CuRVWander

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 a...

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 Mount...

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...

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 feat...

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 A...