To get to Guadalupe from Alpine, you go through a town called Marfa. Marfa is known for being an artsy town and indeed we found several examples on a quick drive through such as Truckland:

The Brite building was built in 1931, and is a unique hybrid of Spanish Mission and Art Deco styles. It also houses several Andy Warhol artworks.





Bottles in a chain-link fence make for an interesting bit of street art:


This building is just wrong:

Presidio County Courthouse:

Down the road from Marfa is this art installation of the movie “Giant” set by the side of the road on the ranch where part of the movie was filmed:

Elizabeth Taylor:

James Dean (Giant was his last film):

There’s also Rock Hudson in the yellow convertible. The coolest part of this are the Michael Nesmith (The Monkees) tunes playing from a set of rock speakers in front of the display (and I thought I was his only fan!):

Down the road we very unexpectedly saw this in the distance:

which turned into this:

we were trying to figure out what it is but luckily the man left us a clue:

Apparently it’s a blimp that houses downward looking radar and is flown like a kite up to 15,000 feet high. It’s purpose should be obvious if you note who’s operating it 😉. UPDATE! On the way out of town we got a chance to see it deployed:

Still further down the road you come on Prada Marfa. Although it’s actually closer to Valentine and in a different county, they no doubt wanted to capitalize on the Marfa name. Still it’s pretty neat and more interesting when you see it in person sitting in the middle of nowhere:

Locks adorn the fence surrounding the exhibit. Perhaps, placing a lock gives people the feeling that they’re part of the art or maybe putting locks on fences is just the thing to do as it seems pretty popular:

Annnd still further down the road is a property across from a field of pecan trees with an outrageous collection of yard ornaments from a mariachi band with an armadillo to a pair of steel horned-toads:

Shelia wanted to model the unigrid for park #37 and how can anybody say no to those eyes?

As we gained altitude approaching the entrance to Guadalupe Mountains NP the clouds closed in and we even had a few flurries from the tail end of the storm that dumped on northern Texas the day before:

and when we got to the visitor center it was pretty clear that we’d be changing our plans for exploring the park – behind the sign and to the left is Guadalupe Peak. At 8,749′ it’s the highest point in Texas. This is the best view of it we had:

but we did get to see some frost and snow covered bushes and trees that were quite pretty: