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.