Lovely morning at the Rio Grande Village campground in Big Bend, TX. Jonathan woke up in the bunk, perhaps somewhat surprised. I got up and made coffee and french toast outside on the camp stove around 8am.
Ollie took us off the levelling blocks again and we were back on the road in adventure mode by 9am. This time Jonathan saw a roadrunner scoot across the road on the drive.
We drove back to Boquillas Canyon so we could do the hike there.
It was about 1.4miles round trip along a neat trail dotted with small groupings of Mexican wares for sale tucked into the trees on the sides of the trail. Same thing, a selection of hand crafted items and a secure tin chained down where you could put money in. We also saw a burro family wandering around! We met a group of senior men from Arkansas on the trail and we chatted with them a bit about our trip. The assured us that Arkansas was not worth a visit, haha. We hiked 3.17km according to my Strava, and were on the trail from about 9:30-10:30am. Neat to be able to walk down to the canyon there where the Rio Grande flows through. It was 28c this morning... hot, but the hike had some shady spaces and wasn't difficult.
We saw some awesome little tracks in the sand and traced them to this little black beetle!
After we walked back to the rig, we drove the short distance to the Boquillas Canyon overlook again where we saw the large set up of handcrafted goods from Mexico to see if the little burro was still there. We had change now to buy it and found the little guy again. Our plan is to thread a small string on him so we can hang him on our Christmas tree! Amelia named it Avan, after her burro.
Then it was back on the road for the looooong drive to Panther Junction. Got to the visitor Centre around 11:15am and with the wifi there we were able to check messages and this is when we found out that our AirBnB guests that had just moved into our house back in Vancouver were displaying some odd behaviours (ordering mattresses, covering up all the windows, smoking just outside the front door, among other things). Only having minimal wifi at this one section in the entire park made things quite stressful for us to try and deal with what was happening back home. Other park visitors/hikers/campers were hanging outside using the wifi as well trying to make plans or resolve things at home, too. We met a very sweet young woman who was traveling on her own and had spent a long time in Big Bend hiking and loving the area. She recommended the Upper Burro Mesa Trail to us and we may check it out tomorrow.
We hung out there for way longer than we would have liked. The kids worked on their Junior Ranger books for awhile while we tried to resolve some stuff. Around 1pm we got some diesel at the gas station there (one of the few places in the park (only place?) to get fuel.
Then it was bye-bye wifi and cell signal again and off to check out the Chisos Mountains in the middle of the park. We saw a truck in the oncoming lane pulled over and we slowed down to see what they were looking at. It was a little mexican black bear romping up the hill. Pretty cool! I think there's only about 20 black bears total in the whole park, so it was special to see one!
Our big hike for today was the Window Trail in the Chisos Basin. We pulled up to the Chisos Basin Visitor Centre around 1:30pm and had a peek inside and looked around the gift shop. The kids saw some cute stuffies they liked - a black bear and a tarantula. Jonathan offered to pay for half of the stuffy each if we saw them in real life.
We went back to the rig and made sandwiches and packed our hiking backpack with lots of water and snacks. At 2:35pm we set off for the Window Trail (8km hike) that descends into the Chisos basin. It was a beautiful hike down, sunny with lots of shade opportunities as we descended through the rocky cactus terrain into more trees. Other hikers coming out of the basin told us that they'd seen a black bear on the trail but it was gone by the time we reached that area.
The end of the Window Trail had a fantastic view out from the mountain.
The kids were amazing little hikers and enjoyed the different terrains and things to climb on. Amelia was very much a keen little photographer with the old iphone camera she has for the trip. On the walk back down, fairly close towards the end of the trail section, Jonathan and Oliver were a little ways behind us checking out some of the features of the digital zoom camera, when I spotted a tarantula on the side of the trail! So exciting!! I didn't want to scare it and have it run off before Ollie could see it. I whisper "yelled" for Amelia to hurry over and when she saw it she was so excited! We "whispered" as urgently as we could for Ollie and Jonathan to hustle down the trail and catch up. They got to see it too as it picked its way along the side of the trail in some grasses and branches. Super cool to see our wild first tarantula on the trip. Very fun. We also saw some really pretty blue birds, and some GIANT grasshoppers called Lubbers who were almost as big as your hand! So awesome.
We got back around 4:30pm - a fantastic 8km (2hour with a rest at the "top") hike enjoyed by all of us. We went back into the store to purchase their well earned stuffies -- we counted the black bear that we saw on the road, since we'd missed the black bear that was on the trail. Oliver also bought himself a neat little pocketwatch from the shop with his own spending money.
By 5:30pm we were driving back to Panther Junction and stopped in the parking lot so I could use the wifi to upload our strava achievement record. The sun was setting and we still had a decent drive back to Rio Grande Village to our new site #97 (we couldn't get three nights in a row in the same site, so booked last night in #47 and then moved to the new site tonight and tomorrow night).
We saw a coyote on the drive back, as well as a cow!
Got to our "new" site around 7pm (the sun had set around 6pm) and managed to park carefully avoiding the very low hanging branch over our site. The ranger rolled by on his golf cart to check us in - friendly older guy, who also mentioned that it was a lunar eclipse tonight sometime around 3am.
Had a yummy little dinner cooked and eaten outside of potatoes/vegetables and the little breakfast "sausages" we were trying from the Impossible brand.
Amelia worked hard on a very detailed Dinosaur book she made up... drawing the skeletons/skulls of those dinos we saw yesterday and then drawing what she thought the dinosaur might look like. Jonathan had an outdoor shower in the dark beside our rig with our outdoor shower nozzle/hose. Then he read Owls in the Family for bedtime stories and we all tucked into our regularly assigned beds for the night. A great day spent, will hopefully bring happy sleep!
No comments:
Post a Comment