Merry Christmas!

 

We are there, look closely. It is where we spent Christmas.

 

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Total connection with nature in Big Bend National Park

We left the camping spot we had enjoyed here for six nights and went to the backcountry spot where we would spend the next six nights at Big Bend National Park. We stopped along the way for another permit, for gas, for ice, and for a dozen eggs.

It is a beautiful day, in the mid-60s, and sunny. We spent the afternoon just sitting and soaking it all in--the beauty, the solitude, the quiet. So much planning and effort to get this Zen feeling of being one with nature. We sat for hours, just looking at the hills and bluffs; Vicky knitting and me drinking the Italian red wine that I love so much and that she surprised me with when we got here--hiding it in the camper (no easy feat) just for this occasion of arriving to the site where we would spend Christmas. She's a keeper all right--it was a good decision yesterday to give her time to untangle her hair.

Our only conversations as we were sitting and feasting with all of our senses on this beautiful desert involved where we might go and explore tomorrow and discussions, few, reflecting on the sounds of nature--flies, grasshoppers, wind through the mesquite.

Tomorrow we hike. To see even more of this wilderness.

 

The next day it snowed.

And the wind blew at 20-30 mph, the temperature dropped to below freezing, and instead of hiking we huddled inside our camper. I thought I was back in central Illinois.

That is the other side of having a total connection with nature--it is an unpredictable beast at times. Something to marvel at and something to always be wary of.

Here is a photo 24 hours after the first one on this blog entry that showed us sitting and enjoying the mountains and sunshine:

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Mystery of the sawed off telephone poles in Big Bend National Park

Theories?

For yesterday's hike we wanted to see if we could create a loop by going east from our campground, and then getting around some hills, then working our way north, and then west back to our site.

R

We failed.

We could not find a safe route. The hike is displayed by the bubble line. With the other lines showing some of our other hikes in the area. As can be seen, we went east, fooled around, and then retraced our steps back.

 

But we did see some beautiful canyons.

And then, high on a mesa, an old telephone pole.

Vicky thought she might get reception, but to no avail.

We explored the area, and found many other telephone poles, in a straight line as expected, except they had all been sawed off, about three feet from the ground. We could also look into the canyon and see downed telephone poles.

So why are all of them sawed off, but this one left standing?

Today, we set off in a different direction to see if we could create a loop trail. Our trail today is displayed in yellow. We set off in a north direction for a mile or so, and then we headed south.

We got to our goal, which was a spot below yesterday's telephone pole.

See our pole at the top of the hill?

Vicky is standing next to one of the downed poles we found on the canyon floor.

To make a loop hike we had to find a way out of the canyon and up to the mesa. Yesterday we had tried several potential spots, but could not find a safe route down. Today we wanted a safe route up, and which is a somewhat easier task. It is easier and safer to ascend a steep hill than to descend it.

Finally, after scouring the area, we found a small wash that did not seem too steep. So, up we went, fighting the sticker bushes all of the way.

Here is Vicky hopelessly entangled in a bush. I was worried for awhile that if she couldn't get free that I was going to have to leave her.

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We made it up the wash to the mesa, and created a terrific loop hike.

But our mystery remains. Why cut down the poles and leave everything there? It doesn't seem that it was done as part of the cleanup when the area became a park. Otherwise why leave the wires and valuable wood?

Our theory is that someone got angry and cut them down so nobody else could use them. And then left one as a nanner nanner. Or as a something else that isn't appropriate to put into a family blog.

Have a better theory?

 

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1500 in three years

Two big events today.

One is that we passed 1500 hiking miles since we left on road trip 1 in January of 2012. In those miles we have accumulated 42 miles of elevation gain. We have walked up over 42 miles? And down over 42 miles?

In 21 different states.

We believe that we know our country in ways that are special. Instead of knowing our cities and settled areas, we know the places that are, to the extent possible, still like they were many years ago.

For us, there is no alternative. We have to keep doing what we are doing as long as we can. There is no way we would have accumulated the health benefits of those 1500 miles by doing anything else. We won't go to a gym, or exercise on a machine. We might ride our bikes when the weather is good (and we do, accumulating over 5300 miles in this same time frame on our bikes), but most of the time in the Pacific Northwest the weather isn't good enough to have fun riding bikes.

Our road trips, and the hiking we do, is essential for our physical, and therefore our emotional, health. Further, we both have serious problems with arthritis, and nothing is a good for arthritis than exercise.

This is our life, out in nature, fulfilling dreams we both had as children where we were free to roam far and wide in undeveloped areas. The planning and organization needed to be gone from home for months at a time is staggering. But we make it fun, and almost everything works out.

Of course we miss people, the special people we love. Life is the trade off game, though, and if we didn't do what we do, we would become unhealthy and sad. That is no good for anyone.

The other good news for today? We found the bear spray I lost. Using our GPS we traced the route we had taken two days ago through about an acre of bushes with 2-inch stickers, and found it before some bear did and used it on us.

 

 

 

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Looking for my bear spray in the sticker bushes at Big Bend National Park

I lost it yesterday. Slipped right out of the holster. Not too surprising given the brush we walked through.

So today we thought we would create a hike that partially overlapped with yesterday's trail to look for it. Vicky cleverly thought to look at all of our photos from yesterday so we could see the spot where we know we last had it. This eliminated some of yesterday's trail.

What we did was to create another awesome loop trail, this time far out into the canyon that loops around to our north and east sides. Our goal was to use our GPS to find the spot where we turned around yesterday, but by going a completely different route.

We walked about a mile down Grapevine Hills road to a wash. Then we went north on the wash for about a mile and a half. At one point we ran into a dry fall that we couldn't get down, and so we used an animal trail next to it to circumvent it.

Vicky at the bottom of the dry fall:

The animal trail we used to go around the dry fall:

After a mile and a half we turned east, knowing we had about two miles across the desert floor to the point where we had stopped on yesterday's hike. We went through several different types of terrain. It was a lot of fun.

We found the exact spot where we had turned around. We followed our route back to the camper, going slow so we could scan the ground for the bear spray canister. But no luck. We have some more of yesterday's trail to rehike tomorrow to see if it got lost there.

We will find it, we are confident. It can only be in one other place. And we got another great hike out of looking for it!

 

 

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Looking for Frederick Rice in Big Bend National Park

At our campsite, hidden under some brush, is this sign.

Within a few years, this sign will be completely buried in brush, and no one will see it again. Does this matter?

So, who was Frederick Rice, and why does he have a sign where he was raised and I don't?

After doing some research, it appears Frederick Rice ranched in this area in the early 1900s.

We decided that we would spend part of our hiking day hunting for any structures that might remain from his ranch. Unfortunately, where he was "raised" was at a spring, so that in the years since he was here, a huge amount of underbrush has grown up. We fought our way through a lot of it, finding some old tin and old fence, and a place where some short retaining walls look to have been built to perhaps make a garden area?

Or maybe this was the foundation of the home. Could it be?

We also found a large water storage tank (above photo), but no corrals or remains of any home-like structures.

As far as we know, though, other structures could remain here, buried in deep thickets that we cannot penetrate.

We have read that a lot of original structures were destroyed in the 1930s when Big Bend became a national park. From what we have read regarding these structures, probably most should have been preserved. At the time, it appears the priority was on returning area to its natural state, but the amount of history that was lost is a bit sad.

When Bill and Kathy were out with us a week ago, we visited some of the historical structures that remain. Unfortunately historical places like the Nails Ranch and the Sublett farm are rapidly wasting away. Many of these structures were made of Adobe, which is just glorified mud. One could see where the rains were washing them away like a tide washes away a sand castle.

Sublett farm:

Windmill at the Nails Ranch, showing how overgrown the farm has become.

Last year at Joshua Tree National Park we found an old and historical mill high on a mountain trail. It was fascinating, but one could not get to most of it because of the growth of bushes around it. It some point in the future, no one will be able to get to it or see it. And it will disappear until in a few centuries it becomes absorbed into the desert. Is this right?

Should these historical areas be allowed to become overgrown, inaccessible, and eventually destroyed by nature, or should they be preserved? And who decides?

A book by Frederick Rice is for sale in the bookstore of the Visitor's Center here, but yet his ranch is being allowed to waste away and be overgrown, including a sign indicating this spot where we are camping was once a home where he was raised.

Tough decisions the Park Service has to make. Unfortunately, it is one of those situations where one person's decision, say to destroy a structure, can outweigh 20 other Park Superintendents who would have voted to keep and preserve it.

We spent the rest of today's hike exploring the huge wash beneath what we believe to have been the Frederick Rice ranch.

One unexpected discovery, out in the middle of the wash, was two bundles of wire. These would have been worth something at the time they were abandoned. We wondered what their stories were. If only fence wire could talk.

Someone stuck this part to a wheel out in the desert, for some reason. Maybe just to get us to wonder what the reason was. If so, it worked.

 

 

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We create a loop hike from Grapevine Hills, Big Bend National Park. tx

We are at a back country campsite at Big Bend National Park. It is quiet and isolated. Nobody within miles. Just what we love.

Our first day here we headed for the hills. We didn't know where we were going to go, how far, or how high.

Then we started climbing in a southerly direction. Still no idea of where we were going. "Shall we go over there?" "Sure!"

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After awhile we realized we might be able to hook up with the established trail to the Balanced Rock. We had done this hike to the Balanced Rock with Kathy and Bill last week. We had the GPS coordinates on my map program, so set off in that direction, up and down hills, carefully finding the safest routes.

 

My GPS unit directed us right to the Balanced Rock trail, except that we were 200 feet above it, with what appeared to be a steep descent in front of us to reach it.

But looks can be deceiving. We have learned that from even a short distance trails and washes can appear to be blocked, but that closer inspection will reveal a route. That is what happened today. We discovered a route to the bottom where the trail was.

 

Here is Vicky at the trail, looking up the direction we had descended. It doesn't look possible from here, does it?

 

We followed this trail back to the trailhead, and then took the road another mile to our camper. Along the way, Vicky spotted a formation that she named "Devil's Horns."

 

We created our own loop trail!

 

 

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