Current Location: Van Horn, TX N 31 02.248', W 104 51.407' elev 4134 ft.

Yesterday I spent the day in beautiful Big Bend National Park in southwestern Texas. The park is very remote, it was a 134 mile drive south from Fort Stockton on US 385 to the park. The road to the park was specked with lots of roadkill, and the requisite buzzards and crows feasting on the roadkill, but very few cars.



The long road in

I had the windows down for most of the drive in, because there was some cloud cover, and at the higher elevation, the temperature was about 70 degrees F, and just beautiful driving weather. About halfway to the park, I got my first glimpse of roadrunners (Hot-Roddicus Supersonicus). Roadrunners are a bit smaller than expected, about the size of pigeons, but damn, they are fast. They run along looking for lizards and insects on the ground. I also saw some larger lizards running across the road, and some type of rodent too, probably chipmunks. A short while after this, I started to see bigger dips in the road as I was coming down into lower elevations, and the dips on the road all had flood gauges, big markers on the side with marks up to 5 feet to show a driver how flooded the dip might be during a flash flood. And then I ran into one of the craziest rain storms I have seen in my life. Rain on the edge of the desert is very odd, it was powerful, yet short. I was sure my car was simply going to blow off the road, but it only lasted about 2 minutes.



The rainstorm

Shortly after the rain, just south of the town of Marathon, TX, I came to a border patrol station, but southbound lanes did not have to stop. Marathon, TX had the highest gas prices I have yet seen on the trip, $2.52 for regular octane.

When you first get to the park it is as though you are driving to Jabba's Palace. Driving down the park road, I was simply thinking to myself "oh my god". I have run out of superlatives to describe beauty, so just know, it was one of the most beautiful places I have seen, and it ranks second on my list of national parks, behind only Denali National Park. I started going nuts with photos, and took 277 shots for the day, 120 of which I posted on the web. By the way, I take all my photos in super hi-res and shrink them down for the web, so if there are any you would like to see at a higher resolution, just email me and I can see what I can do.

For wildlife, I saw several deer in the Chisos Mountains part of the park, however, I wasn't fast enough with the camera to get any of them. I even saw a little baby bambi deer, very cute!



Second photo is a self portrait for the doubters to prove I'm actually on this trip :)



More Mountains

The park is desolate, I saw maybe 12 to 15 other cars the whole day, in a park the size of Rhode Island. The park has lots of high altitude and low altitude spots, and has a lot of exciting switchbacks to drive on. I had some empty water bottles in my car, and they would buckle and make noise as I would drive into the lower altitudes.



I came upon a spot in the park named Mule Ears Peak.

The park follows a long swath of the Rio Grande river, and you can see Mexico on the other side, only the river is in a huge canyon, named Santa Elena Canyon. You can see the canyon from 16 miles away from the Sotol Vista Overlook (N 29 12.885', W 103 22.634', elev 4261 ft.), and it looks tiny, but as you get there, you just drive up to this huge wall, three or four hundred feet into the air, and it is sheer, and astoundingly amazing.





Any Mexican that can get into the US from here should be granted citizenship and given a job in Special Forces

So it was completely beautiful. Aside from the deer, I saw many great desert plants, as well as some eagles, jackrabbits and more roadrunners. At one point I almost ran over a really long, red snake.



Cactus



Wildlife

At the end of the day, I left the park via a 14 mile dirt road> I thought the road was a loop back to the main park road, and would save me some time, but it was very bumpy and took close to an hour to get through in my car, lots of rocks, crossing dry river beds. Something that should have been done in a 4 wheel drive vehicle, although it was appropriate, driving through all that dust, that Dust in the Wind by Kansas came over the radio. At one point I saw a huge animal in front of me, which I though must have been a coyote (Road-Runnerus Digestus), but when I got a closer look, I saw it was the largest jackrabbit I had ever seen, bigger than a lot of dogs. I was amazed.

Once back out on the main park road, I met up with Texas 118, which I took north to Study Butte, TX, on the western edge of the park and then west on Texas 170 to Lajitas, TX. Just after the town of Lajitas, I met back up with the Rio Grande and entered Big Bend Ranch State Park. It is here where I saw the most amazing site of the day, two wild horses on the Mexican side of the river.



Wild horses and sunset. There are actually two horses in the photo, but you can only clearly see the tail of the second, the rest is hidden by the plants

So it was an amazing day. I exited Big Bend Ranch State Park on the western end in the town of Presidio, but it was dark at this time. I proceeded north on US 67, and met the border patrol checkpoint at about 9:30 pm, just south of the town of Marfa, TX. The border patrol only stopped me very briefly, long enough to check out my license plate and talk to me to make sure I didn't have a Mexican accent. They didn't check my trunk, or even look in my vehicle with a flashlight before waving me through. In Marfa, I met up with US 90, which I took north and west to Van Horn, TX on I-10. Today I am headed to Carlsbad Caverns National Park, about 120 miles north of Van Horn in New Mexico (and I gain an hour when I pas sinto Mountain Time!). It doesn't appear that I will end up in El Paso, as I plan to head north to Roswell, NM after Carlsbad, and then west through New Mexico.