The week of Christmas, I headed to California to spend the holidays with my family (as I typically do). Felix, my parents, and my brother spent some time in San Francisco prior to Christmas. I finally got taken for a sail on the family boat! It’s certainly not a boat I’d like to own (has a leak), but we had a nice time on the bay. 

Other SF activities included going to the Exploratorium, and seeing not one, but two circus shows! We saw Dear San Francisco, a resident show by the group Seven Fingers, and Echo, a touring show by Cirque Du Soleil. I wasn’t a huge fan of Dear San Francisco– it’s a show in a small theater where they do things like read poetry while doing circus. That’s just not my thing. I like big spectacle, which is what Echo had so I thought it was great. 

My family Christmas occurred as usual. Many gifts were exchanged between humans and cats. Good Chinese food was had. That’s not really what this blog is about. 

The day after Christmas, Felix and I flew to El Paso, TX to see…can you guess…National Parks! We slept in an airport hotel, rented a car, and headed out on a 4.5-hour drive to Big Bend National Park, located in the south western point of Texas, right on the Rio Grande. We arrived just before sunset, so we grabbed some dinner and headed into the park in the evening to attend a Ranger Talk about the night sky. The Ranger talked about stars and planets and pointed out constellations. It was somewhat interesting. Big Bend is supposed to be a great park for star gazing because it’s so remote, but the view looked to me like any other rural sky (e.g. New Hampshire).

Felix is raising the stars?

The next morning we drove into the Chisos Mountains. These mountains were formed from volcanic activity and they rise up starkly from the surrounding area that is mostly flat. Fun fact: the Chisos Mountains are the only mountain range contained entirely within a national park. 

Felix and I did a 1.5-mile hike called the basin loop which offered views of the Window, a valley where you can see out of the mountains into the surrounding area, and the rock formation Casa Grande. You could get almost the same views from the visitor center located in the middle of the mountains, but we did the hike kind of just to say we did something in the Chisos. There are a lot of hiking trails in the Chisos that are potentially cool, but they were a longer commitment than I wanted. 

Next we drove south towards the Rio Grande, stopping at various view points along the way. In the distance we could see a huge, sheer cliff face. The pictures don’t do justice to how tall and looming these cliffs are. I think if I were an early explorer, I would assume I had reached the end of the world. 

We drove to a border crossing station where we could walk to the town of Boquillas de Carmen in Mexico. It’s a very small town on the border that seems to exist purely on tourism from Big Bend. We took our shoes off and waded across the Rio Grande to enter Mexico. 

There’s then a 0.75 mile walk to the town and a bunch of locals offering horse or donkey rides. We opted for donkeys and they were so cute. We were riding with a pack of other tourists but at some point, my and Felix’s donkeys took a different turn than the rest. We had no ability to steer them and assumed they knew the way and were taking us on a parallel path to town. This was cool at first because we were alone. I got to feel like a cowgirl riding in the desert. 

Eventually, we stopped hearing other people and started to feel like something was wrong. The paths we went down became narrower and our donkeys had plenty of opportunities to brush us past thorny bushes. Finally we emerged in some random part of town, seemingly in someone’s backyard. A local woman saw us, laughed, and pointed us in a direction. We couldn’t steer the donkeys in the direction she pointed so we just got off. At this point we were very freaked out. The Border crossing agents told us not to go beyond the main street of town and this definitely wasn’t it. We tried leading the donkeys back the way we came but they wouldn’t budge. I couldn’t ask the woman for help because she only spoke Spanish and I had no service and no ability to translate. Finally we decided our only option was to leave the donkeys and walk back the way we came. I thought they might keep walking on the path they had previously seem so set on but they just stayed where we left them. I’m sure they were fine and got picked up at the end of the day. Felix and I, on the other hand, were very rattled by this. Felix now refers to this incident as an attempted kidnapping by donkeys. 

We walked through the brush until we found the main path and then walked into the town of Boquillas. There’s not a lot to see or do in this town. There were a bunch of people selling tourist trinkets that look hand-made but clearly aren’t because every single stand is selling the same thing. There were also a bunch of children running up to us trying to sell us bracelets. This was unpleasant. We wanted to escape the heat and calm down so we sat down at one of the restaurants in town. I got a chicken quesadilla and it was not good. We did not stay in Boquillas very long.

When we came back, we asked the border agent if he’d heard about the donkeys taking people off path and he said he hadn’t. Seems to have been a freak event. Maybe our donkeys were new recruits and not yet well trained? Maybe they decided they were done for the day and took us on their path home. We’ll never know.

Next, we hiked the Boquillas canyon trail which was a short walk down to the Rio Grande. We played in the river for a bit and hiked back to the car.

On the drive back, we stopped at a spot called Dugout Wells, where a settler dug out a spring and now there’s an oasis. It also had a nature trail. That was the last thing we did.

There were two things I intended to do in Big Bend that I couldn’t do because the roads to get to them were washed out in the floods earlier that year. One of those things involved going down a road that required four-wheel drive, and we had specifically rented an SUV with the intention of going to this spot. The next day, we started with a scenic drive down Old Maverick Road, which required four-wheel drive. This was somewhat just an attempt to get use out of the car we rented. The road took us through a Mesa, which was cool but didn’t come across well on camera, and past a dugout dwelling of a pioneer farmer.

The road ended at Santa Elena Canyon, the site of our next hike. The Rio Grande cuts through this canyon and its walls are 1,500 ft high! There’s a 1.7-mile out and back trail that takes you partially up the canyon walls and then deeper into the canyon. This trail is very popular and I liked it because you didn’t have to do a lot of hiking to see quite a cool site. We also did a hand-to-hand here.

We then drove the Ross Maxwell scenic drive north. We drove past the Chisos mountains and various rock formations, including one called “Mule Ears”.

We stopped for a quick hike at the Lower Burro Mesa Pouroff trail, which took us to a “pouroff” where water collects and falls off the mesa (if it had been raining). I put on my winter coat for this walk because it was so cold and windy. Desert weather is crazy. 

We also stopped at a big scenic overlook. Enjoy this panorama that Felix took:

We continued driving, stopped at the Panther Junction Visitor Center, and then drove out of the park on Persimmon Gap Road. This road was marketed as a scenic drive but really had nothing to see. In this case “scenic drive” was just a euphemism for “long road”. We drove a couple hours to the town of Van Horn where we stopped for the night. The next day, we continued driving north towards Carlsbad Caverns. This included driving past El Capitan (not to be confused with El Capitan in Yosemite) in Guadalupe Mountains National Park (sneak peak for the next post).

Carlsbad Caverns is inside the Guadalupe Mountain range but the exterior (non-cave part) is really nothing to look at. I was surprised how high up the visitor center was. It had quite a view over New Mexico. Also there was snow.

A lot of park visitor centers have 3D topographic maps of the park, which I really enjoy looking at. The Carlsbad visitor center has a 3D map of the cave that I thought was super cool.

The park was super crowded, likely because we were visiting during winter break. I had planned to walk into the cave through the natural entrance, which is about a 1 mile hike down into the cave from the surface, but the natural entrance was closed because it had snowed recently and was too icy. This was a disappointment because I really wanted to experience the long descent into the cave. Instead, everyone had to wait in line to enter through the elevator that takes you 700 feet down into the Big Room. The Big Room is the main attraction of Carlsbad. The park used to offer guided tours of other parts of the cave, but they’re not doing that currently because of budget cuts, so the Big Room was the only attraction. There’s a 1.25-mile trail going around the room that take you past plenty of cool formations. 

Having recently seen Luray Caverns, which is one of the most beautiful caves in the world, the thing that impressed me and Felix the most about Carlsbad is the fact that it is a really big room. A blue whale could have swam through it. 

The cavern was pretty crowded with people, but everyone was putting decent effort into being quiet (per ranger instructions). This was nice. We took a slow walk around and saw the sights. 

We had the last entry time of the day, so the crowd significantly thinned as time went on. After we completed our loop, I decided to walk it one more time in a speed round. I needed to get more walking in after I was denied the ability to walk from the natural entrance.

After re-emerging from the cave, we walked over to look at the natural entrance. There’s an amphitheater built around it because in the spring and summer, people gather to watch a huge swarm of bats exit the cave at dusk. I really would’ve liked to have seen that. Carlsbad was a pretty cool park but I visited at a bad time, so I missed a lot of experiences.

That was the first two parks of this trip. Stay tuned to hear about Guadalupe Mountains and White Sands!