Friday, April 7-Sunday, April 9                                                                                             Southeast Texas

Big Bend shares a border with the Rio Grande and Mexico for 118 miles.  The park gets its name for the U-turn that the river takes.  The diversity of landscape and wildlife here defies belief.  I had heard about the beauty of Big Bend, but I was unprepared for the breath taking wildness, vastness, and holiness that we encountered here.  At times it was like being on a different planet.

Big Bend has an incredibly complex geological history.  The oldest rocks here have been dated back 500 million years.  This area was once under an ocean, then subjected to mountain building by compression, volcanism and tension.

There are fossils that are 100 million years old.

There are deposits of volcanic ash that look like cement.

There are distant mountain ranges,

structures that look like fairy dwellings on top of the world…

and so much more.

We took a 6 mile hike to a hot springs.  As it turned out, this was rather ill advised as it was 102 degrees and the trail went down and up across several canyons in the blazing sun..  We were pretty exhausted when we got back, but we made it!

People from the Mexican side of the river leave offerings along the trail.

We had to bring one of these scorpion ladies home with us.  We decided to leave her price tag in place, so we’ve named her Skinny Pearl after one of my favorite country music icons.

Buzz was a little apprehensive at first, but they seem to be getting on pretty well.

We were able to get in a couple more (shorter) hikes, and on our last night we heard a presentation by two former poet laureates of Texas.  They are traveling to each national park over the next few years and writing about their experiences.  They shared some poetry with us and I was grateful for their ability to capture images and memories. They have a blog if you want to check it out: poetsparktour.blogspot.com.

I wish I had better words to describe what it was like being here, but I’ll just throw in some more pictures instead.  Stay tuned for a post about the birds and wildlife we’re seeing on our trip.  We can’t photograph everything we see (like the bighorn sheep with his huge horns who bounded across the road right in front of us the morning we were leaving), but we’re keeping track and will report more about that in the future.