Sunday, January 15th, 2006 - Big Bend National Park - The Rio Grande and Boquillas Canyon.

After a breakfast of cold cereal, we started off our day with a Ranger walk that left directly from our campground. "Mary K", as the Ranger was known, walked with us from the campground down to the Rio Grande and back, stopping along the way to show us pieces of the park's ecology and talk about its history. She showed us one species of what looked like a minnow that was limited to two small ponds, and the park service was actually building another pond just to be sure that this tiny fish wouldn't go extinct simply due to loss of its home habitat.

The presence of early Indian settlers in the area was attested to by some potholes in the surface of one huge boulder. Apparently the Indians had used the holes for grinding nuts and grain seeds, somewhat in the way that tribes in other areas of the southwest used flat grindstones. When we reached the banks of the Rio Grande itself, we found it to be at low ebb. In fact, the river was so low that we were told that no float trips through the canyons were currently being conducted.

Apparently, the busy season for Big Bend Park starts at Thanksgiving and continues through Christmas until March. The rainy season is typically July through September, but those months are also unbearably hot, particularly at the low elevation Rio Grande Village campground, and as a result the park is fairly empty. It sounded to us like October might be a good month to visit as the plants would still be green after the rainy season, the Rio Grande would still have water in it, and the temperatures would be a bit cooler than the summer months, but that's just a guess on our part.

After the Ranger walk we had a lunch of "Gumbob" (see Wanderung 1 for a recipe) and decided to take a bike ride in the direction of Boquillas Canyon to stretch a different set of muscles. We had hoped that the road would be flat and parts of it were, but we still encountered a few small hills and ridges, some of which were steep enough to make us get off our bikes and push a bit to reach the top. When we reached a nice overlook for the Rio Grande we called it quits and headed back to camp.

Finding that the pay showers at the camp store were quite nice, we decided to take a shower there (even though it cost $1 for 5 minutes!) rather than go through the rigmarole of opening the valves on the water heater in the trailer, filling it, lighting the propane burner, and then scrunching into our tiny shower to wash. The rest of the afternoon and evening we just sat outside the trailer, ate junk food, read trashy novels, and in general kicked back and relaxed a bit, hoping that the sunshine and clear skies would soon return so we could see the rest of the park at its best.

Our evening entertainment was two hard fought games of cribbage ("mano a wifo" so to speak). For the benefit of the "Game Boy" generation, cribbage is played with a deck of 52 playing cards and involves each player trying to reach a total of 120 points first. Although there is of course some influence of luck, the grame requires a great deal of mental skill. That makes it more interesting, but by the same token it becomes very hard to lose gracefully. Monika and I were neck-and-neck in the first game, but I won by exactly 1 point just as she was ready to sweep by me with a good hand. Actually, a lot of our games tend to be that close and are decided on subtle nuances of play that will gain a point or two. When the tide of luck is running, however, the games can be blowouts. In the second game I couldn't play a card right to save my soul whereas everything Monika did came up aces, with the net result that she shellacked me by at least 20 points. Still, it was fun to be able to entertain ourselves with something that didn't require either computers or 120-volt power until it was time to turn in for the night.