Travel Update 20

We started out the week in Norman, OK, and caught up with Kathleen's old Peace Corps friend, Jessica. Kathleen hadn't seen her since they left Guinea, so it was a great overdue reunion. She generously offered us a place to park and take showers at her mother's house.  That, too, was great.

From there we headed south. We stopped by a little town called Medicine Park in Oklahoma, on recommendation from Jessica's mother. It is a cute little town with the claim to fame of being Oklahoma's first cobblestone community. It was a bit touristy, but super cute.

 

Shortly after Medicine Park, we drove into the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge, where we saw our first bison! The park was created to help preserve the bison, the elk and the Texas longhorn cows. Bison were almost entirely extinct in North America, only about 550 left before Yellowstone and this preservation were made. They shipped in 15 bison from the New York zoo to start this herd, which took off and is now thriving. Elk also had to be reintroduced from further north, having been hunted out of the area in the early 1900s. The longhorn were added later and are there to be protected as a herd of historical significance. The preserve also gave us some scenic views.

We drove a ways further before settling in for the night at a beautiful reservoir that had free camping by it.

We drove through West Texas quickly; there isn't much there for travelers. It's mile after mile of flat, dry land with the occasional ranch here and there. We made a quick stop in Midland and Odessa, mostly out of curiosity to see the town of Friday Night Lights, but weren't enticed to stay long.

Our last night before Big Bend National Park was a roadside picnic area about 30 miles north of the park. This picnic area had a few picnic tables and fire pits, but most importantly a lovely backyard.

The rest of the week was spent in Big Bend National Park. Check out our posts of the three main areas of the park we visited: Chisos Basin, the Rio Grande, and the Ross Maxwell Scenic Drive (Coming soon...). Here's a small teaser of the scenery of Big Bend.

 

Big Bend National Park: Rio Grande and Boquillas Canyon

On Saturday we were able to get another campsite in our same campground and then headed back down to Panther Junction. We were hoping to start the day by catching the park film, usually one of our favorite parts of the parks, but unfortunately the theater was broken and we were never able to see this one.

Instead we continued on with our day, heading down to the Rio Grande Village section of the park. After taking advantage of their laundry facilities we went on two relatively short hikes. The first one was a nature trail just off of the campground. This hike was only 3/4 of a mile, and it went out over  ponds and then up a small hill on a peninsula sticking out into the Rio Grande. It was a lovely.

We saw lots of wildlife, ranging from road runners to beautiful fish and turtles in the ponds. 

 

The hike did show us how surprisingly small the Rio Grande really is. 

So small in fact that Entrepreneurs from Mexico regularly ride their horses across the river, leaving crafts for tourists to buy by putting money in a jar, and then coming back later to collect their earnings. 

Sadly, the river was not always so small. First, due to diversions for farming irrigation and drinking water the river size was reduced to about 20% of its natural flow. Additionally in recent years the river has been suffering from reduced precipitation and increased evaporation due to climate change. 

There is a boarder crossing to the town of Boquillas where they will take you across the river in a row boat for $5. It sounded fun, and we were tempted by the prospect of some fresh tacos for lunch, but we ran out of time in the day. Maybe next time. 

Town of Boquillas, Mexico

We did find time for another fairly short hike into the Boquillas canyon. 

 

On the way back to Panther Junction we did one more easy hike at a location called dugout wells. This hike had signs along the way telling us about the different cactus and animals that live in the area and how they have adapted. All three hikes were nice because they were completely different ecosystems. 

We wrapped up the day with another ranger program, this time down at the Panther Junction Visitor Center. This one was about night sky and the history of astronomy. It was super interesting and ended with telescopes set up in the parking lot. Big Bend is a gold tier dark skies park, meaning there is little to no light pollution. We lucked out and were in the park with a new moon so the stars were extra spectacular. Unfortunately we don't have the right equipment for spectacular night sky pictures.

Big Bend National Park: Chisos Basin

We were super excited to hit Big Bend National Park for a couple of reasons. First, it is the first park we got to in the Southwest, which is the hotbed of national parks. We've finally hit the part of our trip where we'll really be seeing a ton of national parks. Second, it was the first truly scenic park we've seen in a while. And it was great to see real mountains!

The park can be broken down into three main section, the Rio Grand region in the east, the Chisos Basin in the center, and the Ross Maxwell scenic drive. Really there is enough to explore in each of those areas to spend multiple days but we gave each area one day, and we'll break the blog into three post, one for each of those days.

Official NPS Map. Click and zoom in to enlarge for details. 

We entered the park from the North and hit the Persimmon Gap Visitor Center first (red arrow on map). There wasn't much at the visitor but we did ask the ranger if there was anything we should see on our way down to Panther Junction, where the main visitor center is (green arrow on the map). She said that the Fossil Discovery Exhibit was a must see, and we are super glad she did. There was a lot of information about the Dinosaurs that lived here, and the archeology that has been done over the years. And some of the Dinosaurs were alarmingly big...

 

After the Fossil Discovery Exhibit we headed down to the Panther Junction Visitor Center, which is the main visitor center. From there we discovered that the camping was filling up fast. We weren't planning on camping in the park, but did some math and figured out it made the most sense. The closest free spots would have required more gas than simply paying the $16 a night, and we'd rather have that money support the parks, use less gas, and stay in a nice camp ground. So we didn't spend much time at the visitor center before booking it up the hill to the Chisos Basin Campground, the last spot in the park to have spots.

The drive up to campground was stunning.



Since we were already up in the basin we decided to start with hikes in that region. We settled on doing the hike down to The Window (blue arrow on the map).

This hike was very cool, as it descends over 800 feet to end at the top of a narrow pour off, basically the top of a mostly dry waterfall. There was nice scenery the whole way but the views of valley below at the end of the hike were stunning.

 

 

 

To wrap up the evening, we took advantage of the fact that we were at the NPS campground to go to a ranger talk at the amphitheater. It was a fun slide show about some of the hikes on the Ross Maxwell Scenic Drive, which gave us a great reference for when we headed there two days later. A great way to wrap up our first night in the park.

Travel Update 19

We started out the week near Memphis desperate for showers. Luckily for us, February 9th was National Pizza and Bagel day and Planet Fitness was inviting anyone to work out at their gyms and get free bagels in the morning and pizza in the evening. We took full advantage of both times, getting two free workouts, bagels, pizza and WiFi to watch the Ducks get their revenge against Arizona State.

From Memphis, we drove to Little Rock, Arkansas, where we took advantage of free scavenger hunt tickets we received though the Let's Roam app we used in Austin. We walked all around the town, seeing sights and learning a bit about Little Rock history.

Little Rock Capitol Building

We ended the day in Hot Springs, AR. There we visited Hot Springs National Park. It got a bit cold that night and made for a really cool looking fountain at the park.

After visiting our 11th National Park, we headed west towards Oklahoma City to try and catch up with a friend of Kathleen's from the Peace Corps. We took the scenic route through the Ouachita National Forest and into Oklahoma. We decided to pass up the Ozarks, even though we heard they were beautiful. They'll be going on our "places we didn't get to, but would still like to see someday" list. We're eager to get to Big Bend and the large cluster of National Parks in that area and want to keep moving.