The Bend! Day 2: Chasing The Sunset

I had another long hike planned for the second day at Big Bend National Park, but the hike the afternoon before wore Gina and me out pretty good. Plus we had some inconsiderate campers in the site next to ours and they were whooping it up late into the night. At about 11 p.m. they were talking loudly about the cobbler they were cooking in a Dutch oven. Only about 15 yards separated them from the nearest other campers – us, and several other campsite were close by, but they acted as if they were 100 miles from other people. A little bit of excitement ensued earlier in the evening when a skunk invaded their campsite. To top it all off, they started being loud at about daylight. So they were the last thing we heard before going to sleep and the first thing we heard upon waking up.

We decided to scrap any plans for strenuous hiking for the day and instead went for drive on the west side of the park to see what we could see.

First stop was the Sam Nail Ranch on the Ross Maxwell Scenic Drive. Sam Nail ranched there in the late 1800s and part of his adobe house and other ranch structures still exist. He put in the windmill in the picture and it still pumps water that nourishes nearby pecan trees Sam planted. Of course, water is a big deal in the desert and the windmill water keeps a pretty good thicket alive along with insects and other critters.

The park is filled with all kinds of signs of the people who used to scratch a living out of the Chihuahuan Desert. We stopped at the Homer Wilson line camp for a self portrait on the back porch. I used the little pop-up flash on the camera so that I could a good exposure on us and the desert scrub in back of the cabin. Our skin is glistening from the sunscreen. Doesn’t Gina look like she’s having a blast?

Next stop was the pour over below Burro Mesa where most of the water that falls on the mesa runs off a 100-foot waterfall. It was about 2 p.m., the sun straight overhead and my pictures of the pour over itself are terrible so I won’t include any here. However the area is geologically fascinating. I’m currently taking a geomorphology class, which is about how landforms are created. I recognized the area’s volcanic origins from what I’ve learned in class. The cliffs that mark this edge of the mesa are streaked with wide bands of material left by pyroclastic flows from a long dead volcano. Way up on the cliff side there these big boulders that just stick out of compacted volcanic ash. At the pour over these layers are close to the ground so I could get a close-up shot of one of those rocks.

We rolled on down to Castolon on the Rio Grande and had a fine early supper of chili dogs. On our way back up the road we stopped off at the overlook for the Mule Ears Peaks, one of the iconic landforms of the park. There’s a trail that goes out to the peaks that I’d love to hike someday, but we didn’t have it in us this day.

Big Bend is known for its great sunsets and there was one the evening before but I was riding in a car with five other people at the time and so wasn’t in a position to get to some photos. I figured the next night would be just as good. We stopped back the Sam Nail Ranch to wait for the fiery goodness to light up the sky and the peaks of the Chisos. As is often the case when I make a point to shoot a sunset, nothing happened. I did, however, take the time to wash my hair and face in a bucket while we waited in vain. The photo at the top of this post and the top of the post below came from this location. I got a split graduated neutral density filter just for this trip and I played around with it for awhile. It goes on the front of the lens and is designed to even out the exposure from, say, a bright sky and a dark foreground. They’re supposed to be very useful for sunsets. I’d never used one before and the sunset that night didn’t really lend itself to showing how the filter could help.

I had hard time finding a good foreground element for these shots. I envisioned locating a huge prickly pear cactus to put in the foreground, but this part of the desert didn’t seem to have much in the way of huge cacti. It was mostly nondescript brush. I went looking for a blooming yucca, but every one of them was surrounded with that yucky brush.

Gina filed her nails patiently while I jacked around with the camera.

Links to other posts about this trip:
Day 3
Day 4
Day 1

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