Hittin' the High Spots

With the holidays done we are getting back into the routine of normal National Park operations.  On our day that we do what they call IVS (interpretive visitor services), which for us is Wednesdays, we do a project of our own choice.  It may be a trail patrol, river patrol, backcountry road patrol, doing inventory at the visitor center or even washing and changing the oil in the vehicle we drive.  Anything, really. 

On this Wednesday, the first after New Years, we did a combination working in the Visitor Center in the morning and heading out to hit the high point of a number of places on the Ross Maxwell Scenic Drive.  This road is 30 miles of desert, mesas and river country with lots of hiking opportunities.  We are going to hit the high spots by getting to as many of the trail heads as possible and walk in as far as time allows.

First stop; Homer Wilson Ranch.  This is not the actual ranch headquarters, which was located near cattail falls.  Rather it is one of the few fully intact structures left from the turn of the century settlers, a bunk house and foreman's quarters for the Homer Wilson Ranch.

About a half mile off the Ross Maxwell, down on Blue Creek sits a bunk house and foreman shack.

It is a few hundred yards walk down a groomed trail to the elevation of the creek and then about a half mile across a dry wash, creosote bush and rocks, lots of rocks.  Back in the late eighteen hundreds when the settlers came in, it looked a lot different.  There was virtually no creosote bush, just lots of grass, mesquite trees and cottonwoods.  All that grass is what drew them here, it looked mighty attractive for building herds of beef cattle.  What they didn't realize was that it took decades for a clump of grass to grow in this environment.  It did not take long for not so many cattle to virtually eradicate the native grass and for creosote bush to happily fill the void.



Homer Wilson Ranch bunkhouse. 

 The bunkhouse was built with materials gathered locally and hand-made adobe brick.  Everything is still in pretty good shape, there are no furnishings, doors and windows have been removed but everything else is as it was.

Not everything out here was scratched together from available resources.  We have read about a number of places that were mail order houses, right out of the Sears catalogue.

Considering this building has been sitting empty for around eighty years it is in remarkably good shape.  But outside is a little different, time and the elements have taken their toll.  The yard thick with creosote bush and the foreman's shack is barely visible through overgrown shrubs and desert-stunted trees.

That's Cyndee barely visible above the creosote, between the bunkhouse and foreman's shack.

Just a few steps across what was the yard of the bunkhouse is what is left of the several corrals that once held the riding stock for the cowboys that ranged the multi-thousand acre ranch.

It was common for the corrals to be round.  The one above is all there except for its gate, even the center stake is in good shape.  A couple of other corrals nearby were barely discernable, just a little barbed wire and a section or two of a few posts.

Looking up Blue Creek Canyon from Homer Wilson Ranch.  Last leg of the multi-day Outer Mountain Loop Trail

The Homer Wilson Ranch is more than just an exhibit.  It is also a major landmark for hikers that are doing a multi-day hike called The Outer Mountain Loop Trail.  There is a large bear box alongside the trail that leads from the ranch up to the road.  It is common practice for hikers to come out and cache water and food in this box where they usually pick it up on their second night or third day of their hike.  To complete this hike in three days the hikers have to average 10 miles a day through some very rugged terrain with way more ascending and descending than anyone ever expects from a desert hike.  With a recommendation that each person drink a gallon of water a day while doing this hike, they are highly motivated to cache water wherever they can rather than carry that much over the ankle-rolling, rock covered trails.  When we checked the cache on this day there were more than twenty one-gallon jugs and several two-gallon (who carries those?) jugs.  Some were dated for use as far back as December 28th, never retrieved by those who left them because they abandoned the hike after only one day and one night, falling 10 or more miles short of getting to this cache.  Our backcountry visitor assist volunteers will mark these jugs and if they are not gone in the next few days they will remove and dispose them.

Next stop; Mule Ears.  This is a prominent geological feature that can be seen at long distances from several places in the park.  Like a lot of the geological features in Big Bend NP and the Trans Pecos region, Mule Ears is made up of an intrusion.  An intrusion is magma that worked its way up through the crust of the earth and got close, but never broke through the surface to become a volcano.  After eons of wind and water the softer sedimentary rock was eroded away, leaving prominences that modern man is so apt to naming.

From a distance it is sure easy to see how it got its name, sitting behind a knoll, just ears and the crown of a head visible.  I think the original explorers and settlers being out here, so far away from anything for lengthy stretches of isolation had lots of time for their minds to find ways to occupy themselves.

Up close, the equine similarities fade a little.  It becomes more of a puzzle for a geologist to solve.  Between the two intrusions is a thin ridge of rock sticking up.  In one of the roadside exhibits about this rock the story board is titled "Fins of Fire".  These were long, sometimes miles long cracks in the earths crust that magma was obliged to squeeze into.  Whether exposed by erosion or still buried the geologists call these structures dykes.  And for good reason, these former cracks commonly ringed mountains and now, filled with impervious rock create formidable barriers to the flow of subsurface water. 

As these dykes undulate across the terrain they have low spots and sometimes breaks.  It is at these points that springs might be found.  For a desert, it is amazing how many springs there are in the park.  Most do not flow reliably but a few days after a rain there is water bubbling and trickling out of little holes all over the place.

On to Sotol Overlook.  An important thing to know about Sotol Overlook is that it has one of the very few bathrooms in the park.  With that taken care of we took advantage of some pretty clear air and got some more shots of Santa Elena Canyon.

This is some of the clearest air we have had since arriving almost three months ago.  After taking in the sights for a few minutes and visiting with some guys that were doing the same while on a cross-country motorcycle ride, we headed out for our next stop; Burro Mesa Pour Off.

Burro Mesa is not a particularly large as mesas of the west go.  But it is large enough that it can catch water of sufficient quantity to cut a wash that found its way to the edge of the mesa to form a pour off. 

There is a side road off the Ross Maxwell that approaches the bottom of the mesa, and the pour off.  You can drive to within a mile of the feature and is one of several that is recommended for families with small children or people not looking for a particularly challenging hike.  But it does not make it any less interesting.

If you walk all the way in you are rewarded with the cool shade of a narrow canyon and a beautiful sight looking up to the top of the mesa. 

I'll bet this is a sight to see when the pour off is running, aka flash flood.  But I can't see a place I would want to be standing when that is happening.

Gotta get a move on.  Santa Elena Canyon, at the end of Ross Maxwell Scenic Drive is still miles away and the sun is starting to recede.

We have been to Santa Elena several times, ranging from mid-day to late afternoon.  In no case was the light worth a darn for taking pictures.  While the air is the clearest it has ever been on one of our visits there is still little color and features appear flatter than they are.  I guess that we are going to have to get over here one day to see what a sunrise will do for the lens.

This canyon is way more beautiful, and bigger than my photographs can relay.  On the right side of the photo above, where the rock flairs out to meet the river there is a trail that climbs up and into the canyon so that people can experience what it is like to be in the canyon without taking a two-day float trip.

I swung the camera around and maximized the zoom of my lens which brought the people, crawling like ants on the canyon wall, into view.  Although I could not include the full height of the 1,500 foot canyon wall and the people on it at the same time, it does give one a small sense of the scale of this place.

There is a bend in the Rio Grande where Terlingua Creek empties into it.  This bend lets me give the appearance that the above photo was taken from the middle of the river.

We want to see a Ranger program that is going to be given by our supervisor, Ranger Rob so we are out of here.  Just one stop before we go, Cottonwood Campground.

About eight miles back in the direction we came is one of the park's posts, called Castalon.  At Castalon is a developed campground built in a cottonwood grove bordering the Rio Grande.  This is my favorite campground in the park.  It is in a scenic setting with irrigated grass sites shaded by very old, large cottonwood trees.  A great place to camp in the winter but I sure wouldn't want to be here in the heat of the summer.  There are no hook-ups for RVs and as grand as those cottonwoods are there is no way they can provide enough shade to keep the sun from frying your brain like an egg.  This entire post closes for the summer, it is just not a hospitable place to be until after fall harvest time.

We've got 40 miles to cover to get back in time for the program at the Chisos Basin Lodge.  Ranger Rob is going to give a presentation on "Did You Know?", and with his character it promises to be entertaining.

Ranger Rob warms up the gathering crowd (more people behind me) with his lasso.

Cyndee and Ranger Rob's wife enjoy the program as the sun sets on the patio of the lodge dining hall.

This was a full day in the life of a fulltimer.  We covered a lot of ground and while only hitting the high spots, we saw a lot.  We also got ideas about what we would want to do on some of our future IVS days.