We kicked off our first full day in glorious Big Bend by taking a drive down the River Road, a Texas-famous stretch of highway along the Rio Grande. It starts in Terlingua and runs 60 miles or so to Presido. Our first stop was the tiny berg of Lajitas to visit the town’s mayor, Clay Henry. Clay is a goat. Several Clay Henrys have held the mayoralty. The folks in Lajita have many colorful stories about Clay’s hard-drinking ways.
We stopped for lunch at the general store in Lajitas and I had the best sandwich I’ve ever had anywhere anytime. Pastrami on sourdough. It was decadent offering.
A few miles up the road we stopped to check out the river and see the remains of the movie set Contrabando. Only one building remains out of the six or seven built 20 years ago. Just facades and shells with nothing on the inside, they were apparently flood damaged and falling in and were destroyed for safety reasons. I got a good photo of the church the last time we visited.
Not a lot to see so we just took some pictures of each other and moved up the road.
We stopped at the rim of Colorado Canyon just as a guided group of young people rolled up. The spot was featured in the movie “Fandango” in the scene where Kevin Costner digs up a bottle of champagne from under a rock with D-O-M scratched into it. The rock and the inscription are still there. The guide was super enthusiastic about showing his group the rock. They were many and loud and climbing all over the place.
The River Road twisting away across the desert.
We eventually stopped at Closed Canyon in Big Bend Ranch State Park for a short late-afternoon hike. Closed Canyon is a classic slot canyon affair that is quite quite a bit narrower than it is deep.
The canyon acts as an open-air drain to the Rio Grande for a closed in valley separated from the river by a high ridge. The water must really roar through there when it rains in the right spot.
Like the slots in Arizona, the canyon features a series of progressively higher pour overs. Gina and I hung back while Abby and I continued down as far as we dared. We finally got to a drop that we thought would be hard for Abby to ascend, so we turned around.
I got her to make a rare pose for me at the top of the pour over.