Texas Hill Country

Actually, it is much prettier than we anticipated. We spent several days at the large and very nice Garner State Park where folks are still swimming in the river and we rode our bikes around and spent time in the shade of the oak trees. Still hot here, in the high 80’s in the days and at 70’s at night. Went exploring up to Kerrville for the night. It seems like ATT is dominant in a lot of areas so we are having poor cell service. Better when we are near the major highways but very poor in the hills and state parks unless we are near their visitor centers or antennas. Most of the state parks are broadcasting free wifi in some areas. Nice if we are close by or can park near it for a while. 

Lots of rolling hills and gated ranches and grassy oak tree hills. Lots of 'ranches' everywhere. And a lot of wildlife ranches. Big fences. Don't think this is to "protect" the wildlife, think this is to keep them in so they can shoot them for sport.  Did you know that there are nearly as many lions, kept as pets in Texas, as there are in the wild? Interesting.

We stop in Bandera, supposedly the cowboy capital, where we walk around the Winthrop-like (except it is the real thing) town and stop in at the famous Old Spanish Trail restaurant for a Tex-mex lunch. The decor is  John Wayne oriented (we are close to the Hondo River) and the waitress asks us “what y’all would like”. My enchiladas were velveeta-style cheese and onions rolled up and then the whole mess covered with chili con carne with beans. Hmm… not impressed. It was ok, but I guess I am spoiled with loving the real ‘Mex’ enchiladas. Maybe I need to try this again somewhere else? Or maybe not.

The Texas back roads are narrow and lumpy (a lot like small county roads at home) but the speed  limits are 60mph!! Too fast!! These are roads that we are comfortable driving at 45mph. Luckily there is not much traffic and we can let folks pass us when they come screaming up behind. But lots of dips, and now with the bikes on back it makes us heavier in the back and less balanced and we are tired of the clunking in the rear end, so we decide to stop stalling and go ahead and replace our Mor-ryde suspension that we knew was getting worn out. So a trip to Boerne, north of San Antonio, and parts need to be ordered out of Indiana, and we have a week or so to wait for them. Cold front coming and weather predicted to be nights down into the 30’s. So we are off to wait in more heat and sun and will come back to get the work done later.

Texas Border Skirmishes

Numero Uno:

 
On our way out of Big Bend we finally got into some Verizon cell tower service again, (AT&T appears to be dominant in this area) and our phone was dinging with messages and activity so we pulled over at a wide spot on the road shoulder in this open desert and returned phone calls while we had some limited service. Next thing I know there is a border patrol rig behind us with lights flashing and the guy out walking towards us with his hand on his gun. Shit. Really?? 

So I get out and try to explain to him that we are old, stupid, tourists and did not know that their border checkpoint was only two miles ahead of us. Steve is still talking on the phone to his aunt and the guy hears conversation and is suspicious about who we have in there with us and what are we doing. I am back pedaling and trying to explain that we are just back in communications after a week in the mountains, blah, blah, blah. 

He finally decided that we are harmless and probably not stuffing a bunch of illegal’s or drugs into our closets before the checkpoint and he moves on ahead.

  
We get off the phone and move on to the checkpoint and figure we are going to get the real deal.... tear apart the rig, drug dogs, inspect our undies, see whatever they can find, hours of interrogation.... kind of inspection. 

We are coming from a dead end road, there is nowhere else to go, if we don’t show up we are for sure suspicious, we have no choice but to proceed.  But it turns out the same guy is there and he is pleasant and runs the dogs around us and looks in the back (where we obviously could not hide anybody) and then I apologize again for being dumb tourists from nowhere and we are on our way. 

Creepy … can’t even stop to talk on the phone around here. Big Question is … what kind of cameras do they have and where are they in this flat arid nothing landscape that they even knew we were stopped there? They could not see us from there If we had known we were that close to the checkpoint we never would have stopped.

Numero Dos:

So after that, we look at the maps and saw that we have a lot of miles to travel to the Texas Hill Country and it is getting late so we decide to head to the relative safety of Seminole Canyon State Park campground a hundred miles or so away. It is a few miles from the border, but across the Rio Grande which is in a canyon there. We decide that is a better choice than the nearby National Park’s Amistad Reservoir that has several campgrounds, but borders Mexico and has many ways to cross in the water.  Seminole Canyon is billed as a beautiful place where the Pecos River comes in and there are guided tours of the ancient cliff dwellings down in the canyon.  Sounds good. We get there in late afternoon and camp up on the hill in a scenic site and get a little cooler air breeze. Still hot here (low 90’s) and feeling humid. Supposed to be cloudy the next 2 days. No cell service here either but they have free wifi radiating from a dish atop the bathrooms. Yay. We are able to catch up a little. Very dark skies and we are hoping to see the meteor showers. Night it gets down into the 70’s and about 4 am we hear some kind of distant low humming  and think the guy next to us is running his air conditioner. It goes on and on and on for hours. Finally we get up about 6:30 (time change has us dark until nearly 8 am) and we decide to head out to the free showers and see if there are any meteors. We walk out in front of our rig and nearly bump into a stealth border patrol truck parked right in front of us. That is the “motor” we hear running. This guy has a radar unit in the truck bed on some kind or scissors jack and it is up high and he is sitting in the rig with the engine running/humming and watching some figures move around on a green screen. I am sure his heat seeking device saw us get up in our rig and get dressed. Hope he liked the show. We walk up and Steve says “watch ya doin’?”  So casual. I am ready to scurry back to the rig after our morning’s  incident. The guy says he is watching someone move through the area way off and there are two border agents on their way to 'intercept' him. We said we were going to head down to the showers and asked if that was safe (a few hundred yards at the most) he said yes it was. So off we went in the dark with our flashlights. I was feeling uneasy and made Steve come with me to check the bathrooms and showers for fugitives before I went in, but everything was fine and I felt foolish for being a weenie.  We showered and went back and had our coffee and just before light the rig moved on. No headlights, no taillights …. it just quietly glided away … very creepy.

 Then an hour or so later we talked to other campers in tents and they said that agents woke them up at 4 am in their tents and asked them if they had heard or seen anybody moving through the campground. Yeah … real safe ….that’s it …. 2 in 24 hours ... We’re done with this ….we are out of here. Heading away from the border and this crazy cat and mouse game. I don’t know how people can live with this day after day.

Rio Grande - Big Bend

First of all … it is HOT HOT HOT. Today our outdoor thermometer says 102, and the indoor one says 101. So it is probably off a little, but still …….

Ours had a more brilliant orange body and scarlet head

We have taken our showers at the camp store and gotten a shady spot under some trees and we decide to rest and read in the shade. Still sweating in our chairs but it is tolerable. Inside is too warm and without elec hookups our air conditioner does not run, but we find it noisy and irritable anyway so would rather be under this big tree in 
the shade. Steve grills some tri tips from the 

freezer over mesquite for our dinner (yum) with a nice salad and we watch the birds all around us. This park is famous for birding opportunities. 


Over 450 species have been found here. We have a vermillion flycatcher hovering over us and hanging out in the tree above our dinner table. He is incredible. The colors are vibrant and bold. People say that many of the birds here have more dramatic colors than in their other habitats. No photo as our camera is not that good, but I am stealing one off the web for example.

 This National Park marks the northern most range for many plants and animals. The ranges of typically eastern and typically western species come together or overlap here. Many species here are at the extreme limits of their range.  Latin American species, many from the tropics, range this far north, and many from the north will range this far south. Also the Rio Grande River is a migration route.  Birding seems to be at its height in the spring but we are happy with our sightings and hope to come back here again when it cools a little. Temps in the winter are in the 80’s so it sound like a good place to hang out for a while.

We take our evening walk to the Rio Grande river and overlook. The river is slow and lazy and very green at this point and ducks swim in and out amongst the tall bamboo like grasses. We are on the border and can easily wade across at many points if we want to. And many of the locals at the small village of Boquillas del Carmen just across the river do just that. They are crossing the river and putting out jars for ‘donations’ for some of their carved walking sticks and handicrafts. These things are set up along the short nature trail with handmade cardboard box signs.  The Park Service is trying to crack down on these ‘visits’ and craft sales and says that it is illegal to purchase any items and they will confiscate anything we buy, blah, blah, blah.  There is nothing we want, but we are saddened at the plight of the poverty and lack of opportunity for these people in this very small and very isolated village. We leave some small change in a few of the jars. Any  donation to their lives that we can offer is minimal. We watch a few Mexicans walking on the other side of the river, a few donkeys are hanging out in the shade. It is maybe a foot deep at the most and not wide. There is no feeling of threat or danger here.

 
At 10pm it had cooled down to 84 degrees and at 2 am it was down to 80. Sleep is difficult, even with all the windows open and no covers. We wake in the still dark at 7:30 am to a cool 78. So we will move on again. It is too hot for us to stay here for very long. We are not interested in staying in the RV park with elec hookup and running our noisy air conditioner all day/night and staying indoors, and it is too hot  to survive on hikes without carrying heavy loads of water. We hope to come back in the winter.

Chisos Basin - Big Bend

Our drive into Chisos Basin in the center of Big Bend National Park was spectacular. We followed Tom and Donna over a very steep and winding pass not recommended for trailers over 20' or vans over 23’. Glad we are small, as so are the camping sites. 

This huge high-country bowl at 5200’ is surrounded on all sides by craggy 6000-7000’ peaks. It is a green island in a sea of desert.  At the end of the last ice age many plants and animals were stranded here as the colder moister climates retreated northward. This isolation results in a large variety of plants and trees that are either out of their normal range, or that grow only here, such as the Chisos Oak and the drooping juniper.

This bowl has a ‘window’ to the west where the drainage spills out during flash floods. These are called ‘pour outs’ and there are several in other places in this park, but this was one of the largest and the easiest one to access. This basin holds most of the black bears and mountain lions in the park, as the surrounding areas are lower elevation open desert floor.  Last year, because of the dry conditions, there were a lot of aggressive cougar encounters in this basin including a child being snatched off the sidewalk in front of their parents at the motel-like resort by the visitors center. We walked this area at the end of the ½ mile trail from our campground to the visitor center and were impressed with how bold/desperate the cougar must have been. It seemed very public and open.  (And yes, the parents got the child back with a small struggle and minor injuries).

So the warnings are not to hike alone, don’t hike at dawn or dusk, and do not take children on the trails…. at all. Made us a little wary, but we hiked the areas trails and did not see a thing. We even sat and scanned the hillside meadows with binocs and still no big sightings. They say it has been a better year for moisture so the animals are having an easier time. 

The trail to the ‘window’ was about 4 ½ miles round trip through the canyon floor with the last ¼ mile over rock steps cut into the canyon sides and in and out of the small stream. A little slick in places as the water has smoothed and polished the surfaces and then a spectacular view to the west over a 2000+ foot drop to the desert floor below. A breathtaking view in many ways. And not a place to be in the threat of rain/flash flood as there is no escape and you would be taking the big Niagra Falls like ride over the edge. All together an amazing place. Flowers are in bloom everywhere, and the weather is in the low 80’s in the day and a very comfortable low 60’s at night. In shorts and sandals full time. 

 The next day, after a spectacular sunrise,  Tom, Donna, and Steve took off early for the 10 ½ mile round trip hike to climb the 7800+ ft Mount Emory where the views were even more spectacular. The step rock step trail ends in a small rock climb/scramble at the top and 360 degree views.

 It was fun to hang out for several days and hike the mountain trails with the Rankins. Both Tom and Donna are playing music and singing at our evening camps, and our 4-handed/partners nightly cribbage tournaments (with chocolate) were a great way to finish off some beautiful days. So they are off to return north through New Mexico, and we are heading down to the Rio Grande side of Big Bend to see what it is all about.

Davis Mountains- West Texas

 After a day at Carlsbad Caverns we headed to Davis Mountains to meet up with Tom and Donna Rankin for a few days of traveling. We enjoyed the caverns but they have definitely been degraded by many years of human visits. After Kartchner Caverns in AZ we were not that impressed. But it is old technology at Carlsbad and the human touch has caused colors to disappear and our very presence since the 1930's has made a difference. We would vote for the more expensive, and limited tours in AZ over this.
Davis Mountains were beautiful with many wildflowers still in bloom and the grassy open ridge tops were beautiful. Campground was nearly deserted mid week and we were able to hike the skyline trail in solitude. We had planned to visit nearby McDonald Observatory for their solar telescopes and their night star programs but cloudy weather hampered this, although it made for great hiking without getting scorched by the heat and sun. Weather was in the low 80's with nights in the 50's.

Alien Weather

last night's radar

Well... it is foreign to us anyway. So now this Pacific Northwest native and weenie knows about "severe thunderstorms". And I am not a big fan .... last night from 3am to 5am the lightening strikes were so numerous as to keep everything nearly lit up like daylight. And it was just the prelude to today's 'real storm'. Hail at 1-3/4 inch was reported about 10 mi south of us. Glad we missed that as it would be bad for the solar panels. This evening the real front will pass over and they are putting up tornado warnings a little north and easy of us.

tonight

We are down in a draw with about a 100' bank behind us, but that is on the edge of the eastern plains of NM. With wide open sky from there out to Texas. We are east of the Capitan Mountains where the storms seem to be forming as the remnants of the tropical storm and bad weather that hit southern CA spills over into us. With hot dry weather here already in place and another cold front coming down from the north is it a collision that we would rather not be here for. Looking at maps and forecast there is not really a lot of places to go to out run this or escape so we are hunkered down for another rough night.AS of now the sune is setting and there are reports of 3 inch hail below us an hour ago. Steve just took a photo of one of the thunderheads building and we have distant rumblings. Steve has covered one of the panels with our reflective shade for inside the front windshield so at least one panel will survive if we get in the direct path. I feel sorry for the few people in this campgrounds in tents.Think I would insist on the Motel 6.
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