Cathy's Critters – stuff we do out here

Pinnacles up, Laguna Meadows down

Wow, WordPress kind of sucks for a page this big.  I created it all in MS Word and now can’t paste in the generated HTML :-(.  I’m not too good at this…

I put the pictures in a photo bucket at:

Pictures

http://s283.photobucket.com/albums/kk311/kebmsmith/

THE HIKE

Pinnacles up, Laguna Meadow down…

Well, we made it!  Cathy and Kevin made it to the south rim and look beyond the Rio Grande to the deserts of Chihuahua, Mexico.  It was an amazing trip (mostly amazing that two out-of-shape 40+-year-olds made what is called “a strenuous two-day hike…that any Texas hiker worth his salt will eventually attempt”).  We decided that what we lack in athleticism we make up for sheer stubbornness and ego.

We planned to get an early breakfast at the lodge restaurant on Saturday so we packed out backpacks on Friday night.  We did pretty well on packing for necessities and emergencies.  Scott loaned us lots of goodies for the trip including the tent, sleeping bags, “insta-flate” mats, a hand-held GPS, and other equipment.  The GPS wasn’t really necessary for finding our way since these are well-marked trails, but it was cool to keep up with our altitude and distance traveled.  They say to pack at least a gallon of water per person, per day.  A gallon of water weighs about 8 pounds, but you don’t want to risk running out.   However, our guide book (The Hiker’s Guide to Texas, Laurence Parent) informed us of a not-very-publicized spring at about the half-way point going up where water containers could be filled (depending on the time of year and amount of rainfall).  We weren’t going to count on this, and the ranger where we obtained our permit said that it was not very wet, so into each pack went 16 pounds of water, plus a drinking container for each of us.

We joined a group from the Houston Arboretum (Bill, Glen, and their party) for dinner on Friday night where we met a fellow named Rob, who was built like Atlas, and looked to be about 25.  He had done the whole South Rim trail that day.  He said that Boot Spring indeed was wet and we’d have no trouble filling our water supply there.  Later another hiker we met said that rangers often don’t tell hikers about the spring because for conservation reasons they’d rather not have hikers all drinking out of it.  Understandable, but I don’t feel bad about acting on inside information.  After dinner, we took one gallon from each pack and set it aside to lighten our loads, resolving to fill up as necessary at the spring (we had iodine tablets to treat it).  They still felt ridiculously heavy.  We didn’t weight them, but I know what a 50# bag of horse feed feels like, and they both felt heavier than that.

That night we both slept terribly, waking up repeatedly worried about how we could get so much weight up a 2000-foot altitude change over a 6-mile hike.  Cathy’s panic attack was around 1am (which I slept through) and mine was about 4am (which she slept through).  My thoughts revolved around contingency plans if we couldn’t make it to the top.  Would we just turn around and head back? (not likely), camp at another site? (would be a big problem if it turned out to be reserved by someone else), camp at a non-site, off the trail? (dangerous? legal? even possible?).  In the morning, my ingenious wife suggested that a big part of the weight of my pack was the tent, and that we could trade that out for the waterproof tarp and 50’ of rope and make our own tent with a couple trees.  I may not be real bright, but I know a good idea when I hear one.  I pulled the tent out and replaced it with the lightweight materials and feeling a little more confident, we headed for breakfast.

Breakfast was pretty good.  I read up on this place before we came and all the reviews of the restaurant were essentially that “the food was the best of any national park restaurant”.  That may not be high praise, but their dinner menu sounded promising with items like “pork loin chops with prickly pear sauce”, an 8-oz rib eye, pasta dishes, and some tex-mex stuff.  We had kind of a better-tasting equivalent of a Denny’s “Grand Slam” (eggs, pancakes, sausage, bacon, hash browns, and toast) which was big enough to split, came back to the room for our burdens, and walked across the parking lot to the trailhead.

Up the pinnacles trail we went, full of optimism and spirit.  We would look back occasionally at the lodge, a little oasis of condo-like buildings in a basin surrounded by peaks.  See that little “mini-mountain” by the buildings?  The patio of the restaurant has a great view of the top of it and we happened to look up on the way to dinner and saw a person walking around on the peak.  We were impressed by his feat, until we saw the molehill from this vantage point.  “You’re not king of the world – we are!”

Pretty soon, some time past the water tank that supplies the facility, we lost sight of our home and had to focus on the journey.  Zen advice:  don’t think about how far away the top of the mountain is; just think about getting to the next turn on the trail.  Okay, that kind of advice works for a while…

Most the pictures are of Cathy, since Kevin held the camera most of the trip.  They say that if you’re not the lead dog, the view never changes, but this was a nice view to follow.

Hey! Turn around!

Kevin, looking chipper after less than a mile

Pretend you don’t know she has a camera – no acting skills here…

The basin is made up of named peaks around the small area that was cleared out for some lodging and gift shops.  The most famous of these peaks is “Casa Grande”.  The large vertical rock that makes up the upper part of this mountain looks much less wooded and green than other large mountains in the same range.  It had me wondering out loud if any of it was open to hiking.  I read later that it is, and it’s a very difficult side trip from the “Lost Mine” trail.

The day before out big trip we hiked down to “The Window” which is a narrow gorge through which a small stream trickles and becomes a 200-foot waterfall, the tallest in Texas (which says more about Texas waterfalls in general than this particular one).  We got to see a very nervous mother watch her teenage children venture out as close to the edge as they would dare, then we got to check it out as well

After the portion of the trail called “The Pinnacles”, so-named for the favorite card game of local miners (they were poor spellers), we started up Boot Canyon trail.  The canyon is watched over by a very tall rock formation with a good resemblance to an inverted cowboy boot.

At boot spring, we found the pool to refill our drinking water

and took a rest to stretch our backs.

At Colima trail, hikers have the option of cutting off most of the ascent and half the distance by cutting west through to the Laguna Meadow trail and heading back to the basin lodge.

About lunch time now (chicken salad and crackers, dried fruit, beef jerky), and we came across an absolute oasis.  There’s a picnic table just past the Colima trail turnout and a small off-grid building that I can only assume is a storage shed for tools that the park service uses for trail maintenance: shovels, rakes, and other implements of destruction (279).  I thought it was way cool to find a little solar-powered building halfway up a mountain.

They have 4 panels just like the ones we just put on our barn (120W each or so), and they are doing rainwater collection from the gutters into a storage tank.  I guess they use it for hand-washing and mixing concrete, or possibly even treat it for drinking.  Several times I marveled at how difficult the work of building and maintaining these trails must be.  Imagine having to walk 5 miles uphill to work before engaging in heavy labor with railroad ties, wheelbarrows of rocks, and spreading human manure from a composting toilet.  Serious hats off to the National Park Service.

Jelly is so passe’.  I decided to have a peanut-butter-and-dried-strawberry cracker.  Dee-lish.  Cathy feels ready to go after a hearty lunch.

After about 8 hours of hiking, mostly up, this was our first view from the South Rim.  The mountains in the distance are part of Mexico’s protected area in the Chihuahua region.  Our camp site was “SE-2”, one of four sites on the southeast rim.  SE-1 was already taken, and was the closest to this amazing view.  Ours had good access to a nice boulder on which you could sit and look out over the expanse.

At the campsite I thought I had little black bugs on my ankle, but they just turned out be seeds hanging on for a ride.

Cathy arriving at the site – any farther may have been grounds for divorce .

Here’s the Boy Scout emergency tent we packed to save weight.  It worked great!  May not have been super in a downpour, but we did get some afternoon rain and it kept our stuff dry quite nicely.  That little green box is a safe-keeping place for food and trash to keep bears and other grazers from raiding your food supplies.

We explored a short distance from our site and found the coolest surprise.  There was a rocky area and an overlook above a nice valley where we could get a view of the setting sun (352, 353, 354, 355, or 356), and the next morning back to our private boulder for the sunrise (358, 359, 360, or 366).

You can identify many animals by their poop.  We think this may be gray fox or coyote.  Looks a little like my peanut butter and strawberries.

Heading back home now, the pictures are scarcer as we’re tired, jaded, and walking fast (since it’s mostly downhill).  Home at last, ready for dinner (real food!).

Sunday night after dinner we headed into town (Study Butte <pronounced “Stew-dy Byoot”>) to get a card reader for the camera.  On the way, we had to pull over and get pictures of some javelina.  They look like pot-bellied pigs, but are (we’re told) more closely related to the hippopotamus .

I actually waded into the cacti and happened to get between one of them and the other two in his group, causing him to be bold enough to get quite close to me in an effort to rejoin his pack

After that last flash he turned back into the brush to wait for me to leave.  The sunset from the road was very nice.  Here it is reflected on a large lake.  Kidding, no large lakes up here – that’s the roof of my rented Hyundai.

NATURE SHOTS

Several (9?) years ago when we went to the Grand Canyon, we took all nature pictures: plants, critters, scenery.  This trip was no different.  A lot of the pictures we took were to take back and identify later so see if they are anything that might grow in our garden.  Here’s a lonely red flower (unidentified).

We simply called these “blue jays” until we read that the common jay in these here parts is the Mexican jay, which I supposed is what this fellow is. (252).

We didn’t run into lots of mammals (considering the duration of the walk), but we did meet this curious but cautious squirrel.  He peered out at us from the safety of his rock fort.

This pretty red flower growing right up among the leaves of a prickly pear is called “Scarlet Lady’s Tresses”.  We learned this from our new-found friends with the Houston Arboretum.  Rob had found this very same flower the day before and shown us a picture of it.  We took the same picture of the same flower.  I’m told that the only place in the world that this plant grows is Big Bend National Park.

There are these neat-o trees with paper-thin bark that appears to shed like snakeskin.  If anyone wants to identify it for me, 50 points.  Texas-sized waterfall.

Walking along after lunch, I was walking in the lead and Cathy suddenly screamed like a little girl.  I thought she had hurt herself and whipped around to see her pointing at a very frightened rattle snake.  It then registered that I had heard the rattle right before the scream.  I don’t know why he didn’t react to me, having just gone by seconds before, unless I woke him when I walked by.  I tried to get a decent picture of him, but he was already heading through the grass by the time I could point the camera.  Shortly after the snake, we saw our first white-tailed deer, not counting the ones that hang out by the lodge, untroubled by tourists.

This place is so amazingly beautiful that it’s almost impossible to take a bad picture (303).

We often rested our shoulders by letting a rock support the pack for a short stretch break.   This colorful bug is a Desert Lubber Grasshopper.  Here’s a hummingbird we saw while perched on our private boulder.  We were lucky that he sat still long enough to get a nice picture.

More deer – small 6-point buck on the trail from the camp site to the composing toilet.  We had a little doe that came around our site and grazed within 25 feet of us.  As the rain clouds are gathering over our site, there look to be a couple downpours in the Rio Grand valley.  Good for the plants.  We were walking the ¾ mile from our site to the toilet when the rains really came.  Our $0.99 emergency ponchos came in handy.

That’s pretty much the end of a tiring weekend.  I’m in bed at 11:23pm as I type this.  Tomorrow, we’ll be lazy most of the day and take a sunset pony ride.

Good night!

Hello from the Mountains!