Wednesday morning Elaine and I were off to tour the Ross Maxwell Scenic Drive. There are three distinctively different areas in Big Bend and I strongly recommend you plan at least three days to tour the park.
Federico Villalba was one of the many key pioneers in the Big Bend area.
Sam Nail was another big Bend pioneer. The remnants of this ranch are close to the road so it's a pretty easy hike to see it. There are remnants of the adobe house, a couple of windmills, one still working. There are figs and pecans that the Nails planted to transform the desert.
You can see the desert the ranchers worked on transforming.
The picture above is the mountains shown on the left in the Sotol Vista.
The Mule Ears are very easy to see in the distance.
As we went further along the drive, these white hills appeared. I think they were part of a mining operation.
From up on the hill we could see across the border to a small Mexican town. Remember that this is the far eastern part of the park and this town has no crossing to the U.S. and no road to Boquillas.
We were at Castolon at this point when we looked across the river and saw the tiny town. The ranger station and Visitor Center were closed but we found a young man who worked in the park having lunch in the shade behind the rangers station. He told us about the town. Castolon has a small store but the woman working there said she was just filling in and knew nothing at all about Castolon or this part of the park. Hmmmm. There was a much larger store there with a big covered area and picnic tables but it burned down a couple years ago and has chain link fence around it. This is a different building that is falling into disrepair.
Some of the old equipment is still around.
Magdalena's house where she raised 5 children as a widow while she worked for the La Harmonia Company.
The Garlick House is located below the Castolon bluff. It was used by the farm manager for the Harmonia Company, Fred Garlick.
At one point the cavalry was posted here.
The next stop was the Cottonwood campground. In my opinion it may be the nicest campground but it has no hookups just shade and grass around the sites. A mama javelina and her baby come out of the brush far down the campground from us. The mama nursed the little one and then it went back into the brush. Javelinas are peccaries not wild hogs but they can still do some damage if you aren't careful to pickup around your campsite but this campground was not open to camping right now. Every site has a bear box.
Once again we saw lots of roadrunners. This one was very brave. He maintained his position 3 feet away while Elaine got up from the picnic table to get our phones/cameras out of the car.
This was the store used by early settlers near Castolon.
It was actually like a small compound with buildings on 3 sides.
While the sides still look good, the reed style roofs have caved in. The windows and doors have wire across the openings.
This was the boat ramp to the Rio Grande near Castolon. We met this woman and her husband down at Santa Elena Canyon again. They were from Germany.
Santa Elena Canyon, the left side is Mexico and the right side is the U.S.
The river is very low right now but it was high not long ago when it covered the road. That is why the gate was closed. They had to bulldoze the mud from the road.
On the way back down the road, we met these travelers.
Coming back along the road, we stopped to look down at the Homer Wilson ranch. You can hike down there but it is down a steep hill and then across the valley.
Everything looks like you could move right in but that is really not the case. You can see a corral behind the house.
While we were doing this tour, some of our intrepid friends were in canoes paddling their hearts out. It ended up being canoes rather than rafts as the river was too low for rafts. They went with a local outfitters who drove them to the canoe site. That is not the Santa Elena Canyon but a canyon further south.
Another great day in Big Bend National Park.
Interesting day!
ReplyDelete