Posts by BillW
May 4, 2009
Big Bend
By BillW | Posted on May 4, 2009
Texas has two jewels of National Parks: Big Bend and Guadalupe Mountains. Guadalupe Mountains is a limestone uplift surrounded by salt pans and other rough desert, it is a remnant of the last glaciation with trees, plants and small critters (particularly amphibians as I recall) that are a memory of a time when there was a lot more water there than there is now.
Big Bend is another desert park, with a set of granite mountains crouched over the Sonoran Desert that slopes down to the Rio Grande river and the border with Mexico. The first of my many solo backpacking trips started in the Basin in the center of the Chisos Mountains, climbed up out of the basin, down a set shelves to a dry wash in the limestone at the foot of the mountains. From there the trail paralleled the granite wall going East to West, climbed up another dry swash through a set of broken hills into the granite, and finally back to the Basin. It was a rough scramble of about four days in early December when the nights are long enough that even after a full day of hard hiking and a long sleep, you wake up a full 2-3 hours before sunrise.