Lisa
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A Visit to Marfa
Marfa, Texas, a short drive away from Ft. Davis, owes its name to the wife of a train engineer who was infatuated with The Brothers Karamazov novel by Dostoyevsky and its historical buildings to money invested for an oil boom that never happened. This town of 1600 people is now considered an art meca, a…
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Ft. Davis and the Skyline and CCC trails
It’s laundry day! Yay, and there is a nice little laundry in Ft. Davis so we have a short drive to get there. Besides Tony having to drive back to camp to get Dishy (we have no cell service in town), the washing goes well. A couple of people ask me about Dishy which was…
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Hike to the Chimneys
The chimney hike was our pick for the day. This being the busy season for the park, we felt lucky to get a parking spot here. We got a late start with the daylight savings time change and sleeping in. The chimneys are fun to climb up and around. There are several animal trails to…
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Mule Ears and Ghost Town Cemetery
Mule Ear Spring Trail is our afternoon hike after the Santa Elena Canyon. This is a desert walk through broken rock and dry washes. Near the spring, there is a large circle enclosed by a rock wall that is the remains of a ranch corral. The spring is hidden in a small oasis of green…
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Santa Elena Canyon
The drive through Big Bend is interesting because there are so many different geological features to see. In 1937 Walter Prescott Webb (historian from Texas) described it as “Perhaps order once prevailed there, but some mighty force wrecked the place, shook it down, turned it over, blew it up, and set it afire.” We saw…
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Terlingua Ghost Town
We loaded up the bikes and drove off to do a couple of hikes as we moved to the west side of Big Bend. The first stop was the Dugout Wells where the working windmill still pumps a trickle of water out into the desert oasis that it creates. This is the site of a…
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The Hubris of Youth Encounter in Big Bend National Park
As we were nearing the Chisos Basin parking lot from the Basin Loop Trail, two young men were making a lot of noise coming up the trail. It turns out they were loaded down with sleeping bags and full-sized bed pillows with their school backpacks and were pulling a cooler on wheels. Ah, the hubris…
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Chisos Basin, Big Bend National Park
The Hot Springs was a nice hike, but we decided to fill our afternoon with another hike and we needed to charge the van batteries with a drive. Chisos Basin is in the middle of the park and at 5400 feet elevation. Vehicles longer than 24 feet are not recommended as there are some sharp…
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Hot Springs in the Rio Grand River
Upon arriving at the first parking lot for the hike to the hot springs in Big Bend National Park, it was clear that Usain and the cats would need to stay here. The road becomes two one-way narrow passages that we walked while smaller vehicles could drive down. The dragonfly pictured above was on the…
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Boquillas Canyon
After coming back into the US, we decided to go hike the Boquillas Canyon Trail that our guide had pointed out from the village. He gave us a little history of the towers to transport ore buckets in the area back when Boquillas, the village was a mining town in the 1960s. We saw several…