Last Hoorah at Big Bend

We have completed our last day in the Chisos Basin Visitor Center and packing up in preparation for our trip to a return engagement at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.  But before we go there are sights to see.

Now that we are at the end of March and with the plentiful rains of October, November and the first half of December, the flowering plants have stored up enough water to put on a spring bloom.  The Torrey Yuccas were first to show and for awhile, the only thing to bloom.  But soon the creosote bush began to show their tiny yellow flowers and several of the hundred different kinds of little yellow desert flowers were carpeting the desert floor.  But now, on our last couple of days before departure, the cacti are the stars of the show.

First up, the blind prickly pear:

The blind prickly pear got its name because you can not see the spines on its paddles, but they are definitely there.

 

The flowers on the blind prickly pear are all yellow with a green stamen.

These flowers are loaded with pollen, large pollen.  This pollen is large like on a pine tree and is too big to be an allergen.

 Next up is a purple prickly pear:

At first glance this looks a lot like the blind prickly pear, except that this one has huge spines, and there is a tinge of red at the base of the flowers.

 

That tinge of red on the outside of the flower is from the brilliant red on the inside of the flower.



Hard to believe such a delicate flower comes from such a wickedly spined plant.

 The Ocotillo's that have intrigued me so since arriving at Big Bend are doing,,, something too.  They still look like dead sticks sticking up out of the ground.  But in the last couple of weeks the very tip ends have started putting on what look like little red flags.  I thought maybe it was a single, little red leaf.  As long as I kept driving by them each day at 45mph that is the way they looked.

On closer inspection, what looked like a single leaf at 45mph, was actual a clump of buds.

In our last days here at the end of March the little read buds on the end of the Ocotillio's finally opened up.  But still no green on the dead-looking stalks.

It is not all thorn-laced flowers though.  Here and there are clumps of wild flowers and these next photos are Indian Paintbrush.

The tangerine color is common.  This clump of mixed color paintbrush is a little unusual.

I have posted photos of bluebonnets before but this is a little different.  The white flower in the center of the below photo is a also a bluebonnet, but with a genetic mutation that makes it white.

 



 

White bluebonnet

 A honey locust tree near the banks of the Rio Grande was loaded with these fuzzy, yellow blooms.

Next is a plant that Cyndee and I know from our childhood.  When these showed up in the yard we were given a screwdriver and told to "go get that damned old weed dug up".  But now that we are here in Big Bend it is no longer a weed, instead it is a wild flower that bears the name Prickly Poppy.

If you have been following along with this blog you may recognize the below rainbow cactus from a post in late November.  Only then it was encased in ice from a pre-Thanksgiving winter storm that turned the whole 1,200 square miles of the park into a winter wonderland.  But I have been keeping my eye on this one, expecting a bloom and wanting to capture it.  The buds had been forming for months but the blooms, when they finally made would be brief.  Each day, as we arrived home from work, I would get out of the truck and walk behind the camper to check the progress.  When we were within a few days of leaving and nothing had developed I thought that we would miss it.  But luckily, just within a couple days of leaving tiny little blooms appeared.

They are not showy but the muted colors of the blooms against the multi-colored spines is nice.

That's it.  We are done with our volunteer assignment in Big Bend National Park.  We earned our 1000 hour badges while in this park.  We're pretty proud of this but there are volunteers we have worked with in this park that, literally, have ten times that many hours.  Some of them have been volunteering for 15 or twenty years.  I don't think we are going to get there.  I can't see us doing the stuff we have been doing as volunteers when we are 80+.

We are off to Midland-Odessa.  Big Gulp needs new steering tires, the convection oven needs repair, the satellite dish has crapped out AGAIN, we have a big load for the dry cleaner and Cyndee has to get her shopping on at Target, Michaels, and any place with the word 'mall' in it.