Hueco Tanks, El Paso

March 16, 2024

The Hueco Tanks is a world renown rock climbing spot made popular by rock climber Todd Skinner and John Sherman. While there, they created the V-scale system. I'm not a rock climber but it is an important system adopted by the climbing community. In the 1990s, the Hueco Tanks drew world acclaimed being featured on climbing magazines around the world. 

Today Michelle and I signed up for a tour of the petroglyphs/pictographs. We met at the office and drove to the ranch. The house was built by the Escontrias family in the late 1800s to raise cattle in the area. Our tour guide Mr. Padilla took us on the Pond trail and we hiked to site 17. This cave had layers of history. At the surface were recent people who graffitied the area. There was also people from the gold rush area who wrote their name with wagon grease. Finally there were pictographs from the Mescalero Apache Tribe. The largest petroglyphs was a 15 foot long snake, see if you can find it.

After we spent time at the cave we walked to Comanche Canyon. We had to scramble over a dam and walk towards the canyon. One thing we notice was that it was considerably cooler inside the canyon. Today was a great Texas day. It was about 67 degrees with a light breeze. The canyon was at least 10 degrees cooler. Mr. Padilla told us that this canyon was to honor girls when they reach womanhood as shown by some of the drawings on the cave. In the back of the cave was a water source which people must have used while traveling through the area. 

Our last stop was this narrow crevice area. We had to contort our bodies around rocks to get towards the back. But there was this big rock in the way so we all stopped there. Mr. Padilla told us a story of a Kiowa Raiders travelling through the area and were ambushed by Mexican Militia. They drove about 20 raiders into this cave and waited them out. Hungry, tired and thirsty the Kiowa Raiders licked water off the walls. After 9 days, the Kiowa Raiders needed to escape or starve to death. They made a run for it and managed to get out. There was one injured person who didn't have the strength to escape. The Mexicans captured and tortured him. But he didn't die. One of the ranchers was impressed as his resiliency and took him in. The rancher nursed him back to health and the man stayed alive. I think the Kiowa's name was Konate. But that is based on sources from the internet. 

After the story, we walked back to the house and said our goodbyes. This was our first real hike in Texas. We didn't see any snakes only a group of about a dozen quails.