Friday, January 05, 2007

Big Bend


A Big Bend vista - lots more where that came from


The Rio Grande's silt is so abrasive, it created the 1,500 foot deep canyon in the back ground


We succumbed to the frequent suggestions from our fellow RV travelers to visit Big Bend National Park, located where the Rio Grande River makes a…………..get ready for it………..big bend in the border between Texas and Mexico. The park is 130 miles south of Fort Stockton, which itself is about 300 miles from anywhere. We changed our plans to stay an extra day in Fort Stockton and, got an early start by car. The trip started across course grasslands, which quickly became the Chihuahua Desert, surrounded by the Glass, Santiago, and Woods Hollow Mountains. Once we entered the Park, which consists of over 800,000 acres, we were in the Chicos and Christmas Mountains. 180 miles of the big bend in the Rio Grande form the southern border of the park, resulting in a park consisting of mountain, desert and riverside terrain. Next time, we’ll make this a destination and stay longer. We did our damndest to get it all in but that would take a week.

Cameras cannot possibly capture the continuous panorama that assaults your senses every minute that you are in the Park. The vistas stretched “forever”, assisted by a cloudless, perfect day, under a beating sun. The summers get so hot here that some of the ranger stations close for the summer. January worked really well for us!! We saw grazing Texas Longhorns, wild boar (Javalina), jack rabbits and herds of mule deer (Brenda is getting very accomplished at picking the herds out of the scrub. Coupled with the marksmanship skills she exhibited to Jim, Michelle, and myself in San Antonio, she would make an excellent hunter………..we’d always have meat!!) We also saw many bird species including Roadrunners (the bird not the 1969 Chrysler product) and a few coyotes that were no so Wile E. (ie: dead at the side of the road). No bears or mountain lions but……no racing heartbeats either.

This park is for serious hikers who want to spend a week in the mountains, living out of what they can carry on their back. We did NOT join that club but, took some interesting “walks” to canyons and other features not accessible by road. We have learned that when RV’ers talk……….we listen. We would NEVER have found this place on our own.

Today (Friday) we continued across the Chihuahua Desert. This desert occupies a big chunk of northern Mexico, a large portion of west Texas and, extends as far north as Albuquerque, totaling over 140,000 sq. mi. It contains many mountain chains and lots of flat scrubland. El Paso and Las Cruces, New Mexico are both firmly anchored in the desert The “west Texas town of El Paso” of Marty Robins fame has become a west Texas city of over 500,000 inhabitants, who are spread over a vast area, divided down the middle by the Franklin Mountains. We’ll be exploring the area for the next couple of days.

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