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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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 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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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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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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Note: Lisa kindly allowed me to blog today’s adventure, so if today’s prose seems a bit different than usual then don’t say I didn’t warn you. I can assure you that Lisa will be back with tomorrow’s Adventures with Usain. 🙂 We left our sheltered site in Terlingua, waved goodbye to Big Bend, and headed…

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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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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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We tried to hike a Davis Mountain park trail, but couldn’t sign in for it as the office was closed for a meeting. We decided to drive 19 miles up the road, past the McDonald Observatory, to this trail which is owned by The Nature Conservancy as part of the Davis Mountains Preserve. This is…

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