Winter is DONE!

It was only a few days ago I was driving Cyndee to the San Angelo airport for a trip to Georgia to see the kids.  It was a five hour drive through freezing rain that deposited a good four thousand pounds of ice on Big Gulp by the time we got to the airport.  An airport which was now closed due to planes sheathed in ice in quantities far greater than what was on Big Gulp.

Cyndee got her flight rebooked for the next day and we set out to find a hotel room for the night.  The weather was a little dicey for her departure when the time came and when it was all said and done there were delays and missed connections, but she made it and had great week with the kids.

Fortunately, her return flight the following Sunday was less eventful but it was still uncomfortably cold.  During the week while she was gone, I phoned in the weather from the basin weather station each morning and I was getting overnight lows in the teens almost every day.  Visitors to the basin was at an all-time low for our shift.  Didn't even break fifty one day.  Cyndee picked the perfect week to go on her trip.

But Cyndee had no more than got back to Big Bend and somebody flipped the weather switch.  We went from running space heaters all day and just barely keeping the rig warm to running both A/C's and barely keeping the inside temperature under 80.  The orientation of our rig on its pad has the full length of the passenger side facing west south-west.  From about noon till sundown the sun hits all 37 feet full-on and the solar gain is pretty significant.  We've tried putting the awning out to throw a little shade but the wind is just too much.

The weather is not the only thing that changes quick around here.  The bluebonnets have wasted no time in taking advantage of the skip from winter to summer.  Bluebonnets prefer "disturbed" ground so nothing out in the desert, yet, but the roadsides are pretty well lined with them.

With our wet winter the long-time residents are predicting an unusual spring bloom.  The bluebonnets seem to be holding up their end, we'll wait a little while and see if the cactus and yucca come through.

Slow Day in the Office

With Cyndee and I working the visitor center on the weekend (Thu, Fri, Sat) we usually see the peak of visitor ship to the park each week.  On non-holidays we'll have a pretty steady stream of people all day long with 40-50 by noon and 90-120 by 4pm closing time.  February is the lull in the otherwise peak season.  The kids are in school and people taking vacations in this month are more likely to be visiting ski slopes than the desert.  We have days that never break 50 and our clientele of late are distinctly more,, uhmm,,, seasoned and tend to shuffle rather than walk.  But that will change soon enough.  March is Spring Break and people will arrive from all points en masse.  We'll have people lined up ten deep at the information desk all day long.

But for now, with a little time on our hands in the visitor center I had the chance to photograph what passes for a day at the office.

Cyndee has spotted a newly arriving bird to the Chisos Mountains

Time to tap the "reference library" and see if the bird can be identified.

Cyndee doing her research.  Someone is bound to ask what that bird is and they expect us to know.

I hope to work in a way to step back and take a wide shot of the visitor center full of people with Cyndee behind the desk.  If it happens it will be a post in March.

Big Bend East District Back Roads

On one of our project days we got a break in the weather and took advantage of it by checking out a vehicle and doing a back country road patrol in the eastern portion of the park.

We got off the pavement at the entrance to the Glenn Springs Road.  Like most of the dirt roads in the park, it is a narrow path strewn with multitudes of sharp-edged rocks.

Glenn Springs Road at the intersection to Pine Canyon (R).  That's Mexico far in the distance.

Just ahead from the above picture is a crease in the earth where lava once flowed.  Long after the molten rock had cooled, water flowed for eons down the same depression and cut a cross-section through the lava for folks like us to marvel at.



There are a couple miles of this formerly undulating mass of molten rock.  It is easy to envision with you mind's eye this mass of liquid rock pouring down the long draw.

Once again, a camera and its two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional world just can't cut it.  Some things you just have to be there to get the full experience.

Just a little further down Glenn Springs Road the Sierra del Carmen Mountains make an appearance.  We are getting close to the intersection to the River Road but the cliffs are even farther still, well across the Rio Grande, deep in Mexico.

Just as we get on the River Road the scenery opens up and the vegetation changes.  It has been weeks since we have seen any blooming plants but standing there, singularly, was a giant yucca with a big o'l stalk and flower.

We have become accustomed to seeing purple prickly pear cactus but today we came across another purple cactus.  This one was dense and "meaty" looking.  We are going to see if we can get one of the park botanists to help us identify this one. 

There are more species of cactus, among other things, in big Bend than anywhere else.  Anybody that knows what every one them are is a virtual walking encyclopedia.  I know of at least two here.

Meep! Meep!

I have been trying to capture a road runner image since arriving in Big Bend three months ago, with little success.  Those guys are speedy little buggers and won't hold still long enough to even point a camera their way.

But a few mornings ago, a very cold morning, we had the blind to the rear picture window raised and I was looking out across the arroyo when movement caught my eye.  It was a pair of road runners and they were definitely hunting, working their way in our direction.

With it being under 20 degrees and me in my sweat pants and slippers all I could do was grab the camera and shoot through the double-pane, tinted glass and hope for the best.  Both of them mostly stayed in the cover of brush and their markings helped them blend in well.

But today was my lucky day, one of them hopped up on a yucca stump and actually sat still for a brief moment.

Like I said before, it was cold on this morning and the road runner scrunched down, fluffed his feathers trying to warm up while the other road runner kept plying through the brush.

But shortly the slacker perked up.  Something got his/her attention.

I turned the camera in the direction of its gaze and found the other road runner, crest raised and eyes focused on something.  I got this one shot as it launched off this rock.

Turning back to the other one, I caught him just as he was leaving to catch up with his hunting partner.  They were both out of sight within seconds.

Even though I got these photos I am still going to have to keep hunting them.  With me inside I never did get to hear them do their famous meep! meep! call.  ;-)

Sunsets, finally

For those reading the blog since the beginning you know that there was a lot of lamenting about less than satisfying sunsets for the 25 years we were in Georgia.  Just too darn many trees to see a sunset like the ones we grew up seeing on the high plains of the panhandle of Texas.

We thought our time at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon would recharge our sunset battery cells but we ended up right in the middle of a forest of giant ponderosa pines that pretty much blocked the sun all day.  When we did make it out to the rim at sunset, the sky was so clear that there was no color except in the rocks of the canyon below.  Well, surely our time at Big Bend will fix that.  As it turns out, not so much for the first three months we have been here.  But that is all changed now.

Finally, atmospheric conditions have cooperated for producing some colorful sunsets, and sunrises.  The previous 24 hours were spent driving Cyndee to San Angelo to catch a flight to Atlanta for a visit with the kids.  San Angelo is not that far away but when you throw in some freezing rain, for two hundred miles, it slows you down, closes airports and makes you get a hotel room to wait it out.  But after getting her on a flight the next morning I did some grocery buying and then headed back to Big Bend.  five hours later and within minutes of my destination the underside of a ragged clump of clouds began to glow with the day's last light.  I pulled over to get the camera out of it's bag in the back seat and while outside, looking northeast, I was surprised to see sunset action there too.

The light was changing fast so I grabbed the iPhone.  The phone camera has a tough time handling low light situations but it did alright catching this scene that lasted only seconds.

Turning back to the west and now with an SLR camera:

The clouds were like inverted rivers of lava, set against a baby blue sky.

I got back in the truck and continued my last few miles toward home.  I thought that the sunset was fading but it was just the opposite.  But it had been a long 24 hours and I was not going to stop again, I just held the camera up to the windshield and started pushing the button.  Most of the shots were obscured by bug splats, muddy wiper streaks and weird tilts.  But there were a couple of good ones.  Here's one:

Even with an 18mm wide angle lens it was not near wide enough.  If I had a fish-eye lens this would have been something to see on film.  It was something to see in person.

As an added bonus we both have enjoyed a couple of sunrises on the way to work.  The colors are pretty distinct.

It was really cold, maybe that is why the color was so funky.