Calm before the Storm

The week leading up to Christmas has been slow in terms of visitors to Big Bend.  It is the normal slump in visitation that is followed by a tidal wave of folks coming in for the week between Christmas and New Year.

On one of our days off Cyndee and I got up one morning and on a whim decided to take a little road trip to Alpine.  We have been wanting to see what was out that way and even though we did not have any excuse, like grocery buying, to make the trip, we did it anyway.

Alpine is 100 miles away and there are two routes to go from where we are in Panther Junction.  We decided to go out on one route and come back on the other.  Just about mid-morning we were passing through Persimmon Gap and getting our way through the Border Patrol checkpoint just south of Marathon.  Once we got to Marathon and turned to the west we were on roads that we had not traveled before.  The scenery was a little lacking and in just under an hour we were pulling into Alpine.

It was just about lunch time, church would be letting out soon and we figured we better find one of the two or three places that are open and get in before the church rush.  Alpine is split right down the middle by two one-way, two lane boulevards.  On the west bound side is Sul Ross University, perched up on a hill.  On the eastbound side is a collection of shops, art galleries and couple of diners and bakery.

But Cyndee spotted a place on one of the cross-streets and we headed over to find a place to park so we could go in to the Reata.  The sign on the wall outside said it was a place for 'cowboy cuisine'.  Sounds good to us and it must be because there is slug of people parking and getting out of their trucks and heading our way.  We went in and got seated right away.

The restaurant is an old turn-of-the-century house, our table was in what we suspect was a small bedroom.  It had its own fireplace and on this chilly day they had it going.  This was sizing up to be a right pleasant day.

I couldn't help myself, I ordered the chicken-fried steak, Cyndee got the special, a swiss and mushroom burger with in-house, hand-cut steak fries.  Then we ordered a side dish that looked too good to pass up trying; a jalapeño and bacon macaroni and cheese.  It came out in a little cast iron skillet that the whole concoction had been baked in the oven.  Oh, man was everything good.  I thought I was going to have to go out to the truck and sleep it off before continuing our exploring.

But Cyndee spied a True Value store across the street and she made a bee-line for it.  This place was amazing, it had a little bit of everything and with it being a couple days before Christmas there was a little more of everything than usual.  I think we were in there a solid two hours and still didn't see it all.

We took a couple more laps around town and drove through the campus before starting our drive back using the route through Study-Butte.  There is more to Sul Ross than I thought plus they have the Museum of the Big Ben on their campus.  With it being Christmas vacation it was all closed.  We'll give it a look the next time we go in to town.

The scenery going south out of Alpine towards Study-Butte was fantastic.  The speed limit was at least 70 mph but we never got over 60 because we were enjoying taking in the view so much.

A prominent fixture on the horizon is Santiago Peak.  It is a big volcano that stands apart from the jumble of geological structures that make up Big Bend.

Creosote Bush and Santiago Peak

Most of the space between Alpine and Big Bend is wide open desert dotted with occasional peaks of ancient volcanos.  But in-between those occasional peaks is a lot of open space.

Despite it being vast tracts of desert there is plentiful wildlife.  On this drive Cyndee and I spotted two bobcats.  One was just the briefest of glimpses but the other was a good, long look.  He had come out from the brush right alongside the road and was standing there in a pose that would make you think that a taxidermist had put him there.  It is strange, after growing up on the breaks of the Canadian River and seeing bobcat signs, tracks and scat, all over the place, not once had either of us seen a live one.  But now here was one within feet of us.  I was standing on the brake of Big Gulp trying to get his nine thousand pounds of bulk brought to a stop so we could take a picture.  The bobcat continued to hold his pose while I got stopped, he stayed frozen while I dug my camera out of the backpack, he didn't twitch as I got the door open, but as soon as I got the camera up to my face, whoosh! he was gone back into the brush in a flash.  Not so much as a blurry snapshot to show for our sighting.

But the little bob-tailed cat was not the only wildlife for this day.  As we approached Santiago Peak we noticed that the desert was looking more like ranch land than it was desert and as we were looking at a closer view of Santiago Peak we saw what we thought were some paint horses in the distance.

But something didn't look quite right.  Their heads were not right for horses.  They sure had the body and neck to be a horse but those heads absolutely were not horse.  I pulled over and Cyndee got out the binoculars while I got the zoom lens trained in on our quarry.

A little magnification helped a lot.  It was instantly clear that we were looking at an exotic game animal.  In this case it was an Oryx from North Africa.

Check out the rack on the one with his head down.  Those things have to be at least 3 feet long.  Sorry about the fuzzy image, these guys were about a mile away.  To do this picture required lots of enlarging and copious cropping.

 

We were closing in on Study-Butte now, the sun was getting low and it will be a close race to see who gets home first, us or the sun.  But first we wanted to see a place we had been to in the dark but not seen in the day time.  Every Thursday night the volunteers have pizza night together at Long Draw Pizza in Terlingua.

 

                            



 

 

It is named after the place it resides, Long Draw.  A huge dry wash with vertical cliffs, and let me tell you that it is seriously dark out here when the sun goes down.  The headlights barely do any good, it is as if they are shining into a bag of black felt.  We were pretty sure this was a hole-in-the-wall place but wanted to get a look at it while it was still daylight.

Okay, it is pretty much what we expected it to look like but it does not take away from the really great hand-tossed pizzas they make to order.  And by the way, that tiny little white sign on the door; it says "No Cell Phones".  It is just a hand-printed piece of paper and almost faded to the point it is unreadable, but people are quick to let you know that it is best to leave your phone in the car.  The owner, as we have discovered about many people around here, is a serious techno-phobe.  She reacts strongly (some say violently) at seeing a or hearing a cell phone being used in her pizza parlor.

The Maverick Station park entrance is only a few miles from Study-Butte.  We pulled in just as the ranger on duty was striking the colors for the day and closing the station.  She said that there was a distinct uptick in visitors today and that it looked like the Christmas rush was beginning.

We pressed on to cover our last 26 miles to get home but got stopped as the Chisos Mountains came into view.  The sun was setting and really intensifying the color in places where the color is usually pretty flat.  I couldn't pass up the opportunity to get some shots Emory Peak and the pour-off of The Window.

We have been pretty busy of late and have not done any decorating for Christmas.  While at the True Value store in Alpine, Cyndee scored a little thing that is perfect for our limited space and added virtually no weight.

!

It is a little battery operated Christmas Tree with LED lights.  It is so thin it fits between the glass and the pleated shade of our rear picture window.

We'll be working Christmas day and each day after, through Saturday.  I probably won't post again until our days off beginning on Sunday.

Merry Christmas!

A Day in the Field

The Park Service at Big Bend has given us a work schedule that puts us in the Chisos Basin Visitor Center three days a week and out in the field one day.  Our day in the field can be an endless variety of things to do.  We can spend the whole day in the Big Bend Natural History Association's library reading up on things that will help us out when working in the VC, working with another group on a project they have going or be somewhere in the park making contact with visitors.  Making visitor contact can include hiking trails and on this day we decided to take one of the more popular hikes in the basin, The Window Trail.  The Window is a big notch in the bowl of the basin, it is the drainage for the entire basin, not that there is that much to drain now days but I guess after a few million years in a formerly much wetter climate you can cut a pretty deep gouge through some pretty serious rock.

It is a 5.6 mile round trip that takes 4 hours on average to complete and with the great weather today we should have no problem getting down to the slick rock pour-off and back in time for a late lunch.

Along the way we came across a century plant.  Contrary to their name, they do not bloom once every hundred years.  Depending on conditions, this yucca may go for five to thirty years before sending out its stalk, bloom and then die.  Up until arriving in Big Bend I had only seen these yucca in books or nature shows on TV.  Like the ocotillo I wrote about in a previous post, I have been surprised about just how big these plants are.  This one along the trail was days, maybe hours away from falling over and becoming nourishment for future generations of basin vegetation.

The bottom of the stalk was as big around as my thigh and the top bloom was about 15 feet up.

Ahead lies the Window.  The view of the Window appears to be unchanged for a good part of the hike.  You have to get well down into the trail before it starts looking different.

Cyndee takes the lead as we start the 980 foot drop to the bottom of The Window.  Clouds have moved in but the temperature is still rising.

As we got to within the last quarter mile of the trail a spring was bubbling with ample water from all the recent weeks of wet weather.  This water was winding its way through the now narrow solid rock flow channel.  The trail and the water cross each other frequently and sometimes are one and the same. 



The trail crews did some impressive, and creative trail building.  Some of the steps are chiseled right out of the solid rock-bed, coupled with masonry out of native stones.

Cyndee admires the trail construction and spring-fed ribbon of water.

Some of this work would have taken some serious tools to get the job done.  There is no way to get down in here with power equipment, everything used to construct this trail would have had to been carried in on someone's back somewhere back in the 1930's.

It was only a couple hundred yards downstream of the spring and the water returned to an underground flow.  If we are going to see water going over the pour-off we are going to have to get down here during or just after a significant rain.

But that is okay, we are discovering that all the rock beneath our feet have been polished to a fine finish.  These rocks are the epitome of the name 'slick-rock'.

It was interesting to start out several miles away and watch the gigantic V-shaped notch gradually choke down to a gap no wider than your reach.

Those rocks I am standing on are not wet, just extremely polished, and slick.
Just over the edge behind me it is a couple hundred feet down.

Cyndee would only go so close to the edge.  She used the zoom lens to take the portrait of me standing in the notch.

Coming out, climbing back up that 980 feet we gave up on the way out, we got some new perspective on a familiar sight.  Casa Grande is right outside the window wall of the Basin VC.  We are used to having to look almost straight up to take in this massive column of ancient, frozen magma.  Today we see it sitting regally atop our destination.

We arrived back at the basin shortly before 2pm, plenty in time to enjoy the salad bar at the lodge dining room.  But first we enjoyed a fairly routine visit by some park residents.  This is home to Carmen Mountain White Tail Deer.  They only live here and it would seem that they are a creature of habit.  For awhile now we have observed them trotting across the basin parking lot, crossing in front of the wall of windows then going behind the VC and browsing at the base of Appetite Hill, just about lunch time.

Did I mention in earlier posts that the weather changes a lot around here?  And quickly?  Well, it does.  We have been whipsawing back and forth between glorious and 'are you kidding me?' And this week was no different.  Short sleeves and hike one day, layers of clothing and wishing for a fireplace the next.  But this cold snap was a little different than usual, it was an inversion so up in the basin it was a cold but sunny and dry day.  Clouds were heavy but they were all below us.

Island in the sky.

 As we drove down from the basin there was an incredibly dense layer of clouds that was a couple hundred feet thick.  Then, as we got under the cloud cover we were treated to a scene ice-flocked junipers, sage brush, juniper and cedar.

This flocking of vegetation was also a layer of about two or three hundred feet.  As we continued down the basin road on our trek home to Panther Junction the ice was prominent across a very well defined range of elevation.

This inversion made for a picturesque drive home but it is also stirring up the atmosphere at the lower elevations.  Wind is the name of the game at the lower elevations.  Sustained winds of 40mph with gusts to 55mph.  Living in a sticks and bricks I would not have given this kind of wind much thought, but living in an RV those gusts feel like they are scooting you across your sight.  You get up the next morning half expecting to be moved into your neighbors spot.

Knockin' Around

With it being unusually cold for such a long time and with the failure of the electric heater for the hot water tank we have been chewing up the propane.  It is time for a trip down to the Rio Grande Village where we can get our tank refilled.

It's a good 20 miles to the village and you skirt around the northeast base of the Chisos Mountains.  After our little deep-freeze week the north face is sporting a striped coat of white.

While out and about we also decided to check out what are known around here as 'food rocks'.  One of these formations is called cinnamon buns.  They are not giant structures, actually they are only slightly larger than the real thing.  If you know where to go, you can just walk right up to these things.

Pretty cool.  We are learning that there are all kinds of interesting formations around old volcanos.  There is another one, called 'puffy biscuits' that we are going to look for next.  We have heard that it takes a fairly deep hike into the desert t osee those.

The park also has a fossil bone exhibit that we dropped by.  It is more of a picnic ground than an exhibit.  Plans are in place and money has been appropriated for the construction of a structure with top-notch exhibits.  In fact, some of the exhibits, a bronze mega-crocodile head and bronze T-rex skull have already been delivered to the park. But while looking around we ran across some tracks of more contemporary residents.

There was a whole slew of these coyote tracks in the mud alongside what is normally a very dry wash.  I followed them into the desert for a ways, there were at least three individuals and they were meandering around near the exhibit but walking a straight line crossing the desert.

The propane tank is out behind the RGV store in a chain-link fence enclosure.  There is a guy that is at work on certain days and can only do propane fills in about a two hour window.  You have to hit it just right if you want to get your tank filled.  We did and I went around back with him to lift the tank out of the truck and put it on scale.

As I was setting the tank down he asked me if I would like to meet his friend, as he pointed to a spot on the ground just outside the enclosure.  The camouflage was so good that it took a second before I could see the coil.  But there lay a rattlesnake, not moving a muscle save an infrequent flick of the tongue.

This guy got caught out in the open when the big chill hit.  He was not particularly large, probably not more than a couple or three feet long and pretty much frozen stiff.  Not so much as a twitch out of him as I caught a couple of images with the iPhone.

A fresh tank of propane and it was time to head back to Panther Junction.  Since the speed limit is a maximum of 45mph anywhere in the park, it is not a quick trip.  But it worked out okay for seeing a sunset over the Chisos from a side of the range that we have never been at this time of day before.

Visit to our Neighbor

Just to the west of Big Bend National Park is Big Bend Ranch State Park.  It is a little more than a third the size of the national park at 500 sq mi.  There is one paved road in the whole park, it is FM 170 and it parallels the Rio Grande as it courses through 40 miles of the park between Lajitas and Presidio, TX.  The interior of the park is a hiker and trail bike paradise (in the winter).

On one of our days off we packed a lunch and headed west to visit our neighbor.  Arriving in Lajitas at the Barton Warnock Visitor Center we were both happy to see that the State Park system had done a fine job in building a visitor center that was a worthy representation of the heritage of this remote desert.  I have not been bashful about my disappointment in the architecture in the national park, the state park got it right.

A well thought out structure using clay tiles for the porch roof, rough-hewn timbers, stucco and limestone.

The rear of the visitor center as seen from atop a display at the back of the property.

The interpretive displays in the visitor center are top notch.  They cover archeological history, geology, human history, and the plants and animals currently inhabiting the park.  Touring the park by car leaves you no decisions to make.  There is just one paved road, it is most definitely not meant for wide loads and there is no room for your attention to wander or sight see if you are the driver.  It takes concentration to not cross the center line or fall off the shoulderless edge of the narrow road.

We drove about 25 miles of the 40 miles the road takes through the state park.  This would be a great road to do on a motorcycle.  There are whoop-dee-doos, hills and winding stretches, fun to drive in Big Gulp but would be a blast on a bike.  There were also several turn-outs.  One in particular was the Teepee picnic tables.  It was several hours past lunch time but this is where we finally got to stop and eat a bite.

There were three widely-spaced picnic tables and each even had a grill if you knew to plan ahead and bring charcoal.  Another nice feature is that these tables are situated right next to the river.

U.S. on the right, Mexico on the left.  The river is running just as green here as it is 60 miles downstream on the far end of Big Bend NP.



The river flows out of a canyon just upstream of the teepees.  The road leaves the side of the river at this point and starts climbing over a pass.

Look close just below and to the right of center.  That is a sliver of the road as it starts a 16% grade up the side of the cliff and over the pass.

The road that we had been following as it hugged the river now went its own way.  The river had cut a canyon through volcanic rock millions of years ago, the Texas Dept of Transportation had to go over the top of it.

Part way up the pass and looking back towards Lajitas

At the crest of the pass looking at where the road begins a 16% downgrade, and northwest towards Presidio.

Not quite as much rain in these parts.  The desert looks like a desert.

From the top of the pass there is a good view of the canyon and river.

Lajitas is just over the horizon.

Presidio is just over the other horizon.

The day was getting long in the tooth so we reversed course at the top of the pass and started working our way back home, 60 miles away at speeds of 25 to 45 mph.  It is going to be awhile before we get there.

About 40 miles away from Panther Junction we rounded a corner and were treated with a "wow" view.  We had never seen the Chisos Mountains from this side or from this far away.  It did not seem like 40 miles but it was.

The high point to the right of center is Emory Peak, highest point in the park.  The big, almost flat-top block to the left of center is Casa Grande.  The bottom of the basin, and our visitor center is at the base of it.

At first I was not too sure about this place, but after being here for a little more than a month now, it is starting to grow on me.