To Big Bend! (Day 4)

We left Austin under the cover of darkness, just as we had entered (though minus the ridiculous confusing of Sara and Rachel’s arrival). On the road (Rt. 290 W) at 7am, we had already eaten up considerable mileage by mid-morning when we passed through Fredericksburg, which reminded us, as Julia put it, “Of being on a movie set.” The adorable Texan town apparently had been settled by a bunch of Germans, as “eichen” (and other random German words that Rachel didn’t just make up) appeared on more than a couple of street signs, and multiple restaurants advertised “American and German food.” Fredericksburg saw the continuation of Post Office Chicken. The riders in Hank tried to radio to those Liberty and ask for the input of a post office into the more intelligent GPS system, to the consternation of both parties because Hank’s radio would cut out before the message was done. Increased yelling, it turned out, did not increase the ease of comprehension. We put two and two together and switched the batteries. Normal level communication ensued. It took us a couple more rounds of Post Office Chicken to realize that we had run out of small towns along Rt. 290; the interstate was fast approaching. It wasn’t until we were stopped at a Phillips 66 station on I-10 W that genius struck Annie: gas stations receive and send mail too! She ran in with a stack of Netflix DVD’s, postcards, and letters. Annie: 1, Post office: 0.

Since leaving Austin, Rt. 290 and I-10 had proclaimed that we were driving through “Texas Hill Country,” and it was easy to understand why. Every so often, huge cuts in the approaching hills would open and swallow the interstate. The rounded mesa formations were stunning, and offered the most interesting topography since West Virginia. The sheer flatness of our surroundings over the last couple of days made the appearance of these hills even more remarkable. This country significantly differed from the ups, downs, twists, and turns of West Virginia, of course. Here was vast, open sage brush country with no end in sight. No roads crossed the expanse save ours, and the tiny asphalt tracks met the interstate at widely spaced exits with a lonely gas station to mark the occasion. Ranch land lined the edge of the roads, and it wasn’t just any ranch land. Our eyes peeled for legendary longhorn Texas cattle, we were taken by complete surprise when we saw the first band of pygmy goats huddled in the shade. Really? Pygmy goat ranches? There must be a reason Texas is so touchy about people messing with them...

Later, we began to see white toothpicks sticking up from a couple of mesas rising in the distance. Their indistinct forms became recognizable as windmills, and not solitary ones. They stood in shoulder-to-shoulder ranks across the broad mesas, forming vast windfarms that must have covered hundreds, if not thousands, of acres. The night before, Rachel had predicted that the drive across central and western Texas would bring sights of oil rigs pumping the hillsides across gigantic oil fields. It was therefore strangely gratifying to be met first with a vision of such heavy investment in renewable energy, especially in Texas of all places. We did eventually come across some oil rigs slogging away, but nothing to the scale of the new technology that overlooked them from the hilltops.

We stopped in Fort Stockton, a depressing 50s-era National Park gateway town, for groceries and gas. Stocked with food, we headed south towards Big Bend National Park, our first park of the trip.

After 127 miles, we paused to take the requisite park entrance sign photos, and even took one for a Korean family who had stopped behind us. We snaked through agave (century plants) and other species impressively adapted to and thriving in desert life. We detoured briefly to an exhibit describing the Big Bend area of the late-Eocene. We saw fossil replicas of various swamp-style animals, including mini-hippos and the like, as what was now desert had then been a luscious swamp. The exhibit even pointed out the layered gray shale that resulted from the compression of layers of Eocene swamp mud (yes, Rachel took pictures). The short trail led to an incredibly windy promontory, where we experienced a bit of the wind’s erosive scouring power.

We headed to the Panther Junction Visitor’s Center, and talked to a very nice and helpful park ranger who set us up with a backcountry car camping site and some pretty sweet hike ideas. Backcountry permit in hand, we filled every available vessel with water. Even our plastic chicken, which suffered from a condition called “too-many-holes,” saw its fair share of water after receiving a thorough duct tape treatment.

Our campsite was located along the dirt Grapevine Hills road, about 4 miles from pavement. It was smack-dab in the middle of the desert scrub with incredible views of the Chisos Mountains to the south and other highlands to the north. The sun set a bit to the east of the Chisos range, casting a beautiful bruise-colored tint on the haze before the mountains as it dropped below the horizon. An amazing band of cliffs peeked out just above a small rise to the northeast.

Nothing, however, could compare to the stars. The sun’s glow still lingered in the southwestern sky when we could see as many stars as we can see on the darkest night at Echo Hill. As the light faded, more and more appeared out of the darkness, filling in Orion so well that he seemed to don hunting furs as the traveled across the sky. The Milky Way was a majestic wash of light arcing across the sky. We all spent the better part of the night post-dinner and pre-sleep feeling powerless to resist the urge to crane our necks skyward and absorb the sights all around. For the spectacular stars were not merely above us; pricks of light flooded in from all directions. Venus even reflected enough light on its own to brighten a widening arc beneath it towards the horizon, washing out all but a few stars in the vicinity. As we sat in near silence, our patience was treated with shooting star sightings and the Big Dipper’s slow progress as it rose vertically from the horizon, one handle star at a time.

We succumbed to tiredness eventually and reconvened in the tent. As most of us drifted off to sleep, a lonely howl drifted across the open desert. Another howl answered, and soon we could hear yapping back and forth. Apparently a pack of coyotes were celebrating the night sky as well. They are not nearly as eerily haunting as wolves, which we seem to be genetically coded to fear, but coyotes are still just as cool to hear in the wild. They seem so gregarious, yapping and napping at each other like monkeys. Those of us in the tent hoped Sara wasn’t crapping her pants right then, as she was outside by herself.