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Wanderung 11

A Tantalizing Taste of the Texas Tropical Trail

January-February 2006

Friday, January 13th, 2006 - Big Bend National Park - Chisos Mountains.

Having lost a good part of our nightly rest, we tried to sleep in a bit in the morning, but that came abruptly to an end when punctually at 8 a.m. all the motor homes around us started up their generators. They all tended to rumble or buzz along at about the same pitch, so the net effect was like trying to sleep in the middle of a beehive. We gave up at that point and Monika fixed us a breakfast of pancakes and bacon.

I had the bright idea of trying out the truck on some of the backcountry roads in the park, so after breakfast we tried traveling north on the Old Ore Road with the thought of curling back on the Dagger Flat Auto Trail to the main park road and thus return to camp. The road was described as "unimproved", but in some sections the phrase "rutted rocky wreck" might have been more accurate. In between those bad sections we had a kind of gravelly washboard surface where I could just manage to go 10-15 miles per hour, but on the really bad sections we had to slow to a virtual crawl to ease around the rocks and over the potholes. The truck was, of course, taking a beating but I was rather having fun so I didn't notice that Monika was becoming more and more uncomfortable from being tossed around like a pea in a tin can.

We had driven about 4 miles at 7 to 12 miles per hour and had made it just past the Ernst Tinaja backcountry campground when I looked where the "road" was going and came to an abrupt stop. The next section of road was a severe downward slope that looked like nothing but potholes and stones of every size from pebbles to boulders! At the bottom of the slope we could see a white concrete cross, and I had to wonder if the cross was for folks who crashed and died on that slope. Monika convinced me to park the truck in a pull-out just above the drop off and we carefully walked down the slope to investigate the cross. It turned out that the cross was marking the grave of a local guy who died in the 1930s and I was surprised to see that people had been throwing coins on this grave. Not wanting to disregard local customs, we also contributed to the accumulating pile of coins and returned to the truck.

At this point Monika started to make a strong appeal to just turning around. Monika figured it would take another 2 and 1/2 hours to make it to Dagger Flat and that much pounding would be really bad for the truck (Monika knows how to get to me!). Besides she added, she was tired of being bounced around and her back had started hurting. I was smart enough to listen to reason, so we turned around and bounced back to the main road.

Canceling Plan A, we resorted to a Plan B that involved walking on a nature trail around an old well and then driving up to the Chisos Basin. The well was at the site of an old desert oasis marked by some large cottonwood trees, and it turns out that cottonwoods are a sign of underground water supplies. Early settlers had also installed a wind driven pump to have a dependable supply of water, and the windmill was still operating decades later!

We enjoyed the nature trail and particularly the explanations of the different kinds of cacti that we had been seeing all around us since we had entered the park. Getting a bit hungry as it was near noon, we continued with our Plan B by heading for the Chisos Mountains.

The Chisos Mountains are of volcanic origin and the road through them gave us some pretty spectacular views as we drove up and over a 6,000-foot ridge to get to a large natural basin. The road was an old Civilian Conservation Corps road from the 1930s and had several wicked 180-degree switchbacks, which I assume is why the park service recommended against taking big trailers or RVs into the basin. Despite the fact that I thought the park service's limits were quite reasonable given the nature of that road, some folks had managed to get bus-sized motor homes and larger trailers into the basin's campground.

The first thing we did at Chisos Basin was have lunch at the lodge there and then we took another walk to finish out the afternoon. I had a very tasty, but probably high fat, "Big Bend Hamburger" for lunch at the lodge restaurant. We took a table for two near a huge window wall that faced some really spectacular scenery, and that kept us more than entertained while we waited for our food and then ate lunch. To work off some of those calories we walked the 1.8-mile Basin Loop hike afterwards, and that gave us even more spectacular views of the mountains.

The ecology that high up in the mountains was totally different than the desert environment that dominates Big Bend Park at the lower elevations. Our hike passed through stands of trees, some of them evergreens that provided a welcome green relief from the dead grass, cactus, and sagebrush of the desert region. Casa Grande was particularly impressive because it jutted up from the floor of the basin somewhat like Devil's Tower juts up from the plains farther to the north. Fortunately Monika's back had recovered so that she could also enjoy the walk and we both had a nice time.

We drove back to the campground well before sunset to have dinner and while parking we scared off a pack of javalinas (Also Known As "collared peccaries") that had congregated right beside our trailer. They weren't afraid of us really, and so I had plenty of time to take some pictures and get a good look at them before they wandered off. To me they resembled nothing so much as a pocket-sized wild boar, but apparently they are not related to pigs and have a very specialized system of multiple stomachs so that they can digest the tough desert vegetation. The same set of stomachs serves quite well to digest human food, of course, and we were warned not to feed them anything so that they wouldn't become nuisances in the campground.

They couldn't come into our trailer, of course, so we retreated into it to have dinner and then work on the computers a bit before the evening Ranger program. With no 120-volt current, we were strictly limiting our use of both computers to stretch it out as far as possible. Monika just downloaded pictures onto Daddy and I wrote our daily journal and then we immediately shut down the computers.

The evening Ranger program consisted of beautiful slides of Big Bend National Park. The Ranger used the Native American myths concerning Old Man Coyote and the tricks he played during the creation of the earth, the sky, and other animals. Coyote tended to instill disorder in the process, and the slides showed the beauty of the disorder in the mountains, streambeds, and valleys of Big Bend Park. It was a very interesting synthesis of Native American legend and nature photography, but we thought it worked quite well. After the program we used a battery-powered lantern to read a bit before turning in for the night.

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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