Big Bend National Park, Texas:
I got asked to go with the Chihuhuan Desert Network crew to sample some tinajas (persistent pools of water in stone basins) for eight days in early November. The trip was into an area in the extreme western portion of the park called Mesa de Anguilla. We had a pack train that carried a lot of our gear in, which made for a pretty luxurious backcountry trip, and got to hike about 25-30 miles around this really beautiful place. Here are some highlights:
Morning of our first day in Big Bend, sunrise lighting the Chisos Mountains. Wow.
This is our campsite. We didn't see anyone for six days outside of a group of border patrol agents on the first day right near the trailhead.
This is Joseph and our mules making my back feel so so much better.
This is Joseph and our mules making my back feel so so much better.
This is a view of Bruja Canyon, if you move right to left upcanyon...in the distance the mountains on the right are the Chisos Mountains about fifteen air miles away. We hiked from the middle of the image all the way out to the left.
This is looking down Bruja Canyon, in the photo above, this is the portion of the canyon that is on the right half, this is what it looks like from the rim of the canyon.
This is the way to get from the top photo to the bottom photo in Bruja Canyon. No, there are not really trails, and yes that is my co-worker in the photo...
Hiking in upper Bruja we ran across this full Nautilus fossil, which is about eight inches across and like 120 million years old.
A couple days later we hiked to a place called Tinaja Rana, this is a photo stitch of about seven photos, but it gives you a sense of how shear the limestone cliffs and how sketchy all the climbs down to check out the tinajas actually were...needless to say we didn't get into this one...
The last full day in the backcountry a really rare low front went right over us. Rare because it has not really rained in West Texas in something like three years. We didn't get much beyond slick rock that was treacherous to walk on and a beautiful smell of parched desert rain.
The storm as it rolled in...
Then we woke to the most crystalline blue sky.
Our last evening we came out of the backcountry and went to a campsite that was directly north of the Chisos Mountains where the sun setting was really that red.
Big Bend is way out there. The nearest major city is El Paso, 360+ miles away. It is in a county the size of Maryland (Brewster) and there are about 9,000 people in the entire county. The nearest town of any size is Alpine with like 6,000? You look out into Chihuahua to the south and there is nothing there either. You are way out there. It is like the Grand Canyon in its vistas but it is just so far out there. The last night we were there I could see the Crab Nebula with the naked eye, along with so so many meteors from the Leonids. There were huge ones and even the most delicate wisps of green and red light, so minor you would never see them if you weren't in Big Bend. So dark and so clear. Beautiful. And then there are the plants.
Like Hechtia texensis, in the Pineapple family. There were a few beautiful plants blooming, eight flowers in total over the entire time. It is a little dry out there. But I was reminded of how magnificent the planet is and how remarkable all these evolutionary wonders are and how much I really really like botany.
Ariocarpus fissuratus, known as living rock because it looks like a rock. The plant is three inches across and disappears under the ground when there is a drought. This is the only flower we saw of it, which always blooms in November. The flower is about 1.5 inches across. You usually step on the plant before you see it is there...
More to come...
