Big Bend and the Carlsbad Caverns

Apologies for being so late with this post.  We have had a long string of bad wi-fi connections and computer problems.  We hope that those are over now, and we will get up to date quickly. 

We traveled next to the Big Bend National Park, an enormous park along the Rio Grande River in a very remote section of west Texas.  West Texas is desert country, thinly inhabited.  The weather there has been very dry for the past year, and fire danger was at an all time high throughout the region.  While we were there, fires raged all over nearby territory, though there were none in the park itself.  There were fires on the Mexico side of the Rio Grande totaling a million acres or more, and others on the US side with many tens of thousands.  The sky was almost always brown with smoke and sometimes even the nearby mountains could barely be seen.  We kept a careful eye on fire alerts the whole time we were in the area.

Our first stop was just outside the northern entrance of the park, at the Stilwell RV Park, Store and Museum.  This spot was very remote and had only a few RV sites, but we enjoyed it thoroughly.  The family had set up a museum honoring one of their ancestors, Hallie Stilwell, a pioneer woman who worked the ranch in that area for many years before the park was even formed.  There were some wonderful stories about her and the ranch, and we learned about the schemes that her family used to keep the ranch from being included in the park when it was set up.    We took a ride down to the end of the ranch road, which terminated at the Mexican border near the ghost town of La Linda.  This town used to supply minerals to US industries, but was undercut by the Chinese and the border is now closed and the town fallen into ruins.

We began  our exploration of the park with a trip to the Rio Grande Valley campground right on the border.  Daytime temperatures were very hot, usually over 100 degrees, so we had a tendency to lay low during the heat of the day.  But the campground had a lot to recommend it, and there were sites available in the full-service part of the park, so we decided to move down to that area and stay for a few days to explore the neighborhood.  The bird migrations were in full swing, and we looked for as many opportunities as we could to join others for birding walks, or get tips on where to see good birds.  One of our favorite sightings was a little elf owl, the smallest owl in the world, which lived in the top of a local telephone pole.  Every evening the local birders would gather and wait for sunset and dark, when the little fellow would pop his head out of his hole, sing for awhile, and then fly off into the night for some hunting, to be replaced by his mate for the evening. A rare treat. 

Ivy did some painting in the area as well.  She found a good spot at an overlook, but found that she was constantly interrupted, either by groups of motorcycle enthusiasts, who were cruising the park, or by the local Mexican craftsmen, who would sneak across the border to sell their wares.  It seems that the Big Bend Park used to allow all kinds of travel back and forth across the border.  Tourists went to Mexico for lunch and some crafts, and Mexicans came over to hawk their wares.  That all changed with 9/11 and the border has been closed all the way to Presidio, over a hundred miles away.  But the craftsmen sneak over anyway and leave their wares along the trails with little bottles for you to put your money in.  But they have to flee if they see the park rangers coming.  Along here the Rio Grande is about ankle deep, so there's not much of a barrier to crossing.  

After a few days we moved to the other side of the park, to a town called Terlingua.  This is a bit of a hippie town, with a very different feel than the rest of Texas.  It looks and feels a lot like New Mexico, right up to the silver and turquoise jewelry and the adobe houses. It is very laid back, with a colorful ghost town and cemetery and some pleasant restaurants and shops.  But it continued very hot, with daytime temperatures over 100, so everyone was a bit lethargic in the middle of the day.  There was a lovely old trading post at the top of the hill with a large shaded front porch, where everyone gathered in the late afternoon to re-hydrate and gossip. 

The ghost town in Terlingua was well worth seeing also.  Some of the buildings have been rehabbed and are still inhabited, but many are falling down.  There is a large and ancient cemetery, dating from the time when the town thrived with mining activities, now all gone.  We had a nice dinner in a well-known restaurant there that is built half underground and keeps cool with earth based design.  An interesting place.

We visited the west side of the Big Bend Park from here, traveling up into the Chisos Mountains, where there is a lodge and some good birding, and also traveling down to the western part of the park by the river, site of the famous Santa Elena gorge, a dramatic canyon cut by the river through the huge bluffs.  We hiked a bit there, but were finally turned back by the heat.  There was a lot of climbing to the trail, and no water, so we made a strategic retreat and held a picnic down by the river in the Cottonwood camping area.  There we saw our first gray hawk, a small tropical hawk that only comes a few miles into the US from down south.  It is a gorgeous little creature and we got lots of fun out of seeing it.

While we were here, we took a canoe trip down the Rio Grande River.  We went with a guide company and several other folks and spent a half day on the river.  The river was quite low, and even with shallow draft canoes we kept dragging along the bottom and sometime needed help from the guides negotiating some of the shallow spots.  It was a gorgeous day, and one of the highlights was a picnic on a river sandbar set  up by our guides. After the trip, we proceeded to the town of Presidio on the border, and looked in on an old fort there with an excellent historical exhibit covering the era of Pancho Villa and its impact on the border areas. 

From Terlingua, we headed north to the Carlsbad National Park area.  We stopped off in the town of Pecos, where we visited the West of the Pecos Museum, a great resource that has been put together with loving care by the local history buffs.  There's plenty of history there and stories of the old west.  And quite by chance we found an excellent tamale factory nearby where we ordered a half dozen of their finest.  The tamales were too spicy for Ivy, but yours truly dined off them for several days.

We stayed in a small RV park in White's City, right outside the national park boundaries.  We spent a lot more time in the caverns than we had originally thought we would, because we found them so dramatic and fascinating.  They were quite different from the previous caves we had toured in other states during earlier parts of the trip.  Formed by sulfuric acid created by water combining with the local oil and gas in the ground, these caverns are orders of magnitude larger and more dramatic that we had seen in the past.  We signed up for several tours and also came by in the evening for the bat flights out of the caves at dusk.

There was a lovely park nearby that was part of the caverns national park land, but separate from it and some miles away.  It was a great place for mid-day picnics, as the weather continued quite hot, and the middle of the day required some nice shady spot with lots of cottonwoods, shade and a small stream running by it.  We used this site several times, and Ivy also found it a good source of painting material. 

From here, we headed north across the New Mexico border, headed for the Taos and Santa Fe areas and hoping for a bit milder weather at their higher altitudes.