Camping in Big Bend

On to Stillwell Ranch RV Park, about 12 miles outside Big Bend National Park. Here we find a remote campsite, set up our tent and camp gear before the sun goes down. Wally builds a fire, he likes a fire to sit around, and I pull out turkey slices, squares of prepared dressing, rosemary and dried cranberry biscuits, and jellied cranberry sauce, and, of course, some wine in a box, for our Thanksgiving feast.  A cold night, not a restful sleep even on an air mattress—my hips objected-- and the next morning a quick drive to the Stillwell headquarters for a bathroom stop. We are not exactly roughing it since bathrooms, showers, and a small store make up the headquarters site.  On the way back to our camping spot, we see a man walking the side of the road in the camping area, with jumper cables in hand.  We give him a lift to his camp to jump his car and then back to our camp to prep for a day of hiking. Only to have the truck not crank over so now it is my turn to seek help to jump our vehicle. 

Some choice expletives by the husband.  Nothing to it but drive the 40 miles back to Marathon. Luckily the garage is open and so we buy a new battery and get it installed by a young man whose toddler, dressed in a sweat shirt with dinosaur points running up the back and over the hood is riding his little hot wheels trike around the station.  The young man has on a Dallas Cowboys t-shirt so he and husband talk about the Cowboys game that we missed while out in the park. I am always amazed at the instant camaraderie of men who follow football—wherever they are, they can talk about the game.

Finally around 1:00 we are back at Big Bend to begin the hiking. Consulting the Park guide for an easy trail, I find one off a 7-mile dirt road to “Balancing Rock.”  As advertised, it is a fairly easy hike along a dry creek bed and in between hefts of boulders, until you climb up to the balancing rock—I am getting hot, the temp has gone from 45 to 73 and I am still dressed for the cold—plus I don’t like heights, so I don’t go all the way.  A four-some of retirees were coming down the steep incline to the top, one woman very careful about her footing since she had just had a fall.  Husband said the view was nice but not anything I couldn’t already see. I got a few pictures of the boulders and left it at that.

We decided to try another hike, taking the Ross Maxwell Loop about 20 miles further. The Park is so large, that you have to drive 20-30 minutes between trails.  I think that is one of the things I like so much about Big Bend, its immensity, the sense of space and openness, the ability to see great distances, and then to go down a trail either out into the vastness or in the recessed places along dry creek beds, dry gulches.  So off we go, but not too far; our legs are tired from the previous hike and it is getting close to sundown and we want to get back to our site before it is really dark.  I think that one of the reasons the Bid Bend area, and much of West Texas and into New Mexico look so vast and open is that the vegetation is short.  This sounds simplistic, but where we live in South Texas is also flat and home to various cattle ranches, but the mesquite trees grow to 20-30 feet, and live oaks and palm trees give it a more tropical feel.  In the Big Bend area, the vegetation is about 3 feet high, cactus, grasses, sage, maguey, the wispy strands of ocotillo swaying above the rest, the occasional flower strand of yucca punctuating the skyline, but generally the view is unobstructed by vegetation, is open to the hills and mountains that give outline to the great desert basins. As we were leaving the park in the late afternoon, husband commented on the purple of the mountains to the west where the sun was setting behind them.  He sarcastically said that people who have not come west don’t know the truth of the line in the song, “purple mountains majesty,” which reminded me of my view in the rearview mirror leaving Colorado. A quick semi-shower in the cold water, enough to knock some of the dust and stink off, then to camp for another night in the open.

Next morning we break camp, and head home, stopping at the Oasis Café in Marathon for breakfast.  It is a small establishment, a two-to-three woman operation.  The woman waiting tables warned us we would have to be patient because there were other tables and I guess just one cook and one grill. She was tall, weather-beaten, front teeth capped, a single braid of brown-gray hair out the back of her baseball cap.  She had a quirky sense of humor, fit for the quirky place that served visitors and residents, that nourished flies near the dusty windows.  But we had a tasty, welcome breakfast of huevos rancheros and enchiladas with eggs that would hold us for most of the 7-hour drive home.

So, another trip—short, fast, and breathtaking.

On to Big Bend

Leaving the park, the next stop is Langtry, Texas, the site of Judge Roy Bean, law west of the Pecos. We turned in, having been raised watching television and movies that featured the judge, but everything was closed and there was not much beyond a few historical markers.  The towns along this stretch of Texas owe much of their existence to the building of the railroad that connects the lower part of the US to the west coast, the Southern Pacific transcontinental railroad. Most of these towns are dusty, ramshackle concerns, a few inhabitants and establishments, serving local ranchers and probably hunters.

I noticed that the entrances to ranches became less elaborate the further west we went. From the imposing and artful structures of other ranch entrances, once you get west of Del Rio, they are more like cattle guards with a “bump” gate that you can bump with your pickup to get through.  A few brands or metal figures of deer or javelinas, perhaps a rusty shade of red was about the extent of the decoration.  But then, the roads were dusty threads out to unseen ranches, perhaps just hunting ranches.  A few cattle munching grass, some sheep and goats just west of Del Rio, and then the sightings of livestock diminish to the random cow or steer as you go further into Big Bend territory.

We like to count the wildlife we see on our trips; memorable here besides the javelinas crossing the highway and the roadkill (deer) along the highway are the two tarantulas we saw crossing the road.  A spider has got to be big for you to see it walking across the road from the comfort of your truck.  I’m just saying . . . .

Sanderson, Texas, home of the Terrell County Hunter’s Feast, the ridges along the highway dotted with deer blinds and hunters’ camps. Driving over a rise in the road and then down, we saw some black objects in the road.  I was going to dodge them, but they turned out to be a family of javelinas.  Javelinas are pecories that resemble furry hogs, black course fur trimmed in grey around the neck, a snout for a nose.  Known for their tenacity, they are also the mascots of my university, Texas A&M--Kingsville.  These guys just stood in the middle of the road, frozen, each about four feet from the other.  Since there was no traffic, I too stopped and waited from them to come to alert and run across the road or dash back into the tall, yellow grass on the side of the road. Then Marathon, with its one or two blocks of the main street edged by vehicles, nice looking ones, of folks visiting the Gage Hotel and the few bars and eateries for Thanksgiving.  The women looked well-dressed, surely visitors from San Antonio or Austin, walking about the dusty town with drinks, wine--chardonnay most likely-- in clear plastic cups.

To Del Rio

Wally and I decided to drive out to Big Bend and camp out rather than fly to do Thanksgiving with the kids.  I went in to work on Wednesday morning—only 4 kids showed up to my Women and Gender Studies 1301 course and students in my sophomore literature sections were turning in essays electronically.  So a short work day, with hopes to get out of town around noon.  We left the house at 12:15 but it took about an hour to get out of Kingsville, what with filling up the truck with gas, going to two ATMs for cash, returning home for something forgotten, and then grabbing lunch from Arby’s—all in a cold drizzle.

Luckily, we drove out of the drizzle on the back roads south of San Antonio to Del Rio, our stop for the night.  Not much to note on this route—cattle, some long horns, oil derricks and pumps, mesquite and cactus, and some sad little towns. Hondo had signs announcing it is God’s Country, and on the strip of land between the main street and the railroad tracks, various organizations had set out their little Christmas signs, many with the note about being in God’s Country. Hondo also seems to be the site of the wild hog festival and hunt.  West of Hondo multiple signs advertise dove hunts.  So, as in much of Texas, hunting seems to be a primary activity for residents and visitors.

Made it to Del Rio around 7 pm, checked into our motel, and then consulted Yelp for a place to eat some good Mexican food, for as its name suggests, Del Rio is on the border with Mexico. We found a mom and pop restaurant, five tables and limited menu.  We went with two “Gringas,” chopped pork with onions and cilantro in a four tortilla served on Styrofoam. But oh my, it was good and the people so friendly.  The place was located on a Farm Road, just down from the prison, so it generally served locals and family.

Once we headed west out of Del Rio, the landscape began to change to look like West Texas, scrub, limestone, emerging hills or buttes, and canyons.  We went to Seminole Canyon State Park to look at the Indian pictographs.  The park is named for the Seminoles who emigrated from Florida to the West Texas Rio Grande area but they were not the ones who made to pictographs. Those were done by Pecos Indians around 4000 years ago. To view them, you have to go on a ranger-led hike, mainly to preserve the drawings.  Our group of about forty followed our guide, who took time out to tell us about the artifacts.  In the group were retirees, couples traveling together, and families.  One woman had an infant in a front pack; another family, the man an Asian with a thin beard tied together to make a beard pony tail, round glasses, and slightly protruding teeth—an image of kindness. His daughter, a girl of about 5 or 6 wore her long red coat; she kept looking for dinosaur bones. The toddler he carried on his back. At the park museum they had a metered telescope to look out over the canyon.  My husband saw her try to look through it then tell her daddy it did not work. He said it needed a quarter but all he had was a dollar bill that he tried unsuccessfully to insert it in the coin slot as way of demonstration to her.   Going up the stairs to the overhang where the paintings were I was reminded of the climb we made in 1998 at the Mesa Verde ruins. Up a steep ladder to the overhang and ruins, and a crawl through a tight space to go from one room to another.  It was particularly tight for some of the men, Wally included.  Up at the great height, where families lived and kids had run around, my fear of heights, of kids falling over the edge made me queasy. It makes you wonder about the lives that the Native people had, the dangers they faced.  But then the view, to be up high and to look out over the valley, how marvelous.  The climb at Seminole was rather tame compared to Mesa Verde, the height and views not as grand. But then the pictographs—the one with a human-like figure, arms or wings outspread as if to greet the day or visitors. The ranger explained about the paint they used, the process they must have undergone to come up with mixing deer tallow with the mineral dust and water and some plant stuff—the same stuff of soap—in order to create an oil-based paint that would stand the test of time.  The desire, the human need to create art, to tell stories is amazing. You can almost imagine the groups around a fire, telling stories, the artists painstakingly converting those tales to art, an art sanctioned and supported by the community.

Los Magueyes Tacos, Del Rio — the “Gringas” was fantastic!