Emory Backpack, December 7th-December 10th, 2022
My original plan for what to do during December 2022 was to head down to the Catskills and hike the 3500fters there, and in retrospect that probably would have been the best use of my time, but I had the opportunity to join a few friends on a school backpacking trip they were doing in West Texas, which included climbing Guadalupe and Emory, the tallest and most prominent peaks in the state respectively. I judged that that, along with the much nicer weather type in West Texas as opposed to the Catskills during December, would make it a better use of my time. So I got ready, packed my stuff, and undertook the last plane trip I hope to do for quite a long time, as I got the whole round of the penis-detection-machine and getting sir'd the whole time even though I was traveling under my new legal name. But hey, you can't count on an inherently racist, xenophobic organization like the TSA to magically not be queerphobic, but what do you know?
Anyhow, the first leg of our trip was doing an Outer Mountain Loop in Big Bend National Park, a backpacking trip we would do over the course of three nights. Personally, I think this could have been reasonably done in two nights, but a number of the people on our trip were new to backpacking, so we took it slower. The first day I was able to summit Emory and got one of the best views, and one of the better pictures, that I've gotten during my entire time doing these projects. After a night cooking with a campfire since we forgot to get the right fuel canisters for our stove, we headed down from Boot Canyon down to Dodson trail, where we spent the night at significantly lower elevation. The next day we traveled to just past the Homer Wilson Ranch and camped a third night right on Blue Creek Trail. The final day we hiked back to Chisos, and took a much needed rest day. Turned out that my latent eating disorder gave me enough trouble even with the easier pace we were going at, so I took the opportunity to eat and recover
We were then going to do a few day hikes around Guadalupe National Park, but once we got there, a winter storm started up and since none of us had our winter equipment with us, I was unable to climb the highest peak of the state. We redeployed over to El Paso for a few days hoping the warmer weather would help us, and we almost went up North Franklin Mountain, but I was the only one who ultimately had interest in such a trip, so we killed time and then headed back. Overall the trip was great if incomplete, and my only real gripe with it a year and a half after the fact is that, while my friends were pretty great as always, I got a lot of transmisogynistic vibes from a lot of the other people there. Nothing too bad, and I was still able to be friendly with all of them, but you can tell when you're not welcome somewhere, and I am neither the first nor the last transfemme to discover that "women and nonbinary spaces" are often not accepting of transfemmes. This was neither the first nor the last time I would discover this in my life, but it is something to reflect on
