If I haven’t mentioned it before, driving through western Texas is simply yucky. It is a very boring landscape, few resting places and so much crazy construction. Sometimes Dave had to basically drive 3/4 on the road and then the shoulder. Which is a soft shoulder and all while pulling ‘Lil TG! Insane. And scary. But, we did finally make it to Lajitas, Texas which is a golf resort that had a decently nice RV park. And a bakery, pizzeria and an extremely expensive restaurant. We tried the pizza but were not up for paying for $50 dinners. They also had a pool, laundry and really great, free showers. So not too bad. The only other issue was that it was a little more than an hour from Big Bend NP so we did a lot of driving- both to the park and then all around the park. Since it was quite warm when we got there, it was nice to see (feel?) the AC in Tut was working great.
Big Bend NP is quite a park. It is comparable in size with Yellowstone or the Grand Tetons and has very distinctive environments. And lots of Permian period fossils! When you enter through the west gate, it is essentially west Texas…. creosote bushes and lots of sand. And wind. Our first day in the area it got to 99F! With gusts approaching 30 mph. You could feel the moisture leaving your body so it is easy to understand why the plants and landscape are so arid. We basically drove around all the southern and western areas of the park and did a couple shorter hikes. But so hot!
Then weirdly, the following day was sooooo cold! The high finally got up to 50F and again extremely windy. We visited the Chisos canyon and saw some white tailed deer along a trail that overlooked a beautiful, treed box canyon. So different than the sandy desert even though it still qualifies as a desert for lack of rainfall. But if there is any moisture, it falls on the Chisos mountain and funnels down the canyon. We also went to an area where settlers had worked and that overlooked the Rio Grande. It was amazing to see this border between 2 nations is a 10-20 foot wide shallow river anyone could walk across. Makes you wonder again, the purpose behind all the money spent on 45’s damn wall when it is impossible to keep people from crossing the river in these regions. While on a hike, we watched a guy on a mule come across the river and meet a woman in our parking lot. He brought her sopapillas and empanadas. She simply ordered by text and the guy came across on the mule, delivered them and went back across. Then later we saw a guy on horseback bring tamales to a guy ON THE TRAIL ITSELF! Back and forth just like that. And there are these little trail side “stores” where the children from a Mexican school leave crafts and little trinkets for the Americans to buy. They also have to be crossing the river.
On a side note – I would highly recommend anyone thinking of coming to Big Bend keep track of school holidays. Different districts in Texas take different weeks of March off. Same with New Mexico. There were times on some of these trails that we felt as crowded as we were in Zion last fall. And the kids are either EXTREMELY well behaved (with a military parent or two it seemed) or holy moley…crazy children running all over the rocks and running down the trails etc. Phew…
Anyway…back to the park. While driving around we did see a desert cottontail and a really cool roadrunner. He even jumped up to catch a bug, but he did not say “beep, beep!” But he ran under brush before Dave could get a picture. And there was a very cool fossil exhibit sort of out in nowhere north of Panther visitor center. We hiked along the Rio Grande again, and I was able to reach “Mexican” plants with my hiking stick. It really isn’t a grand river at all. All the hiking plus it was pretty fatiguing driving everywhere plus, the hour or more to the RV park and we decided to take a break. We chose to go to a cool looking visitor’s center for Big Bend Ranch state park.
That turned out to be one of the very best visitor’s centers we have been to. It had so much information about this region and the animals and plants. I kept wishing my friend Laura R could see it, or maybe John B from Barrett. And certainly all those Science Olympiad kids who did earth science all those years. And then we took off to see this park. WHAT A WASTE OF FIVE HOURS! First off, the main road is just the freeway that rolls along the Rio Grande. It was OK, and we did finally see wild javelina run across the road. The area is pretty poor and rural. Across the river (Mexican side) there were some nice looking farms but our side was wild, creosote brush mostly. Then when we thought to turn into the middle of the park away from the river, it was unpaved roads that you need high clearance 4wheel drives to traverse. It was again a lot of driving for not much scenery. I also think we were tired of seeing the west Texas desert. So, we took ourselves to a roadside converted garage for some real BBQ. It was a good way to end our time in Texas. They had live music that was mostly older country (think Waylon Jennings) with a very pumped up crowd. We don’t know where all the people came from because this region is very low population. We are looking forward to getting back to New Mexico soon.
