Great Weather

With the weather being so great it is easy to get out and enjoy Big Bend.  On a whim we struck out for a hike to a place we had been thinking about for awhile now.  Like the hike in the Santa Elena Canyon, this one was short and easy.  The Burro Mesa Pour Off is only a half mile up a canyon, walking a sandy dry wash.

Curiously, there were no critters to be seen on this day, but the geology was pretty spectacular on its own.  After a 25 mile drive from our camper in Panther Junction to the parking lot for the lower Burro Mesa we tighten our boot laces and shoulder our cameras for the walk to the pour off.

As far as mesas go, Burro Mesa is not particularly large.  It takes in a few square miles but it is dwarfed by other mesas in the Trans Pecos region.  A couple of the really big ones have become home to wind generator farms with hundreds of those giant windmills atop them.  Burro Mesa could probably accommodate no more than ten.

While its physical size may be small, Burro Mesa's geology is huge.  The cut in the canyon wall leading up to the pour off is like reading a book that spans 200 million years of history.  The layers are so distinctive that the most amateur geologist can read the layers.  The ancient sea bed is clearly visible with distinct layers lava bombs jutting out from the sandstone.  Rocks hurled into the shallow sea from violent eruptions miles away.  And finally, capping the sandstone sea bed is a thick layer lava flows, formed over millions of years by much closer volcanoes than the ones that planted lava bombs.

But the goal was to get to the pour off and in a short while we were there.  For what we had become accustomed to thinking of as small, we were a little gob-smacked by the sight of the pour off.





 

I fell like a broken record saying that the scale of this is difficult to convey with a photograph, but that is what it is.  And seeing what the water has sculpted out of the rock is also difficult to convey.  The white sandstone of the ancient sea bed is softer than the overlaying volcanic rock and it has been etched away by the elements faster.  That's pretty cool but what the water has done to the volcanic rock is what struck me.  In the photo above the dark vertical streak in the center of the frame is nearly a perfect half-pipe.  And it is not diminutive either, it is not inches wide but feet wide.  A little more than ten at the narrowest point near the bottom and more than 20 at the top.

 

This time I got Cyndee to put herself in the frame for scale.  You have to look close, but she is there.

 



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