Baby, It's cold outside!

As part of our daily routine in the Chisos Basin Visitor Center, we download the weather report and post it in several strategic locations inside and outside the building.  This report gives a forecast of what the weather may be over the next three days for the mountain area and the lower elevations.  They also report the river depth at several locations as well as the flow rate.  But anybody that knows Texas weather knows that a weather forecast is outdated before the ink on the paper can dry.

In the days leading up to the weekend before Thanksgiving we started noticing the forecasts predicting a cooling trend and each new day the predictions started changing to incorporate colder temps and increased chances of precipitation.  As the week went along we gradually switched from short sleeves to long sleeved uniforms, then we added fleece jackets and by Friday we had incorporated a vest under the fleece jacket.

On our way home Friday evening the temperature had noticeably dropped and clouds had started moving into the basin.  We got into our government issued Chevy HHR and climbed out of the basin and started up the series of switchbacks that peaked at the trailhead for the Lost Mine Trail.  We were now at approximately the same elevation as the clouds and the combination of moisture saturated air and cold temperatures was flocking the trees.

We stopped to get a snapshot of this ice-laden tree thinking how unique this was and that we may not get another chance to see something like this way down south on the Rio Grande.  However, we had heard war stories from the old-timers about the basin road closing at times because of ice or snow so we made a mental note to call dispatch in the morning to be sure the road was open before embarking on our ten mile commute from Panther Junction to Chisos Basin.

Arriving at home it was getting pretty cold, hovering just above freezing and precipitation that was alternating between rain and sleet.  But the ground was warm enough that there was no sign of any accumulation.  This waffling between liquid and solid continued throughout the night.  The fiberglass roof on our camper accentuated the din in a staccato fashion every time rain switched to sleet.

At 7:00 am Saturday morning we were on the phone with dispatch to get the latest on road conditions.  Everything outside our door was wet but nothing frozen.  But the pass into the basin is a couple thousand feet higher and we wanted to be sure all was well before heading out.  We got the all-clear from dispatch with note of some light frost in a couple of spots at a switchback near the top of the pass.  Good enough, we are off to work.

It is a dreary day, thick, low clouds that are expelling enough moisture to keep everything wet and one guessing whether the sun has found its way up.  Initially, our climb up the switchback leading to the peak at Lost Mine Trail was no different than the roads down in Panther Junction, but on the last three turns before summiting the pass it started changing, quickly.  The temperature dropped sharply to 27 degrees and while the road appeared to still only be wet, it was anything but.  All traction ceased to exist.  Just as we topped the pass the road became completely and thickly covered in black ice.  We were pointed down at the first switchback on the basin side and our little HHR's wheels were not turning but we were continuing our advance on a turn that there would be no way to negotiate.

The only thing to do was to let off the brakes and try to steer towards the shoulder of the road to get traction for at least two of the wheels.  Most of the time I would not consider ten inches of dirt with a 500 foot drop at inch 11 to be a shoulder.  But right now it is a better option than sliding right over the switchback with its 1500 feet of an express ride down the cliff to the basin.

Luckily the shoulder worked.  We decided to just sit tight where we were for a little while and gather our thoughts.  Shortly lights appeared in the mirror and I could see a white Ford Explorer with the distinct green stripe of a Park Ranger vehicle.  He managed to get stopped a couple hundred feet behind us, right in front of cars that had come up from the basin side and could get no further than the trailhead parking area.  As I watched, the Explorer began sliding.  It went from sitting dead-still to moving without the wheels ever turning!  And it was coming towards the HHR.

Just as suddenly as it started moving, it stopped.  I got out of the HHR and did a hand-over-hand walk down the side of the HHR and around the back where I could get my feet on the shoulder of the road and get enough traction to walk up to the Ranger's vehicle to see what was going on and if he was in radio contact with the road crew.

Cyndee got a shot of John talking to the ranger.  You can't tell from the picture but he is totally supporting himself by leaning in the window and keeping almost all weight off his feet.

I walked up the hill to just above the Explorer, stepped onto the road and skated/slid my way down to the ranger.  He was a little stressed out.  It seems that he was initially able to get the SUV stopped.  But when he put it in park and took his foot off the brake, it started to slide.  He only arrested the forward motion by putting on and holding his foot on the brake.  He could not move, he had to stay where he was and hold the brake.  But at least he was in radio contact with the road crew.  They were mobilizing with a sand truck.  We were just going to have to be patient until they got there.

With time on our hands we snapped a few pictures.  It was not safe to get out and walk around looking for the best angles and framing.  We had to be satisfied with what we could do from the comfort and warmth of the HHR.

The thin clouds made for some ghostly figures on the mountainside.

Grass near the shoulder of the road was taking on ice just as heavily as the tall trees.

Even the needles of a prickly pear cactus are like magnets for attracting ice to their surface.

A hillside directly opposite the parking area of the Lost Mine Trail.  There are two Century Plants in the frame that Cyndee found interesting.

The Century Plant up close.  It is hard to see it in this context.  It is most often associated with hot, dry deserts.

Looking out the windshield of the HHR.  Just where the road fades into the fog is the switchback, making about a 140 degree turn to the right.  Straight ahead, no guard rail, just the abyss.



In just barely an hour the amount of ice on these trees easily doubled.

And it just kept getting thicker.

Only a few minutes more and these same trees started doubling over from the weight of the ice.

In a little more than two hours the sand truck had made its way to us.  But he too stopped just at the point the road began its descent.  We waited while he and the ranger worked out what to do.

Final decision was to back up into the trail parking, turn around and back his way down to us, letting the sand spreader cover the road in advance of his approach.  He had almost expended his entire load of sand getting to the pass summit.  If we were leaving it was going to be a choice of one direction only, back to Panther Junction. Looks like we are going home instead of to work.

Several of the other drivers that had come up from the basin talked with the sand truck driver and decided to wait for him to return and sand the road all the way down into the basin so they could get back to their lodge rooms or campsites.

Once home we could see that the cold air had sunk down into the desert.  Ice was forming on all surfaces now.  It did not matter whether the surface was horizontal or vertical, it was collecting ice.

This windwork usually rotates in the gentlest of breezes.  Not today, it is frozen solid and weighing several pounds more than normal.

Looking down the little gulch toward the school from just behind our camper.



Rainbow cactus as an ice sculpture.

It only took a few minutes after getting Big Gulp home from headquarters that it was encased in ice.  By morning even our heated camper had developed a shell of ice.  Opening the door took some doing.

Okay, all this is well and good.  A unique experience to be encased in ice in a southern latitude desert, especially months ahead of when weather even similar to this is typical.  But this is exactly the weather we planned to avoid.  Come on, we took a volunteer job in the southwest desert for goodness sake.  We thought we would be managing staying cool, trying not to use the air conditioner.  Instead, we burned nearly 40 lbs of propane in just three days trying to stay warm.  If the weather doesn't straighten up and go back to normal we are going to have to rethink our winter strategy.

A walk in the desert

We got an email from our volunteer coordinator that she was arranging a guided hike through what is considered an extreme section of the park.  The day fell on what is our normally scheduled day for being in the field.  We accepted the invitation, put on our uniforms and joined eight other volunteers for a walk in the desert.

Our objective for the day was to start at the Marufo Vega trail head, which is a wide spot in the road where it crosses a dry wash, walk up the wash until it branches off to the Ore Terminal trail following an abandoned aerial bucket conveyor (think ski lift for ore) and then onto the Strawhouse trail where we would enter a narrow dry wash bordered by sandstone cliffs and its bottom lined with boulders we would have to scale.

Cyndee and I both took cameras but after getting home we realized that we had hardly taken a picture.  Our trail guide was an energetic fellow, he kept things moving at a pretty good clip and didn't allow any room for the time it takes to fiddle with a camera and set up a shot.  Then there was a good part of the time that holding a camera and walking at the same time was not an option.  There were a number of places along the trail that the camera had to go in the backpack and that feet and hands had to be used simultaneously.

But in the few shots we did get, the one below caught our taskmaster/guide.  He is the one up against the sandstone outcropping, in uniform.  He is about ten years my senior but he moved around like he was twenty years my junior.  One minute he would be in front of you on the trail and the next he would be standing on the edge of a cliff 200 feet above us, and with no visible sign for how he got there.  Then in  flash he would be back in front of the group just in time to help us find the next segment of a very poorly marked and hard to follow trail.

That's Cyndee in the red backpack.  At this point the heat is just about to put her over into her cranky phase.

About halfway through our hike we entered a narrow and shallow canyon.  Once we got in a little ways there was some good shade and we took a water break.

What we did not know was that we were going to be taking a water break directly beneath some ancient rock paintings.  It was explained that dating these paintings was very difficult but that based on the style of the painting it is believed that they are a good 3,000 years old.

The bottom-most drawings seem to represent two people holding hands with rays of sunshine or falling rain above.  No one has a clue what the diamond shape represents.

One of the cactus I had heard about in training but had yet to see was a rainbow cactus.  There were several of them along our hiking trail and I managed to grab a quick shot of one as we went by at a pretty good clip.

We made it back to the trailhead a little after noon, piled into the van, cranked up the A/C and drove the couple miles it took to get to Rio Grande Village.  Everybody bailed out and headed for the picnic tables under the ramada adjacent to the grocery store/gas station.  After eating a sandwich and guzzling about a gallon of fluids we headed over to the residence area of RGV to help christen a new washer and dryer.  No joke, there was sparkling cider and plastic wine glasses, a toast and everything.

It seems that this two machine laundry was a long time in coming.  Despite the machines having been bought and delivered to the sight four years ago, today was the first day they had been operational.  The explanation was that it was a combination of the speed of a government project and the culture of "Big Bend Time".  We are learning that a lot of things around here are always mañana.

I don't know about everybody else, but mañana we have to be back to work at the basin visitor center.

Mystery Solved

A couple posts back I relayed the story of a bear and her two cubs on the hill out behind the Chisos Basin Visitor Center.  Through the binoculars I could see one of the cubs holding something down with his front paws, biting at it and then pulling up on it with his teeth.  Occasionally he would raise his head and shake until his ears flapped so hard we could hear it down at the bottom of the hill.

The next day the bears were still on the hill and I told the story of climbers causing the momma bear some irritation.  Rangers were called in and people and bears went their separate ways.  But this encounter caused a stir in the natural resources group of the park. 

The day following the encounter a ranger from the natural resources group came to the basin and climbed Appetite Hill to do a survey of the situation.  The outcome was that the hill was declared to be free of bears.  However, it was discovered why the bears were hanging around one spot for so long and just exactly what that cub was doing.  It seems that the small cave I described previously was a giant honey pot.  Bees had built a massive hive in the cave and the bears had located it.  The cub had been holding down a honey comb and engorging on it.  Even though he had hauled it out of the cave and moved onto a boulder just down the hill, the bees had not given up trying to defend the hive.  From the shaking the cub was doing of his head there must have been quite a few of those bees getting through that thick hide.

Knocking Around

On a day off we drove out toward Persimmon Gap just to look around.  We only know this road as one we have traversed on our arrival from Fort Stockton or a trip to the grocery store in Odessa.  But today we are just knocking around to see what we can see.

The Persimmon Gap Road cuts right through the Chihuahuan Desert, generally flat with interesting geological features in the distance.  However we found one spot that looked promising and got out to see what the camera could see.

In reviewing the shots I had one that I liked that I thought would look better in black-and-white.  Here is my attempt at an 'Ansel Adams'.

Something else we saw brought home a discussion I had with a ranger.  During training, since we only were taught to do backcountry and river permits, I asked if there was someone special that would write rock climbing permits.  The reply came back that no rock climber had ever asked to climb in Big Bend.  All the rocks, it seems, are too "rotten" to hold a rope anchor or even cams.  A cliff just to the east and a little south of the Persimmon Gap entrance station had recently shed a big chunk of its vertical wall, exemplifying the description of rotten.

Much of the rock in the park is either sedimentary or volcanic, neither you would want to try technical climbing on.

Another opportunity we got was to take a portrait of Panther Junction and how it is nestled up against the base of a mountain range.

Most of the time it is difficult to do the scale of things around here justice, but not with this one.  Those tiny white dots are a visitor center, headquarters, a maintenance facility big enough to care for 1,200 sq miles of park and housing for about 200 people.  A whole town is virtually invisible against just three smaller of a dozen more peaks.

More than just a sighting

It is a beautiful day here at the Chisos Basin Visitor Center, one of only a few lately because of an unusual abundance of rain.  Looking around here in the basin you would lean towards thinking jungle rather than desert.  We were having a busy morning but during one lull in visitors it was my, (John) turn to walk this weeks interpretive program schedule over to the lodge front desk.  On the way back from the lodge I glanced up Appetite Hill to see if yesterday's bears were still around.  Bear is not the first thing I saw, rather it was a family of three - mom, dad and adult daughter scaling the side of the hill that faced the visitor center parking lot.

Dad and daughter were well ahead of mom.  It was mom that caught my eye as she was at about the half-way point and deciding that going all the way to the top was not in the cards for her today.  As I watched her crab-walk down a boulder, movement on another boulder a couple hundred feet to the left got my attention.  One quick glance and it was obvious it was not other people.  The sow bear from yesterday was still on the hill and she was none too happy about climbers being so close to the cave where she and her cubs had denned up.  Momma bear had a bead on momma people and was huffing and clomping her jaws loud enough for me to hear all the way down in the parking lot.

I called up to the lady who had now stopped and turned to wave at her family.  I hollered to her; "bear", and pointed at where it was.  I'll give her credit for not panicking but she was indecisive about what she should.  I hollered up for her to come down, now, but don't run!

As she was getting down the hill I trotted to the VC and grabbed a radio and started calling dispatch.  Cyndee grabbed the camera and started taking pictures through the window of the VC office that faced Appetite Hill.

By the time Cyndee got zeroed in to take the shot, one of the cubs had joined its mother on the boulder.  It was curious about what all the fuss was about.  And moms being moms, the human one had chosen to not immediately start her decent.  She was trying to communicate with her family that was now on the peak of Appetite Hill.

Cyndee captured the above shot just in case we needed it for identification purposes.  But later, when uploading the pictures from the camera to the laptop I enlarged one of the peak pictures and realized that Cyndee had captured the moment when daughter and dad finally understood that mom was telling them there was a bear.

"A what!!?  Where!!?"

All of this hollering between the top and bottom of the hill further "stimulated" the sow and she was now climbing in the direction of the voices at the top.  The people could not see the bear and the bear could not see the people but there was plenty of hollering and hand waving from the mom that they knew to go down on the opposite side they came up.  Just as I finished up the radio call to dispatch the folks on the peak disappeared down the backside of Appetite Hill and the lady walked into the parking lot.  The sow was almost all the way to the top but had encountered a vertical section and had started to go around the side, in the direction of the climbers.

Just about the time the law enforcement ranger (LE) arrived, some thirty minutes after making the radio call, the dad and daughter came walking into the parking lot up from the Window Trail.  They were a little wide-eyed as they recalled that getting down off the hill went without incident but they then encountered the sow and cubs on the trail.  It was a peaceful passing of the two families.

While the LE was interviewing the family the dad said that he had been coming to Big Bend for fifty years and had never seen a bear.  Well, he can't say that anymore.  Now he is going to have to tell the story of almost getting eaten by a bear in Big Bend.

Bear Sighting

One of the things we do as Visitor Center Hosts is document cougar and bear sightings.  Normally a visitor will come in from a hike in the backcountry and tell us about something they saw.  Many will even share the photographs they got.  We write up the sighting on, what else, an official government form, in triplicate of course, and turn it in to headquarters.  Unofficially we fill out certificates of sighting and present it to the person making the sighting, and a sticker for the sighting that gets put on the map hanging on the wall of the VC in the general area of the sighting.

The last cougar sighting was more than a month before we arrived at Big Bend.  Bears on the other hand are getting sighted frequently.  We were getting one sighting every two or three days at first but as the number of visitors increase with the beginning of the high season, sightings are now daily.

Most folks have a general idea of where they are when they see a bear, they usually know what trail they are on but can't pinpoint what part of the trail for the sighting record.  We usually put the sticker on the map about as far back in the woods as we can.  Today a group of folks came in pretty pumped up about seeing a bear with two cubs.  Actually they were concerned about one of the cubs.  It seems  they saw it fall out of some low branches of a tree and tumble down a bolder where it stayed and started bawling.  We asked them if they could show us on the map where they thought these bears were and the response was that they all pointed over our shoulder and out the back window of the visitor center!

They all said; "Come see!"  I grabbed the camera and followed them around to the backside of the visitor center and a few hundred feet down a trail that skirted a tee-pee shaped hill named Appetite Hill.  We don't know how it got that name, we keep asking but have not found anybody that knows.

When we got to where there was a clump of people standing and watching the sow and two cubs, the one cub had stopped making a racket and its mom was climbing back and forth between where the cub was and a shallow cave just above.

This is momma bear.  The noisy cub is behind her rear end and the other one is just up the hill in the shade of the shallow cave

This is the second cub.  Both cubs were a lot darker than mom.  Neither had been around long enough for the sun to bleach out some of the black yet.

After snapping a few pics I pulled the binoculars out of my pack to see if I could get a bead on what the noisy cub was up to.  I could see he had his front paws on something and was systematically putting his head down between his paws, biting and then pulling up.  Occasionally the cub would look up and shake his head, making his ears flap hard enough that we could hear it all the way down to where we stood. Once, the cub came out and stood on the boulder where his mother stood in the top picture.  With the binoculars I could see that his lower legs were wet and his claws were shiny from being wet with something.  Whatever it was, it was not water.  It was too viscous and had color to it.  By now a Ranger had joined us and I handed him the binoculars.  He could not make out what it was either.

We continued to get bear sightings this day and they were all coming from the hill out behind the VC.  Most folks were pretty happy about getting to see bears, some not so much.

IVS Day

A couple posts back I had some shots of a female Javelina and one of her brood.  I mentioned that they would probably make a show again as they stick to an established territory.  They did.  Well, not they but more like he.  We suspect that the male of the herd was on a little private outing.  As we were leaving early one morning we spotted him rooting around in the yard of one of the border patrol guys.

The peccary can't see or hear worth a darn, but their ability to smell is acute.  They are one of the reasons it is forbidden to leave anything outside.  All the bear-proof trash cans and recycle containers in the park aren't just for the bears.  There are a whole host of critters that can ruin your day by tearing up or making off with your stuff if it is not very securely put away.

On this same early morning we headed north toward Persimmon Gap, a 26 mile drive across the desert to the northern-most entrance station of the park.  We have been having some unusually wet and cloudy weather lately and on a good part of this morning's drive we had to idle through some pea-soup fog.  All of a sudden we broke out of the ground hugging cloud bank and were treated to a great view of the desert.



Sunrise bouncing off yucca and a distant fog bank.

And again with the tarantulas.  They are everywhere, if you come to Big Bend and don't see at least ten of them in the first half-hour then you should probably see an optometrist.

Later, we made it up to the Chisos Basin.  The clouds were still a big part of the view and they parsed the cliffs and peaks into some pretty interesting things to look at.

Meet Casa Grande.  This is a massive column of magma that never made it to the surface until after a few million years of erosion exposed it.

There is a short loop-hike near the Basin VC that takes about an hour to walk.  Some of the hike covers ground that is in a bit of a micro-climate.  Flowers that had long since faded elsewhere were still in peak bloom here.


If you click on the picture and look at it full-screen you can see some pretty cool texture in the bloom.

As we climbed up (south) in the direction of Emory Peak we turned and got a new perspective on The Window.


The Window takes on a different look from about 1,000 feet higher than the view of it at the Visitor Center.

As volunteers for the Interpretive Services of the NPS our 32 hours a week are split between 24 hours (3 days) in the Visitor Center and 8 hours doing what the park calls IVS (Interpretive Visitor Services).  On our IVS day we do not report to the desk of the Visitor Center, rather, we are to put on our uniforms and go out into the park and make ourselves available to visitors.  That is where today's pictures came from, just being out in the park.


Trial by Fire

There is nothing quite like your first day.  Your first day of school each year, your first paid vacation day, your first day on a new job, or, in our case we had our first solo day as Visitor Center Hosts in the Chisos Basin of Big Bend National Park.

We attended school for a week and received top notch training from a long line of some of the most knowledgeable people we have ever met.  Then there were two days of on-the-job training with our supervising ranger.  Once again, an inspiring level of knowledge and expertise with heaps of patience.  We were fired up and ready to go, confident that we had the tools and skill to get our visitor's questions answered and their permits written so they could embark on their Big Bend back country adventures.

We had one day off between our last day of OJT and our first solo day.  During that time we would ask each other questions as if we were visitors to see how we would do at fielding questions.  Many times we would not know the answer but from our training we knew where to look for the answer or who to call.  One thing we could not do was practice writing backcountry permits.  That one worried us the most, not because we thought we could not do it but because we did not have a good grasp of all the names of the trails, campgrounds and zones.  All those zone enter and exit possibilities over 1,200 square miles were a formidable challenge for us to assemble in our newbie brains.
 

Thursday came and it was time for us to do it for real, alone.  Our fallback guy/supervisor had deftly planned some long overdue vacation leave to begin the same day as our first day.  Whatever happened, good or bad was ours and ours alone.  Now do not misunderstand, we knew we were not doing heart transplants or something like that but we did want the people we helped to have a good experience and not get upset at us enough to start a riot or something.  That was enough pressure for us.

 

The Basin Visitor Center opens at 8:30 am.  With our anxiety about getting the registers open for the first time and logging in on the permit computer we decided to get to our station early so we would have all the time we needed to be sure everything was right.  The alarm went off at 5:15 am and by 6:30 we were ready for the day, had our lunch packed and were at headquarters checking out our government vehicle for the drive to the basin.  By 7:00 we were trying to crack the safe so we can open the registers.  By the time we finally turned the dial properly it felt like an episode of Mission Impossible.  The clock was ticking, sweat was forming on the brow, heart was beginning to pump a little harder but, success at last, now, just a little walk around the corner to the counter where we can count the money and open the register.  But wait, what’s this?

 

Through the filtered light of a sunrise that had not yet made its way into the basin we could see the white commercial-size bus sprawled across six parking spots.  A hiking club from Dallas had engaged a charter bus to drive 32 of them all night to get to the basin for a three-day weekend of backcountry camping.  Its cargo doors agape with people scurrying about like ants, picking out heavily laden backpacks.  And those ants had a trail of bodies that lead right up to the door of the visitor center.  We do not know how long they had been there but it was long enough that they were already looking anxious to get inside.   One person we learned when we went to open the door had actually written “I’m first in line” on a piece of paper and left it on the ground in front of the door.

 

Whoever wrote that note had not returned to assume their place in line by the time we unlocked the door.  But she came running when she saw the group start to compress forward as we got the deadbolts loose and the doors swung open.  Picking up her sign and frantically waiving it as she entered the visitor center, her amused hiking club mates allowed her to move to the first of the line for permits.

 

Cyndee had already sized up the situation and had made a decision on the division of duties.  She said; “John, you type faster.  You’re doing permits, I’ll do everything else.”  Marching orders received.  Let’s do this.

 

The sign lady exasperated and in a rush, started reciting a backcountry permit worksheet number.   “Uh, okay, but there are no worksheets to reference, when did you create this worksheet?”  “Yesterday, before we got on the bus to come here” was the reply.  “I’m sorry but the system resets itself every day at 6:00am, all worksheets unpermitted from the previous day are deleted.”  There was a brief moment of silence and then a groan arose from the 15 people standing in front of the counter.

 

“Okay everybody, we can get through this.  We will recreate your worksheets right here, issue your permits and get you on the trail as quickly as we can.”  We both looked at each other and held our breath, wondering how the hiking mob, I mean club, would take this.  To everybody’s credit everything proceeded in an orderly fashion, no rioting and setting cars on fire in the parking lot or anything like that.

 

Driver licenses were transcribed, itineraries were noted and alternate campsites were chosen because first choices were already occupied.  The keyboard on the El Campo computer was getting worked hard, paper had to be added to the printer and receipt tape had to be replaced on the fees register.   But in just under an hour a bus-load of campers with multi-night itineraries had permits in hand and were on their way.   Our first day was not the easing in we had hoped for but on the bright side we are no longer apprehensive about creating permits, pushing buttons on either of the registers or afraid of making a mistake.  We got very comfortable with making lots of mistakes, and fixing them.  Since we got all this out of our system in about the first two hours of our tour of duty we should be able to just relax and enjoy the next several months.  Somehow it is unlikely it will work that way.

Doing it for Real

Classroom training is over and we are in uniform at Chisos Basin getting broke-in to the rigors of assisting visitors to a national park.  Our supervisor, Ranger Rob, is going through the mechanics of operating the visitor center and demonstrating how to engage people and help them with all their questions.  We'll have the safety net of Ranger Rob being with us for a couple of days.  After that we go solo.

Both of our on the job training days went well enough, but the thought of doing all the things that have to be done without someone prompting us is causing a little bit of anxiety.

In previous posts I have included photos of our "office".  Once again our office has a great view.

The Chisos Basin Visitor Center where we work is the building to the left.  The view out our back door, the big notch in the mountain, is called The Window.

The Window view looks out to the desert more than 2,000 feet below.

 The eye of the lens makes The Window look as if it is just a few steps out our back door.  It is so not so.  The trail that takes hikers right down into the notch and standing on the edge where rainwater pours off to the desert is a three hour round-trip hike.

Other than the hawk and tarantula I have been hard pressed to capture local wildlife with the camera.  Of course a lot of that has to do with being indoors for training so much.  But on the way home, just as we were pulling into the resident section of Panther Junction something caught Cyndee's eye.  I got stopped and started reaching for the camera and got it pointed at the quarry just in time to see a female Collared Peccary (commonly referred to as Javelina) and one of her young disappearing into the brush.

The Javelina have a relatively small territory when forage is plentiful, 200 to 400 acres and heards of up to 50 will defend it from other herds.  I bet we will be seeing the rest of this family in coming days.

Boy, there are a lot of cactus here in the Big Bend.  I don't mean a whole bunch of one kind of cactus, I am talking about there are more of more kinds of cactus here than anywhere else.  But my attention keeps getting drawn to one in particular, the Ocotillo.  I grew up in the land of prickly pear cactus and yucca.  There were some small barrel cacti too but we never had anything like these Ocotillos.  They are so long and stringy looking it is amazing that can even exist in a place that has such fierce wind.  But they do, and from the looks of the throngs of them around here, they thrive.

It is hard to tell from a photograph just how tall they are so Cyndee put me in the picture to give it some scale.




Hard to tell just how far this cactus reaches to the sky.

My 6'5" frame is thicker but the cactus has me by another seven feet in height.

You can see that there is a lot of green on this cactus, evidently this is not normal for this time of year.  All the rangers keep expressing their amazement at how the Ocotillos look.  On some hikes I have come across some of them that have progressed to their normal winter condition.

The weather has become highly variable.  Swinging from hot and dry to cold and wet then hot and wet then super-foggy then crystal clear.  Rainfall is well above average for the year and a month that is normally extra-dry is shaping up to have more wet days than dry.

People that are only going to be here for a few days are not too happy about the view not being so good because of the weather but I am finding some pretty good photography opportunities.

The Window is in there somewhere

The Window from near the trail head to the Lost Mine Trail