Monday, January 16th, 2006 - Big Bend National Park - Scenic Drive to Santa Elena Canyon.

Our main goal for the day was to see the west side of the park, so we drove around the Chisos Mountains to the Ross Maxwell Scenic Drive. Although the weather was gradually clearing, we had occasional sprinkles of rain and very curious combinations of sunlight and clouds that made the desert in general and the Chisos Mountains in particular look quite striking. At one point the Lost Mine Peak appeared to be a castle of rock perched up among the clouds, almost like something you would read about in a book of fairy tales.

The Ross Maxwell Scenic Drive led us south along the west side of the Chisos Mountains. As we neared the Chisos we could see the Casa Granda formation inside the basin through a big notch opening in the mountain wall that was called "the Window". Along the drive we also found several interesting rock formations that had been sculpted by the wind and sand over the millenia. One reminded Monika of a lion sitting guard on top of a hill, and we named it "The King of the Mountain".

Our first stop on the scenic drive was Sam Nail's ranch site. Not much is left of the ranch house except some crumbling old adobe walls, but the trees and shrubs planted by the Nails have survived rather well since the park was founded in 1944. Partly that was due to an old windmill driven water pump that was still pumping water over 60 years after the Nails had left their ranch. To me, that was impressive. After all, how many of our electronic devices will be fully functional 60 years from now? I would guess not many.

Our next stop was a walk to the Burro Mesa "pour off". The pour off is a shear cliff of dark rock that becomes a waterfall on those rare occasions when it rains hard on Burro Mesa. The rest of the time, of course, you see this fantastic cliff at least 200 feet high that drops from a notch in the top of Burro mesa down to the floor of the desert below.

Continuing on past more fascinating rock formations, we reached the Castalon store and historic site near the southern end of the drive. Some of the artifacts from the pre-park period included a horse drawn farm cart, an old steam tractor, and an old-fashioned gasoline pump. A small convenience store was housed in one of the old adobe buildings. We bought a couple of sandwiches for lunch and sat outside enjoying the sunshine and beautiful blue sky before continuing to the end of the drive.

The scenic drive ended at a trailhead for a walk into the entrance of Santa Elena canyon. We had to walk across the Terlingua Creek and endure blowing alkali sand to get to the canyon entrance, but we figured it would be worth it because Santa Elena canyon was reputed to be the most dramatic of the three Rio Grande canyons in Big Bend park. What we found when we climbed through the entrance was shear rock walls dropping 1,500 feet into the narrow ribbon of the Rio Grande, and it was simply breathtaking. We followed the trail along the U.S. side of the river until it was cut off by the intruding walls of the canyon, but we could well imagine that the rest of the canyon might be equally impressive and we would like to go back to see it someday.

To finish off the afternoon we took a dirt road directly north until we reached the west entrance to the Big Bend National Park. Outside the park lies the Texas state Big Bend park, but it seems to be managed more along the lines of a national forest where people live and work inside the park. We drove over to Study Butte to check out the river rafting companies located there, but the Rio Grande was too low for rafting and we were too incompetent to handle either a canoe or a kayak in any kind of rapids (see Wanderung 1 for our try at canoeing in the Everglades). As at least two of the rafting companies offered shuttle services, we vowed to come back with "Mutt and Jeff", our 2-person inflatable raft, and try our luck at rafting through the canyon some day. We thought we might try it just after the rainy season ends in September so that there would be enough water to float our boat, so to speak.

Eschewing rafting, at least for the moment, we turned to chewing dinner at the "Chili Pepper" in Study Butte, a Mexican restaurant painted in garish red and run by, as far as we could tell, real Mexicans. We had a bit of a language problem when I tried to find something that was "low fat" on the dinner menu, because although I thought he said my entree of shredded beef and tortilla would be pan fried it was clearly deep fat fried. Monika's entree was very pretty with a baked star-shaped tortilla shell topped with layers of guacamole, hamburger, lettuce, and tomato. She exchanged some of her entree with me so that I could try to avoid clogging my cardiac arteries again, and we relaxed and listened to the Mexican music while we had dinner.

After dinner the sun was already setting, so rather than drive on to see more of the state park we re-entered Big Bend National Park and drove back to Rio Grande Village. That we we returned to our trailer before dark and could enjoy the wonderful park scenery in the glow of the setting sun.

Back at camp, I disconnected one of our propane tanks and had it refilled at the camp store so that we would have a spare for the night. The desert air was so dry and clear that temperatures were dropping overnight to as low as 19 degrees, so I really didn't want to run out of propane for our heater! Besides being bloody uncomfortable, if the trailer became cold enough the water pipes might freeze and that could in turn cause all kinds of mischief. We were, in fact, somewhat surprised by the wide temperature swings in the desert, which required us to put on several extra layers of clothing in the morning and then gradually take them off by the late afternoon when the temperatures soared up to the 70s. The presence of clouds would moderate those swings, but when the sky was clear at night and the sun blazed down from a cloudless sky all day, the temperatures would vary by about 60 degrees, and that was definitely more than we were used to. Still, it was fun being able to run around in shorts and a T-shirt in the late afternoon rather than bundling up against the snow and cold as we would have to do back up north!