The Bend! Day 4: Crossing The Rubicon

I’ll admit that I’m not much of camper. I love going out into the wilderness and rambling around and I’ll camp out if that’s the only way I’ll be able to visit some places, but I don’t like it. The whole camping thing is just such a hassle. Screwing with ice chests and camp stoves and flashlights and cooking outdoors and not bathing and participating in different bathroom routines is all bothersome but not really that big a deal. The thing that gets me is the tent. First you have to put the damn thing up and arrange some kind of bedding. Then you have to hope it doesn’t rain (admittedly not a great danger in the desert). Then to get up to pee in the middle of the night you have to use to the preternaturally loud zipper, which wakes up your tentmate(s) and possibly other nearby campers. And, if you’re in a campground, to pee in the night you have to put on pants and shoes and walk to the restroom. In addition, there’s the dish washing in cold water and the constant not being able to find things. Eventually you have to take down the tent and put up the bedding. It just sucks.

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So when Gina found out this sweet bungalow was available at the Chisos Mountains Lodge, I was happy to scrap our night-three plan to camp out in a back country site in the desert. I had looked into renting a room at the lodge for one or two nights about six weeks before our trip but it was all booked up. I guess they had a cancellation. This place was billed as the VIP Suite and, the woman on the phone said, it was the only guest room at the lodge with TV. It even had satellite. The room itself was beautiful. It had everything a room at a Holiday Inn has plus privacy, hidden from sight of the other cabins and buildings. It had a minifridge, microwave and coffee maker in the sitting room. And the price was reasonable, $175. You can expect to pay more than that for basic rooms at most bed and breakfasts and this was their best room. Very cool.

After a good night’s sleep and a hot shower, we packed up and headed over to the lodge restaurant for some park-vendor food. As you can see, the restaurant’s big feature is a giant window with a view of the Basin Window. We ate a couple of semi-decent burgers and watched three deer browsing in the cactus and yucca in front of the building. You can see a deer silhouetted in the picture and there’s another barely visible in the shadow.

The plan for the day was to hit the Hot Springs down on the Rio Grande and then head out to a primitive campsite to spend our last night in the park. The Hot Springs was once a health spa that featured a post office, hotel and other buildings, and of course, the healing waters of the spring. I got a postcard shot of the post office. We walked the half-mile trail to the springs where a large man-made pool of geothermally heated water still stands on the river bank. I didn’t take a picture of the pool because it was full of people and I didn’t think they wanted me taking their picture.

A nearby bluff is covered with prehistoric pictographs. Most of them have been defaced by callous tourists. No one knows what they mean, but I imagine the messages have something to do with the mysterious hot water and mother corn and hunting and probably the sexual prowess of the rock painters.

Here’s a couple examples of the vandalism:

Then we headed out to historic Glenn Springs. I picked Glenn Springs for our camp because it has the remnants of a town and a wax factory and was the site of a raid by Mexican invaders back in 1916. When we stopped at the ranger station to get our permit, the ranger on duty asked why we wanted to camp there. I thought maybe I had made a big mistake. I asked her if there was a problem camping out there and she said “No, I just have never put anybody in those campsites before. There are some that are a lot prettier.”

You get to Glenn Springs by driving across the desert on a slow dirt road. You wouldn’t want to drive your car on it, but my the Ford Explorer we borrowed from my parents was plenty without even using four-wheel drive. It took a little over an hour to cover the 15 miles from the paved road.

While looking at the topo map of the area I noticed a grave marked on the map and set my GPS so we could find it. When we got near the site we found a trail to the grave so the GPS wasn’t needed. This single grave stands in the middle of nowhere, but the Woodmen of the World was kind enough to erect the granite monstrosity to mark the site.

There’s not much left of the town. A bunch of rusty cans and other metal and these posts where the wax factory stood.

Across Glenn Draw, where the water from the spring flows, a cemetery marks the only remnants of “Mexican Glenn Springs.” MGS was were the Mexican wax-factory workers lived. The cemetery has about a dozen graves. From the site you can see the giant granite maker of Mr. Lewis’ grave about a half mile away. These people don’t have a major organization to provide permanent markers for their final resting place, but beads hang from many of the crosses and the graves themselves have a lot of coins laying on them. Somebody must care about them.

Cacti surround most of the graves, which made it hard to get into position to shoot them effectively. I tried very hard not to get stuck but one them jumped up and got me. A bunch of tiny spines lodged in my leg and side and then in my hand as I tried to remove them. I spent most of the good shooting light pulling them out. I finally had to go shirtless and almost decided to go pantless back to the campsite.

Glenn Springs boasts two camp sites and we set up at GS 2 to eat dinner. We had a couple of ribeyes that we needed to cook before they went bad but we didn’t have the correct gear. So I got the grate from the propane camp stove to use as a grill and built an illegal ground fire out of charcoal. The steaks were delicious. I poured water on the coals and scooped them all up to take with us and then covered the area with dirt. I hope a ranger doesn’t come along and notice what we did and send a summons in the mail.

Dinner at Glenn Springs Steakhouse.

To get to GS 2 you have to drive a couple hundred yards down Black Gap Road, an extremely rough, unmaintained track through the desert. Just before dark, as we were setting up to eat, a bright red hummer came down the road from the opposite way we had come. An ashen-faced city slicker who had probably never taken that thing off the pavement stopped and asked, “Am I anywhere near getting out of here?” I asked him where he was trying to get to and he said, “Any road with pavement. I don’t care.” He said he had taken a wrong turn and Black Gap Road had nearly done him in. He was relieved to find out he was almost to the maintained road and less than an hour from a paved road.

This big tree (a pecan or walnut I think) is the only real tree for miles around. It stands beside Glenn Spring. That’s the sunset on Chilicotal Mountain behind the tree. While we were at GS 2 a line of about 10 buzzards came flying in and roosted in the tree.

After dinner we had a decision to make. I couldn’t bear the thought of setting up the tent again, so we kicked around the idea of clearing out the explorer and sleeping in there. Gina had a problem in that some of her medicine had spilled out in her purse and she was feeling the effects of being without it. And as it got dark it got spooky out there in the middle of nowhere with random graves all around and literally nobody else within maybe eight miles. You have to work to get that alone in this day and age, and you can feel it. We were heading out in the morning to return home and had planned to go to Dallas and spend the night. If we left that night, we could drive a couple of hours to Fort Stockton and stay in a motel and be able to drive all the way home the next day. Plus we’d avoid the spookiness and the hassle of camping another night. So what do you think we did?

Sunset on the Sierra del Carmen mountains 15 miles away in Mexico.

Links to other posts about this trip:
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3