Dodging Strong Winds in New Mexico and Texas

​LONG STORY SHORT
​The weather forces us to adjust our travel plans.

​By Kristine McGowan

We’ve endured all kinds of weather in our trailer. Triple-digit heatwaves. Bone-shaking thunderstorms. Frigid nights that froze our water gear.

But so far, nothing’s intimidated us more than wind.

I’m no stranger to wind. I grew up in Southern California’s High Desert, where 20-to-40-mph winds are about as constant as the rumble of dirt bikes. My skin still smarts from all the sand that blasted my face on family camping trips. I’m pretty sure some of it’s still embedded under my nails.

You’d think I’d be used to wind, but I gotta say: In a trailer, it’s a whole ‘nother ballgame.

As I write this, we’re hunkering down at our campsite in Big Bend National Park while 30-mph gusts rock our trailer every few minutes. We’ve pulled in our slide-out to spare the awning atop it from a potentially damaging thrashing.* And we’re about to eat dinner in bed because Outdoors RV’s manual clearly states that sitting in our slide-out’s dinette while it’s this position could damage it.

Still, things could be worse. Like they were earlier this week, when we were dealing with a lot worse.

First there was New Mexico. We were at our campsite near White Sands National Park, about to move on to our next spot, when 40-mph gusts kicked up a miles-long dust storm. We didn’t have to drive through the storm, but we still hesitated. Towing in strong winds can be dangerous. There’s no hard-and-fast rule dictating when it isn’t safe to tow, but based on what we’ve heard, hitting the road in 50-mph winds or worse is asking for trouble.**

Our trailer is heavy—thank you, Outdoors RV—but it’s aerodynamic from only one direction: the front. If a strong enough gust broadsides it, our trailer could sway into the next lane. Even worst, it could roll.

We don’t know how strong the wind must be to make that happen, but we don’t want to find out. That’s why we delayed our drive by a few hours, until the wind calmed down enough for us to feel comfortable towing. That’s also why days later, in Texas’s Guadalupe Mountains National Park, we decided to hit the road a day early because the wind was looking bad again.

And I mean bad. Our campsite sat at the mouth of a canyon, which behaved like a funnel, giving the 40-mph gusts even more punch before they barreled into us at the bottom. Our trailer rocked and groaned under this pummeling. We got almost no sleep on our last night there.

We could have stayed one more night, as we’d originally planned, but we did not want to. According to the forecast, conditions would only get worse throughout the week: sustained 35-mph winds with 45-mph gusts on the day we planned to tow, raging into 40-to-60-mph sustained winds and 80-mph gusts the following day.

In other words, if we didn’t leave soon, we’d be stuck in Guadalupe Mountains for several days.

As soon as we got a window of calm(er) wind, we jumped at it. We packed up, hitched up, and got the hell out of Dodge. And thank goodness we did: The following day—the day we’d originally planned to leave Guadalupe Mountains—I checked the conditions there. Not only was the wind awful, but it had also kicked up a dust storm, making the already-dangerous driving conditions that much worse.

Maybe we would have been fine towing through that. Or maybe we wouldn’t. But being so far from home, in these remote regions where self-rescue often is the only option, we’ve learned not to take unnecessary risk.

I guess that’s our hard-and-fast rule: If you don’t have to risk it, then don’t. ***

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* While we love the awning for keeping our slide-out’s roof nice and tidy, we also hate it for making our home more susceptible to strong winds.

** If you know a hard-and-fast rule about towing in strong winds, please share. We’d love to hear it.

*** Unless you’re uprooting your life to embark on a 1.5-year-long adventure of a lifetime. Then by all means, follow your heart, fellow risk-taker.