Holiday Retreat

The Christmas and New Year's holiday in Big Bend was a busy time.  We worked extra days, filling in for our visitor center co-host while he went to New Mexico to visit family and helping our supervising ranger on a day he was scheduled to be alone in the VC.

It was busy but surprisingly we never achieved a visitor count to the Basin Visitor Center that equaled the 498 the day after Thanksgiving.  We mostly stayed in the 300's with three and four generations of families coming in to warm up, buy souvenirs or pick out a book on the Big Bend and Trans Pecos.  We have learned that families, lots and lots of them, have a tradition of gathering together in Big Bend for the holiday week every year for decades.  When talking to these folks it was obvious that they loved this place and knew it's physical attributes as well as its history.  We picked up a lot of new information about places in the park and history that we had not yet come across in our three months of working and living in the park.

For the most part the weather cooperated to make for a beautiful pilgrimage for everyone.  And we did not let the pretty days get by us either.  When we got a break from our volunteering duties we headed out into the park to go someplace we had not been and to photograph familiar places without a veil of smog.

There is an un-marked road almost directly across from the Sam Nail Ranch exhibit.  This road was constructed for access by maintenance people to get to one of the water supply tanks located at Oak Springs.  But it is also access to the trailhead for the Oak Springs Trail, that climbs from the desert floor up to the bottom of the Window Trail. 

Maintenance road to Oak Springs.  It is narrow, rocky, rough and lined with paint removing vegetation.

But there is more to this road than a water storage tank and Oak Spring trail head.  There is another trailhead that is no longer on any currently published map.  The Cattail Falls trail can also be found at the end of this sharp-rock road.  It used to be charted, and frequent visitors from the past remember it well but the trail is no longer promoted and has been taken off maps.  The trail leads up to the base of Cattail Falls where the cascading water terminates in a pool and is surrounded by lush vegetation.  Many of the plants in this little oasis in the desert are very rare, some only exist in this spot.  A plant that thrives in this environment is poison ivy.  One day a few years ago someone (a visitor to the park) took it upon themselves to do everyone a favor and eradicate the poisonous vine.  Using an herbicide they indiscriminately broadcast the plant poison, mildly affecting the poison ivy but devastating the more tender and rare plants.  While no one is discouraged from going to Cattail Falls that wants to, it is no longer promoted and cartographers have been asked to remove it from their charts.

It may not be promoted or charted anymore, but the trail is still marked and maintained.
The Window (looking into the basin) is the backdrop to this photo.

After about 20 minutes of bone-jarring bouncing down the dirt road at a pace not much faster than a walk, you reach a wide spot that passes for someplace to park.  There, just a few paces away is the trailhead marker that gets you on your way to your destination of choice.

Back up in those craggy cliff faces in the photo above is Cattail Falls.  And the funky, blue color is real.  Light, filtered through whatever each day's pollution is, is highly variable.  When shooting across distances, one day you may get grey, the next, red and the next, blue.  I'm not sure exactly what color I should see at a distance.  Up close, one can see almost the full spectrum of color in the fine layers of sedimentary rock or the massive piles and monoliths of frozen magma that never made it through the crust of the earth to become lava.  Geologists call this kind of rock pluton.

We got a late start getting out for the day so there are not enough hours of daylight left to hike to the falls and back.  Instead we will jar ourselves back out to the paved road and go a little further west on the Ross Maxwell Scenic Drive to the Sotol Vista Overlook.  Relative to other days since our arrival the air is pretty clear and we wanted to see if there was something to see with the smog thinned out.

Turns out there was.  We could see for tens of miles and the exit of Santa Elena Canyon came into view more than 15 miles away.

Santa Elena Canyon from Sotol Vista Overlook.

That little notch in the distant ridge is where the Rio Grande exits Santa Elena Canyon.  It does not look like it from here, but those cliffs are 1,500 feet tall and as vertical as they can be.

I put my 300mm zoom lens to its maximum and managed to pull the canyon in a little closer.

If you did not know the size of this canyon or its grandeur from up close, this photo would leave you less than impressed.  I'll see if we can do it justice with some closer shots on another day.  But while on the overlook we also looked northwest, towards Study-Butte/Terlingua, about 25 miles away and due north towards Marathon, 90 miles away.

From Sotol Vista Overlook looking northwest towards Study-Butte.

From Sotol Vista Overlook looking north towards Marathon, 90 miles away.

That is a lot of desert and low mountains in the two above photos and that is the way it looks for 360 degrees.  It is pretty pleasant out here on a winters day at 60 degrees.  I have no desire to see it in the summer at 115.