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Wanderung 11

A Tantalizing Taste of the Texas Tropical Trail

January-February 2006

Thursday, January 12th, 2006 - Driving from Monahans Sandhills State Park to Big Bend National Park.

We both popped up at sunrise with the same thought in mind: Sunrise pictures! I took the camera first and wandered around taking pictures while Monika took a shower. Then Monika took over with the camera while I took a shower. We were both intrigued by the morning sun illuminating certain features of the sand dunes like the surface rills, footprints, and plants, but getting decent pictures of such delicate things wasn't easy. Although challenging, trying to get an artistic shot was a lot of fun and that put us in a good mood for the upcoming drive south to Big Bend National Park.


 

Our water connection had been slowly dripping all night and by morning there was a small puddle on the asphalt. We hadn't paid any attention to it, but the desert wildlife sure noticed it quickly! When we came back to our trailer from the photographic expedition, we saw a flock of quail carefully sipping the water while a glock of goldfinches waited their turn in a nearby bush. We were loath to disturb them, but we had to pack up and besides, we knew they would return to the puddle as soon as we had left.

From Monahans we turned south to Fort Stockton, where we joined U.S. 385 down to the park. The change in scenery was nothing short of astonishing. From Monahans to Fort Stockton the land appeared as flat as a pancake. What with the clear air and brilliant sunshine, we could see everything all around us from horizon to horizon, which for us Easterners was a bit unsettling. The road, for the most part, was as straight as a beeline and that combined with the unlimited visibility allowed me to see something I had never really seen before. That is looking straight down the road over the hood of the truck I could actually see the "vanishing point" where the road stripes and even the line of telephone poles on our left all came together at the horizon. Unbelievable, and seeing it felt distinctly unnatural.

From Fort Stockton to Marathon we steadily climbed up to about 4,500 feet and the landscape shifted to include some low mesas. As we neared Marathon the mesas gave way to low mountains, which became thicker and numerous as we continued south into the park. I had never realized that Big Bend National Park is really in a very mountainous area of Texas. The main mountain range in the center of the park is the Chisos Mountains, the highest of which was about 6,500 feet.

Once in the park we continued driving for over an hour to reach Rio Grande Village, a campground that was, as its name implied, right on the Rio Grande River. In fact, we put our rig in campsite #2, and the river was just south of us across the street and a hedgerow of bushes. How did we decide on that campground? As much as I would like to claim a deep, analytic process for our choice of campsites, the reality was much simpler. There are only 3 campgrounds in Big Bend that will accommodate RVs. The road to the Chisos Basin campground would only accommodate trailers 20 feet long or less, so that let it out, and Cottonwood campground at the west end of the park had pit toilets, so we chose the Rio Grande Village campground because we could get our trailer to it and it had flush toilets!

The good news about our campsite at Rio Grande Village was that it was both convenient to nature trails and unimproved roads crisscrossing the eastern section of the park and it was cheap at $5 a night for Official Old Farts, commonly known as OOFs (that is, holders of the U.S. Park Service's Golden Age Pass). The bad news was that those cheap sites had no hookups whatsoever, so we were "dry camping" in trailer-speak. Providentially we had filled our fresh water tank when we left that morning, so all we really had to do was brave out 3-4 nights of no 120 volt electricity. As hardships go, that has to rank among the least of them, particularly as we still could look forward to those flush toilets (although no showers, darn it!).

After setting up the rig we relaxed from the drive and had a leisurely dinner. Shortly before sunset, however, we bestirred ourselves and traipsed down one of the nature trails adjacent to our campground. We wanted to get a good view of the sunset over the Caballo Mountain range, and the nature trail led up a small hill with an overlook. The moon was rising over the Sierra Del Carmen which were bathed in the unique sunset glow that the Germans call "Alpenglueh". Along the way we crossed some marshland connected to the Rio Grande that had some of the healthiest looking reeds I have ever seen. After sunset we retraced our steps and settled in for the night.

Monika suggested rolling up our awning right before we turned in for the night, and boy was I glad I did that when about 2 o'clock in the morning a big windstorm hit the campground. If you imagine how it would feel to jump out of bed in your pajamas and run outside with bare feet to stand in the howling wind and try to correctly roll up a big awning that was being jerked about by each gust, you can understand why I was so relieved that we had done it earlier. Curiously enough there was no rain, so my best guess is that the wind was due to the passage of a dry but extremely strong front. In any case the trailer was rocked from side to side a bit by the gusts for the next few hours, and that made it hard to sleep.

Copyright 2006 by R. W. Holt and E. M. Holt
Prolog Map Epilog

January 06
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February 2006
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