5/14 – 5/16/21
5-14
The wind that had rocked my car all night was still blowing when I woke, and still filled with the whine of semis on the interstate. I felt no inclination to linger at my campsite. Turning onto the highway that would – in a hundred miles or so – bring me to Big Bend National Park, I put on my sunglasses, set the cruise to 82, and savored the feeling of speeding through a desert at dawn. I was enjoying myself so much that I failed to notice the Texas State Policeman parked just off the road. But he noticed me. Fortunately, I got off without a ticket.
After about an hour and a half of (slightly slower) driving, the hazy Chisos Mountains appeared on the southern horizon, and I entered the national park. I was immediately struck, as I had been during my last visit, by the grandeur of the high desert – ravine-scarred hills, endless horizons, clouds trailing wraithlike streamers of rain.
I headed straight to Santa Elena Canyon, probably the scenic highlight of a park filled with scenic highlights. The southern edge of the national park (and, of course, the nation) is the Rio Grande. It isn’t especially “Grande” here – only thirty or forty feet across, and shallow enough to wade – but the action of its silty current has carved a series of canyons, some more than 1,500 feet deep, through the mountains and mesas around Big Bend. Santa Elena Canyon is the most impressive of these.
The cliffs that marks the course of the Rio Grande (and the international border) are visible twenty miles away. As you approach, they rear higher and higher, until they dwarf every other feature of the landscape. You drive along them, paralleling the river, for several miles. And suddenly, as though cloven by a titanic axe, a gap opens in the cliffs, and the river turns into it. This is Santa Elena Canyon.
The trail into the canyon offers sweeping views of the river and cliffs. The real highlight, however, is the trail’s end, where footsore hikers can remove their shoes and wade down the sandy river bed. Since the water was low – it never reached above my calves – I was able to walk up the river for nearly a half-mile, staring up at the cliffs and enjoying the novelty of crossing and re-crossing the international border.
By the time I returned to my car, the temperature had risen into the nineties. Trying to ignore the heat, I spent the rest of the afternoon doing a series of short hikes through the rocky desert that covers most of the park. During the longest of these hikes, I noticed dark clouds massing over Mexico. They moved toward me, filling the southern horizon. Lightning flickered and thunder rolled as I hurried to get back to my car before the rain began.
Then, for some reason, the storm stalled over the river. It loomed there as I drove to my campground (the first in my experience to have an on-site store for guns and ammunition). Finally, just after I finished my shower, it struck. As I sit in my car, writing this entry, rain pounds the windows and lighting arcs overhead. As of 10 PM, if my car thermometer can be trusted, the temperature is still 90 degrees.
5-15
Just before dawn, as I was leaving my campground, I paused for a final picture of the cliffs along the Rio Grande. Then I plunged into Big Bend State Park, the National Park’s seldom-visited neighbor. For fifty miles, I followed El Camino del Rio – the River Road – which parallels the Rio Grande through the desert. Windows open to the humid morning air, I passed beneath a long procession of cliffs, tops kindled by the rising sun.
A few miles down the road, I stopped to explore a deep slot canyon. The hike was endlessly photogenic – glowing red stone on either side, a sliver of blue sky overhead, the hush of the canyon floor broken only by my footsteps.
I took another, rather less magical, hike farther west, where a natural sculpture garden overlooked the river. Although it was still only mid-morning the heat had returned with a vengeance, and my shirt was sticking to my back by the time I retreated to the air-conditioned fastness of my car.
Reaching the end of the River Road in the dusty border town of Presidio, I launched myself into the emptiness of west Texas. I stopped a few times – to check my emails in Marfa, to get gas in Van Horn – but continued steadily north until the hazy peaks of the Guadalupe Mountains appeared on the horizon, framed by thunderstorms.
I arrived at Guadalupe Mountains National Park a few minutes before the heavens opened. After waiting out the storm in a picnic shelter (I passed the time by making dinner), I emerged for a short hike. The trail was nothing special, but the views of the desert below – starkly outlined against the darkness of the retreating storm – were memorable, especially after a rainbow sprang into being behind a pale mesa.
A short drive north brought me to a free campground near Carlsbad Caverns, where I watched the sun set over a line of crimson hills. For a few minutes, as drizzle fell from a passing cloud, another rainbow arced overhead.
5-16
I began my day at Carlsbad Caverns. Since I was part of the day’s first tour, and almost the first one off the elevator, I was able to wander more or less alone through the cavernous Big Room. The scale was almost overwhelming. The ceiling was over 200 feet high in places, and the walls far enough apart to be almost invisible in the dim artificial light. Except for my footsteps, the only sound was dripping water.
Impressive though the Big Room’s size was, the real highlight was the variety and beauty of the limestone formations along the walls. Stalactites festooned the ceiling by the tens of thousands, ranging in scale from delicate needles to mighty pillars. The walls radiated, the floors flowed, the ceiling descended in an infinity of figured stone.
After leaving the caverns, I began a trek across New Mexico. It was a long drive, and felt even longer than it was. Most of New Mexico is desert and scrubland, and I followed what seemed to be an endless series of two-lane highways through that emptiness. Approximately in the middle of nowhere, I stopped to see the ruins of an Indian pueblo and Spanish mission church, marooned together in a windswept sea of juniper.
More juniper, more desert, more half-dead little towns, and then I-40, and Albuquerque. After stopping for a burger near the University of New Mexico campus, I hit the road again, heading onward and northward as the sun set and a crescent moon rose.
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