From our final camping spot in Big Bend we took several hikes. One was on an established trail, the Pine Canyon Trail. We did this hike the morning after it had snowed, so the trail was beautiful. And all along the way we could tell that we were not the first morning visitors--many small creatures had used it.
The trail winds through desert before hitting the canyon. The last 3/4 mile is pretty steep, which you will realize why I am saying this in a minute. Since we hiked from our camping spot, not the trailhead, we added 2 1/2 miles to the actual route.
We just had to do this:
The trail ends at a huge cliff. If there has been a lot of rain there would be a waterfall. Instead, today, there were icicles.
I mentioned that the final 3/4 mile is fairly steep. The reason we know this is because one of us is a ditz and left his camera at the end of the trail, so both this person who shall remain unnamed and his wife had to do it twice. This is in addition to the extra 2 1/2 miles this person and his wife had extra because they were not at the trailhead. Good thing this unnamed person's wife is such a good sport.
The rest of our days In Big Bend we did our more typical explorations. We would identify a place and see if we could make it there. This particular part of Big Bend has a lot of underbrush which made cross country hiking difficult, and it also had wash after wash. These washes were a bit more difficult to scramble across than other washes we have encountered. But still fun.
The cool thing we discovered, out in the middle of nowhere, was three dams that had been built before Big Bend became a park in 1935. One was little more than earth piled up, with big rocks keeping it in place. Seems a bit thrown together, but it is still there, almost completely hidden in the underbrush.
What fascinated us was the other side of this dam. It was a large dirt area, cleared of any vegetation, with what looked like to be a small circular track--as if the Javelinas regularly ran races around it. We could come up with no explanation for this curious phenomenon.
On another of our hikes, out in the middle of nowhere, we came this dam.
Can you believe the size and condition of it? A few hundred feet up the wash was another, although smaller, one built in the same style. Who built these?
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