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