Like many road-trippers, we had once gone right past Guadalupe’s half-hidden wonders on our way back from Carlsbad Caverns, its sister national park 40 miles up the road in New Mexico. (The caverns are part of the same ancient reef that the exposed Guads are made of.)

It was already late in the day and we hadn’t allotted the recommended six to eight hours to reach Guadalupe Peak, though we did stop to snap a few photos of El Capitan, the thousand-foot-tall limestone prow that catches everyone’s attention from the highway. As we drove on, I scrolled through geotagged posts on Instagram and began to brood over the fact that I had never mugged for the camera with an arm slung around the metal pyramid atop the famed zenith. It seemed a shameful omission on my native-Texan C.V. And so, I took the bait. A few months later, we headed back so we could say we’d been there, climbed that.

With more than 80 miles of trails and a number of way-off-the-grid backcountry campgrounds, Guadalupe has a reputation for being a hard-core hiker’s paradise. (The ultra hard-core can now tackle the hundred-mile Guadalupe Ridge Trail, which starts in the park and ends just past Carlsbad Caverns; you’ll need to hire an outfitter to drop water caches along the route.) If I were to boil down my own philosophy on ideal outdoor recreation, à la Michael Pollan, it would be, “Long walks. Not too difficult. Mostly shaded.” So, a few phrases jumped out as I skimmed a brochure promoting the park’s day hikes: “Extremely rocky.” “Avoid in midday heat.” “No trail the last ¼ mile.” “Avoid during high winds.” “Involves some scrambling.” There was a chance that I might not be the park’s target audience.

At least with three full days ahead of us, we had time to ease our way in before tackling Guadalupe Peak. We poked around a few of the park’s Old West structures, like the rock ruins of the Pinery Station, once a stopover on the Butterfield Overland Mail Route, and the rugged Frijole Ranch compound. Its 1876 stone house and red schoolhouse are now a cultural museum that traces the stories of the region’s early inhabitants, from the Mescalero Apaches, whose mescal cooking pits and petroglyphs have been found nearby, to the hardy (and yes, legume-loving) homesteaders who ingeniously rigged all kinds of handmade contraptions to pump water and keep the gas lamps lit.

Behind Frijole, we picked up a trail that leads to two of the six springs that keep this part of the park golf-course green. The only obstacles along the short, wheelchair-accessible paved path to Manzanita Spring, a reed-lined pond that used to be the local swimming hole, were copious ringtail droppings, which looked a little too similar to the cherry pie Larabars I had stashed in my pack. The route got a little rockier as we continued past well-named Nipple Hill until the desert petered out, overtaken by a woodland of maples and oaks, fiery-limbed Texas madrones and maidenhair ferns. “Please protect this fragile moist oasis,” read a sign near where Smith Spring bubbles up out of the limestone escarpment, “by remaining in the ‘people section.’”

That there is a public “people section” is a testament to the vision of a couple of conservation-minded landowners who fell for this alluringly inhospitable part of the world. Both J.C. Hunter, a local county judge, and Wallace Pratt, who was the first geologist on the Humble Oil Company payroll, bought up sizable spreads that were eventually donated or sold to the National Park Service, paving the way for Guadalupe Mountains National Park to be established in 1972.

In those early days, it was hotly debated whether the new park should build any roads or facilities to accommodate visitors, or if, as per the Wilderness Act of 1964, it should be left “untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” Some boosters worried that without any amenities, only a small segment of the population would be sprightly enough to traverse Guadalupe’s undomesticated backcountry. “Go in while you’re young,” was one wilderness advocate’s rejoinder.