Saturday, January 14th, 2006 - Big Bend National Park - Lost Mine Trail.

I slept fine, but when the inside temperature dropped to 40 degrees around 5 a.m. Monika was too cold to sleep the rest of the night. So the first order of business when I got up was to start the trailer's propane heating system and that warmed us up to about 50 degrees. Using the stove to cook breakfast brought the inside temperature up another 10 degrees and we were finally back in the "just bearable" range. Still, getting dressed and walking over to the campground bathrooms chilled us both thoroughly, so as we drove up to the Lost Mine trail for our day's walk we had the truck's heater on full blast to warm ourselves.

The Lost Mine Trail is only 2.2 miles long and if you just considered that you would get the impression, as we did, that it would be an easy hike for experienced walkers. But the trail starts at a relatively high 5,700 feet and trends quite steadily upward to a peak and lookout area at 6,800 feet, for a net gain of 1100 feet in those 2.2 miles. The Civilian Conservation Corps constructed the trail between 1940 and 1942, and it is really a "Cadillac" trail with many rock walls and steps along the way. The basic trail surface was typically dirt, roughly crushed rock, or bare rock with a coating of sand, so we had to constantly watch our step.

A trail like that is a good way to find out how badly you are out of shape, and I, for one, was glad that the park service had 24 labeled stops along the way where we learned about the trailside plants, the names of mountains we were viewing, and such like. I needed every one of those stops, and after climbing steadily upward for 2 hours I was huffing and puffing like a steam engine on the last stretch up to the peak. My lack of stamina may have been partly due to a coronary artery that I later found out was 95% clogged, but it's hard to tell. The absolutely magnificent scenery, however, more than made up for the exertion of the climb. Along the way we saw astonishing landscapes of mountains dropping off into valleys, strangely shaped rocks created by centuries of wind and rain erosion, and vividly colored lichens. The only thing I could compare the scenery to would be the Hurricane Ridge Trail in Olympic National Park that we had walked on Wanderung 6.

I didn't see any glaciers walking in Big Bend, of course, but I did see some of the strangest colored bands of rock cutting diagonally through the mountains. The bands were just as colorful as the deposits in the Badlands we had seen on Wanderungs 3 and 6, but what were sedimentary deposits like that doing up in that set of volcanic mountains? Did they signify ores or some other kind of contamination? Tis a puzzlement.

The wind was really howling around us, so we had lunch in a sheltered nook on the peak. The way back down was, of course, easier than the way up but also more dangerous in that our muscles were starting to get really tired and the footing going down was very treacherous. We each slid once or twice but didn't fall. Reaching the truck safely, we gratefully sank into its comfortable seats for the drive back to camp.

After resting a bit we took our bicycles over to the camp store and rewarded ourselves for a hard day's work by buying bottled drinks plus some crackers and dip for a snack. By this point the wind had died down completely and the temperatures were back up in the 60s, so we sat outside the trailer to enjoy our repast. A couple of birds that looked like the flickers back home but with orange patches on their head rather than the red we are used to, seemed curious about us. I think they were hoping for a handout or accidental contribution of human food to their diets, but instead of feeding them I tried imitating their calls. That seemed to attract them for a while but when they found out that my "bird-speak" didn't really make sense, they took off for greener pastures. There really did seem to be a lot of birds around our campground, and although I didn't know what any of them were, the birders we met seemed to be very happy people.

After our close encounter of the feathered kind, Monika cooked dinner while I finished our daily log and afterwards we read a bit before turning in for the night. Although we had battery-powered radios, the AM and FM broadcast spectra seemed to be basically completely empty in the Big Bend area.