burn up a lot of miles between the high stuff.
Biker Quote for Today
Riding washes from the soul the dust of everyday life.
