day 10 - big bend national park, tx

After a quick oatmeal breakfast, we set off to do some trails.

We had originally planned to take a trail to an area where old ruins create a hot springs that people like to go swim in. However, presumably due to flooding, the trail was closed. So we went off to the Boquillas Canyon trail that offers views of the Rio Grande.

One thing you learn quickly out in the desert when wearing short sleeves and short pants: desert plants want to kill you. This is a nice, somewhat lanky plant, right?


But look a little closer...

Thorns. Everywhere!

Many plants like this, as well as the omnipresent cacti, make trekking through the desert kind of tough sometimes, especially when the plants grow over the trail.

This trail not only had these killer plants everywhere, but the main trail had been essentially eroded by rain. Essentially, the trail goes over a hill onto a sand dune, from which you can look into a canyon where the Rio Grande flows.


By the time we were there, the sand had all turned into mud because of the rain, creating some sticky situations:


After some muddy, reluctant crossings, we got to see this canyon.



The Rio Grande was very muddy that day because of rains the day before. In general, rainstorms over Southern Texas seem to come and pass quickly, but are incredibly violent when they are raging. After we came back from the trail (and showered to get all the mud off), we had the pleasure of being caught in a rainstorm - luckily we were in our car at the time. It was actually really cool - you almost couldn't see anything around you because the rain was so thick, and the droplets also pounded so violently on one side of our car that it got almost completely clean.
However, the desert soil drank that water up so quickly that five minutes later, it seemed as if the rain never happened.

We had lunch at the park's restaurant, and then stopped by the store and picked up a little plush javelina as a souvenir. Javelina, also known as collared peccaries, are these piglike mammals that inhabit the park along with the usual megafauna: bobcats, bears, mountain lions, deer. Although normally vegetarian and peaceful, they sometimes will attack bigger predators as a herd, and apparently once ate some camper's pet poodle. Pretty ridiculous! Anyway, we were hoping that the little plushie would give us some good luck, and that we would see one sometime during our time at the park.

The next adventure of the day was the Ross Maxwell Scenic drive, a nearly 30-mile meandering road through the Western side of the park, which led to magnificant views of several incredible rock formations as well as views of multicolored rock bands through the mountains.

The following are just tons of pictures of what we saw on the drive:





















We outran a storm that was dumping rain behind us on the mountain roads, eventually ending up near another canyon, Santa Elena, which was also by the Rio Grande. Then we found that part of the road leading to the last mile of the trail had flooded, so we turned around and decided to head back to camp.



All was well til we got here:


A tiny creek that we'd seen as a trickle of water on the way out had flooded due to the rains and turned into a ridiculous raging river that was pushing huge rocks, entire shrubs and various other types of debris onto the road and off a steep cliff. The river was about a foot deep (as far as we could tell), and had also deposited a dangerous mud slick under the flow of water. Here's a video. You can even hear the roar of the water.

Our wheels were entirely caked with mud:

So we were the first people to discover this little mess, but ultimately about 5 cars collected at this point, full of people who needed to pass. After everyone stared at it for a while, people began to wade in to ascertain the depth, and eventually started to clear rocks. Altogether we were stuck there for about an hour and a half to two hours, waiting for the creek to slow down, the water to recede, and the rocks to be cleared out of the way.


At long last we got back to our campground in the Basin, just in time to catch the sun setting over the mountains.

We started to prepare a late dinner when one of us looked over at a thicket just beyond our site. Several low, gray shapes had emerged. JAVELINA!

We had some terrible lighting so of the twenty or so frenzied shots we got of them, this was the only one that came out (there is one other, but it's a javelina butt-shot). Anyway, there were about 5 or 6 or them rooting around by the thicket. One of them came closer and stopped about 10 feet away. (Meanwhile, another car had come around, then backed up and stopped in front of them, and someone's head and arms emerged, busily snapping pictures.)

As we were the only people in that section of the campground, and because we were in the middle of cooking dinner, I was pretty sure that they had been attracted by the prospect of food. Javelina, however, can become aggressive concerning food, and more importantly when they attack, they attack in herds, swiping and biting and causing a lot of damage with their tusks. So I went to get the park ranger, but when he came by, the javelina had already disappeared.

Later that night, however, we got our skunk visitor again. This time he hung around for a little longer, circling around our picnic table, and then sniffing one of our chairs before moseying off.