Big Bend National Park is not one that you hear a lot about. We had a fabulous spring vacation there last week. Of course, you have to really appreciate the desert to enjoy it much. Big Bend sits in the peninsula made when the Rio Grande makes a Big Bend along the Texas-Mexico border.
We had beautiful weather except for one night when the wind blew our camper around. The days though were warm and sunny with nary a drop of rain. There are several main areas of the Park. There is the River, the Desert, and the Mountains. The Mountains are desert mountains however, not a lot of the vegetation you are used to in mountains.
We saw a nice collection of wildlife. A beautiful red bird flew around our camp one afternoon. We later determined it to be a Vermilion Flycatcher. We saw lots of Road Runners and discovered that Chaparral does not mean Road Runner in Spanish. The Spanish word for Road Runner is Paisano. I was a little offended that I saw so many of them and they are the state bird of New Mexico—not Texas.
We saw Javalinas a couple of times. We learned that Javalinas travel in bands. We were calling them a herd, as in a herd of pigs, but we learned that they are neither pigs nor are they related to pigs. Hmmmm—they look so much like a pig.
Do you care about the animals. There was quite a bit of human activity around 1900 and it is interesting. Unfortunately the Park Service doesn’t think so. None of the signs tell much about the ranchers, miners, or farmers that tried making a go of it in that rough country. They spent their money on signs telling us really brilliant things like, “the closer you get to the rock formation the bigger it looks.” No kidding, that was the message on one of the viewpoint signs.
The pictures of our outing are posted at
http://gallery.mac.com/nathanrusell#100015
Take a look.
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