Good Bye Big Bend - Last Hikes

Sunday was our last day in the Big Bend area, and we still had a full day of things we wanted to do.  There are only two churches in town, so we started at the 11:00 service at the local Baptist church.  Do we need to mention that they had beautiful wildflowers out front?  

 
One never knows what to expect when going to a different church.  But we certainly didn’t expect that the special music would be “Amazing Grace” on the bagpipe played by a local ranger wearing a complete Scottish kilt uniform.  That is amazing!

After church, we changed clothes and headed into the national park for our final two hikes.  The first was a little known hike that is on no map because of the sensitivity of the area.  We knew about it because a hiker we met on another trail was exclaiming about it.  When we asked a ranger, he gave us more detailed directions that included driving on an unmarked gravel road for a couple miles, then walking another half mile to a trailhead.  It was truly a hidden gem.  We thought it was appropriate this Sunday that one of the first things we saw on the trail was this cactus.

It was a beautiful blue sky day, and we were clearly in the middle of a desert hike, so it might be a little surprising to know that our destination was Cattail Falls.  Where could there be a waterfall hidden amongst all this cactus?

We did notice that some of the desert plants seemed larger than usual, so perhaps they were getting a little more water?

 
















This ocotillo was one of the tallest we saw.  Incidentally, we were hoping to see the ocotillo in bloom.  But we must be satisfied with all the wildflowers because we were just a little early for their showy red blooms.

 






After a mile on the desert trail, we started to hear rushing water.  Then we walked into a desert oasis that was 20 degrees cooler and absolutely stunning!

The water was pouring out of the mountain, and we had this oasis all to ourselves for thirty minutes.  It was just beautiful!

 
This cooler and wetter micro-climate was decorated with maiden-hair ferns and columbines--two plants that one would never expect to find here in the desert.
The one thing that we didn't see at Cattail Falls were cattails!
 

There was a pink-flowering tree next to the falls that made a nice artsy photo.

 



Downstream from the roaring waterfall, were smaller falls that echoed the blissful sound of falling water.

It was hard to believe that only 100 yards away from that cool hidden waterfall was the dry desert terrain.

 We couldn't understand what happened to all the water that was pouring over that waterfall.  The riverbed was bone dry!  So Mark (aka Indiana Engelman) had to solve the mystery of the disappearing water.  He hiked down the river bed until he saw the last of it disappear underground.

 This hidden hike was one of the highlights of our time in Big Bend.  But we weren't finished on our final day.  We were now headed towards the Upper Burro Mesa Trail.  

Denisa found this hike described in an article about forgotten canyon hikes of Big Bend in the Texas Highways magazine.  The article points out that few will stop at the unassuming trailhead that begins in "a nondescript grassy valley."  So again, we had the trail to ourselves.  Past the grassy valley, we entered into a series of canyons, with increasingly taller walls and more rocks in the way that we had to scramble over.





 

 We had beautiful blue skies, as you see through this hole in the canyon wall.  This canyon is the Javelina Wash, where the water from the Chisos Basin will drain.  Even with the rains we have received since our time here, there was no moisture in the canyons.






 





The destination in this 3.6 mile hike is the pour off where all the rushing water from these canyons would make a hundred foot waterfall.

The picture above was our view from the top of the pour off down to the dry sand below.  We have found that you lose all depth perception when you try to take a picture straight down like this.  In more scientific terms, we could describe it in the same way that the article did: "The canyon suddenly ends at a huge pour-off.  Be careful, one slip and you're dead."   That's 100 feet straight down.

A few days earlier we hiked the Lower Burro Mesa.  On that day we were standing in that sand far below the pour-off where we were  today.  

We hoped that some hikers would come down that lower trail, so we could take their picture to put some scale to our pictures.  So we made ourselves comfortable in the room-size cavern where the water would swirl before it became a waterfall.  We found a remarkably comfortable rock recliner, and Mark almost went to sleep.  It was a wonderfully cool and shaded place to rest--another one of those wonders we love to wander into.

 



No hikers appeared below, so we finally headed back down the trail.  The first step was getting back up that first group of rocks to enter back into the canyon.  There is definitely some rock scrambling on this hike.  We also had to pay attention to not miss any turns since it would be easy to go down the wrong canyon and never find your car.









In the past we have described hikes by the number of miles, or the number of hours, or even the number of tangerines eaten.  On this hike we saw an unusually large number of lizards. 

Most of them were quite quick, but this one stopped long enough for a photograph.  So we will describe this hike as a 16 lizard hike.

These two hikes were great fun, and it was a gorgeous last day in Big Bend National Park.  We really feel like we have been wandering His wonders! After 8 days, we were a little sad as we left the park for the last time this evening.  Good-bye Big Bend!