CuRVWander

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...

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 complet...

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...

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 c...