Big Bend day 1

Big Bend is a sprawling park; two entrances but most enter through Persimmon gap gate. As you enter you see country just like the west Texas range land, desert, you’ve been driving through for miles, and miles. There may be slightly more brush and slightly more greenery due to the lack of grazing in the park. There are three interesting areas of the park, Rio Grande village, Chisos Basin and Cottonwood. We went to the first two on day one.

It’s roughly 40 miles from the entrance to Rio Grande village. The landscape is Creosote shrubs, Yucca and Prickley pear cactus, then suddenly you come over a slight hill and look down on a green strip of land dominated by cottonwood trees, willows and cattails. The Rio Grande creates a 1/4 mile strip of green on either side. Here are some pictures…..

They say the marshy area in the immediate foreground is a beaver pond. The elevated walkway is part of the nature trail from the campground. The Rio Grande is just a stream, ankle deep in places. Apparently almost all the water in it comes from the Mexico side of its drainage. We suck as much water out of it as drains into it from the US side. The picture above is from a small hill looking upstream, west. Of course that’s Mexico on the left.

This picture is from the same hill looking south. There is a small Mexican town just a 1/2 mile downstream and many Mexican families could be seen, out for a stroll along the river. The drive from the entrance to this trailhead was over 40 miles.

The best area in the park is Chisos Basin. Smack in the middle of the park, it is an island of green in a sea of barren-ness. As you drive you climb about 2,000 feet then descend a little into the basin, a bowl shaped alpine landscape with very different flora from either the desert or the riparian zone. Here is a picture of “the window”, a gap in the shear rock walls that surround the basin. This is of course where water runs out toward the Rio Grande…..

The high rocky mountains you see on both sides of the window are surrounding, 360 degrees, except for this gap. It was noticeably cooler, and greener than any place other than the strip of green along the river. Eastern species such as white tailed deer live here, but nowhere else nearby for 100’s of miles.

Not many new birds, a little disappointing, Gray Hawk, tons of Vermillion Flycatchers (not new for me but have only seen one, a lost bird in Florida), Pyrholuxia.