Big Bend Ranch State Park - Exploring the Interior (The hard part)

Wow! What a difference a day can make! We were sweating and wearing shorts just 24 hours ago, and suddenly we had snow on the mountains around us and we were wearing coats and gloves!

Even if the weather wasn't ideal, it was time to explore the interior of Big Bend Ranch State Park. While most people only see the parts of Texas's largest state park that are along the highway, we headed into the sections that can only be reached via gravel roads. We had our new set of all-terrain tires on the pickup and we drove into the "hard part" of Texas's largest state park. 

After ten miles of gravel roads, we got to a sign that the park was closed!  What?!?

We are familiar with parks that are closed from dusk to dawn. Had someone forgotten to remove that closed sign this morning? We've had rain, but the roads looked great. We couldn't think of a reason for the park to be closed, so Mark drove right past that sign and continued onward. We would find out that in the high elevations of the interior of the state park yesterday, they got 3-4 inches of snow. After some search and rescue efforts to remove cars stranded in the snow, they closed the park. Sure enough, the ranger was on his way to remove that sign. It was surreal to think that we were sweating in 90-degree weather just the day before!

Our plan was to make a couple hikes in this interior, and the first was the Ojito Adentro. While the hike started in the desert, we didn't take a picture until we got to the area where the spring was providing enough water to support green trees. 

That's something we haven't seen in a while. In the middle of this brown landscape we took pictures of green trees because they were so uniquely beautiful to us after a month in the desert.

The last section of the trail took some rock scrambling to continue, and we wondered if we were still on the trail.

But at the end of the canyon, we found the pour off. That's a desert word that we have come to understand better in the last few weeks. In this dry country, the top of the canyon has a notch where the water will pour-off if they ever get that much water. Considering that we just got 24 hours of light rain and the pour-off was dry, it obviously isn't needed much.

The only water was from the spring where the water was bubbling up rather than pouring down. The water in that small pool was perfectly clear. This permanent presence of water supports the cottonwoods and blackberry plants that were so unique in this desert environment.

The trip back to the pickup meant squeezing back through the rocks that guard this special little green oasis in the desert.

While the weather was cold and windy, we had to take this picture of the tiny spot of blue in the sky over the canyon wall.

We're not sure why someone had taken the time to use rocks to outline a body in the trail, but it seemed like we should take a picture of it. Denisa laid down beside the rock outline here on the Ojito Adentro trail.

It was less than a mile back to our pickup that we left in the trail head parking lot. From here it was hard to believe that a green oasis with song birds flitting through the cottonwood trees could be so close.

For the rest of the day, the only birds we would see were the more usual desert doves.

A few miles down the gravel road brought us to our second hike of the day. We headed up a steep incline to the overlook along one of the canyon walls.

It was a steep drop from that view-point to the canyon floor far below. We are on the Cinco Tinajas Trail, and from here we got our first view of the five pools.

We hiked around to the right to get to the upper tinajas. Tinaja is the Spanish word for permanent pools in a desert, and they were surprisingly clear and deep. 

Just like mountain tops where Denisa is content to sit and enjoy the view, Denisa likes to just sit at the edge of the tinajas as well.

On the other hand, Mark started scrambling along the rocky canyon walls above the pools.

There are cinco (five) tinajas (pools) and Denisa saw most of them as she pointed the camera towards the little dot near the center of the picture below. That dot was Mark, hanging on to the canyon wall.

After more scrambling on the rocks, crazy Mark took this picture of Denisa--still sitting.

After thoroughly enjoying the upper pools, we started on the second part of this trail. That took us over the hill where we spotted some claret cup cactus blooms. 

These are the most beautiful of the cactus blooms, and Denisa had a hard time hiking by one without taking a picture. They are relatively rare, but you would think we were tripping over them constantly based on the number of photos Denisa had of claret cups.

She also liked this spiny relative of the claret cup. The picture below is of the strawberry hedgehog, which will have a strawberry pink bloom later in the summer.

The second part of the trail brought us all the way to the canyon floor. Mark was standing in front of the lowest of the cinco tinajas. He was very frustrated to find that he couldn't climb up that canyon wall to look down into that pool.

While we didn't see many birds on this cold day, we saw evidence that they are permanent residents here in the desert. Without big trees to call home, little desert birds use the branches of the cactus to build nests.

We've been doing a lot of hiking in the desert in the last few weeks. This day we added another four miles to our total. When we got back to the motor home, Mark could feel a cactus spike in the thick sole of his hiking boots. When he looked closer, he found he had many spikes. Using a needle-nose pliers he removed a pretty impressive collection of hiking boot spikes.

This was our last day in this remote part of Texas, so we made the trip into the interior of Big Bend Ranch State Park even though it was blustery cold, and the park was closed when we arrived early in the morning. We enjoyed our two hikes, plus drove further to the Saucedo ranger station deep inside the park. Now we can say that we've explored the "hard part" of Texas's largest state park.