Painting in the Guadalupe Mountains it helps to understand what you are looking at. These peaks are not the snow-capped granite peaks of the Rockies, or the rolling, folds of colliding plates like the Appalachians. The Guadalupe Mountains found on the border between West Texas and Southeastern New Mexico are what is left of an ancient barrier reef, buried by sediment when the sea dried up, then gradually exposed over time by the high winds that blast from the plains in every direction. It’s a devil to get there and you better pack a lunch if you go. But if you like this sort of landscape and aren’t content to just admire it on a calendar, you should go. I made the trip and took my paint box.
A lonely national park preserves much of the Guadalupe Mountains on the Texas side of the line. On the New Mexico side, a national forest and Carlsbad Caverns have spared the rest of the area from substantial development. Even the oil and gas industries have kept 
their distance. Most people speed as fast as they can through the desolate area on the highway connecting El Paso and Carlsbad. You can’t blame them. The climate there is rough, arid and windy, cold at night and hot in the day. There is no fuel to be had, no Starbucks and you won’t see a cellphone tower for 100 miles. But slow down, get off the highway and into the mountains and you will be gobsmacked by the rugged beauty of the canyons and hillsides.
I hiked into the best known canyon in the park, McKittrick, at 9:30 in the morning and set up in the shade along the dry creek facing a ridge. The sun bombarded the peaks and cast deep shadows in the folds of rock and the talus beneath them sloping down to the canyon 
floor. The sky was brilliant blue, not a cloud to be seen. An astonishing variety of greens – all of them studded with spines, thorns or other armaments – grew everywhere. Stubby stands 
of yellow snakeweed blooms popped up low to the ground. The madrone trees, with delicate pale bark, and juniper bushes, bloomed with two hues of small red berries. Blue, yellow and red – the primary colors. From these three shades all other hues are derived they say. It doesn’t work quite that easily when you mix your paints, though.
I carried a bag of paint tubes, chose nine colors for my palette, three or four more than a skilled plein air painter needs. There was white, hansa yellow, yellow ochre, burnt umber, cadmium red, madder lake red, cyan blue, ultramarine blue and sap green. The sky was cyan, straight out the tube with a bit of white. The greens on the slopes took more work. They had be dulled down with pinks, again and again and again, 
to simulate the dry, desaturated colors of desert plants. The morning shadows moved across the terrain impossibly fast. Once I fixed their location in place on the canvas, they had moved on, leaving me to improvise from memory the deep, shadowy hues that were the dominant feature 10 minutes before. As I sat there working, I heard a dozen different birds, none of which I had ever heard before, and not one human voice for two hours. Mornings don’t come much better than that.
