Day 10- the drive to Big Bend

What adventures we’ve been having!  And so much luck. Yes, we’ve camped in the single digits without electricity (only one night though and the view was so worth it!!) and set up camp in the dark (but we are very good at that!). We learned that if you set up a tent with snow under the floor, the inside is slippery too on the packed down snow underneath!!  We learned that in the desert every plant is prickly and they blow over the campgrounds so you really can’t wear socks outside even on the blacktop and rocks (!). It takes a long time to pick all those sticky things out!

But we have been lucky.  We don’t really like hot weather so doing a trip like this now is fantastic (and usually it isn’t this cold!!) and we don’t like crowds so it isn’t crowded!  We lucked into Grant’s Garage and a quick fix for the truck.  We lucked into Mesa Verde as they had been closed a week due to substantial snowfall and they opened the day we were going to be there, and they had been busy clearing so we saw much more than we thought we would have. Andrew’s connection for camping near there kept in constant contact about the weather and how they were doing with clearing out all the snow (Mesa Verde RV Park-only ½ mile from Mesa Verde National Park and a LOVELY facility!) and finally let us just set everything up in their back driveway and plug into their laundry room.  Carlsbad Caverns, in the upper elevations, had been closed to icy conditions for a week as well but were open the day we did our self-guided tour! In fact the natural entrance had been closed even in the morning but opened up for our scheduled time so we got that lovely 1 mile hike down through the awesomeness of the cave. So we had a plan B due to the weather and today we went to Plan C.  

The hotel was nice and the room humongous!! Our neighbor had two dogs that were adorable and only barked once! We were up fairly early and it was misting and there was a light frosty/icy layer on the truck window.  The Carlsbad Caverns park page reported they were closed this morning due to black ice and they were working hard to open up later.  It didn’t look hopeful so we just decided that since we had seen most of the cave it was okay to just get on our way to Big Bend.  We crossed the highway to drop some postcards off (finally-the stack was pretty thick at this point!) and I slid across the sidewalk–black ice!!  But thankfully the roads were okay.  We carefully drove down the highway amidst the spritzy precip and the extreme fog.  Once we were down from the elevation everything was better.  Andrew has been driving most of this trip but I took a shift from Van Horn to Marfa.  :)  The scenery is boggling.  Beautiful but stark, full of bushes of some kind, yucca of some kind (the tall ones), and grasses of some kind.  Then just grasses, then cows!! Then gates proclaiming a ranch but no houses to be seen.  Occasionally there will be a residence of some sort, perhaps a trailer or camper or shack and you wonder if it is a permanent residence or if someone is homesteading (Do people still do that?) or seasonal.  Some of these look pretty desolate.  There are windmills and water tanks and oil/fuel tanks (assuming for heating) and the towns are small and smaller.  Valentine had a library (!!) that was busy as several young people were on the porch or leaving the building!  There wasn’t much in Shafter that we could see but I did look it up as there was a sign proclaiming a mine and was curious what kind of mine it was (silver, owned by a Canadian company but negotiations for being sold late last year).  It has a population of about 25, and we also read it was the set for the movie “The Andromeda Strain”!  There was a sign further along stating “the site of the Contrabanda movie set” so I had to look that up too and it really was an abandoned movie set along the Rio Grande from the movie “Lone Star” (All that is left is one building.). All these places are certainly stark enough.  We took a scenic tour and followed the Rio Grande to a town called Presidio and then turned toward Big Bend.  The road was curvy, winding this way and that, this scenery was rocky and the mountains low enough to be greenish. The Rio Grande just weaved along.  It looks like they are improving the areas as we saw quite a few restroom facilities but upon checking them all out, they weren’t open yet. :/ We noticed that in Texas they have signs letting you know how deep the water is when you cross areas that flood.  It goes to 5’!  It doesn’t say how flooded is considered safe though? 

We stopped by a small grocery store to stock up on a few things and then entered the park.  It is huge and that is an understatement.  Bear and mountain cat warnings, heat warnings (usually after April and through the Summer), and today it was really cold and foggy.  It was 31 when we entered the park but what was weird is that once we started climbing up to get to our lodge, the fog disappeared and it was suddenly 55, at a higher elevation!  The lodge is actually scheduled to be demolished and rebuilt in 2024.  We have a lovely room and the view is outstanding!!  Andrew tried to get into the campground but it was booked and we lucked into the last room here.  The fog curls up from below and envelopes the mountains and then creeps back.  We unloaded what we needed, took a short hike and then unloaded and refilled our water bottles and reorganized the truck a little.  We ate a delicious dinner with leftovers for tomorrow and enjoyed some tea on the balcony.

 

The weather doesn’t look promising as there is a winter weather advisory and rain forecast all day.  I do have ponchos (Thanks to Aurora!) and we have several hikes planned for tomorrow.  We didn’t get too many steps in today but we are definitely still ahead for the week!!  We feel lucky indeed that we must have been driving in front of the weather front as I-10 had massive weather-related accidents a short distance from where we were driving through. We took the highway/scenic route and not the Interstate.