A Hike in the Desert

My wife and I love to hike and love places that you can explore on your feet.  This last week we drove and hiked a park we had never been to but that had long been on our list of things to do, Big Bend National Park.   The first thing to understand about Big Bend is that it is far away, no matter where you live.  We live in a state that is contiguous to Texas, in Arkansas,  but we still put over two thousand miles on our 4Runner driving to and through the park.  Even if you live in a one of the closest big Texas cities you are still fairly distant, El Paso is a five hour drive and Dallas is over eight hours away from the park.  In our case, being a hundred miles from the Texas border, we had a twelve hour drive to reach Big Bend.  

It occurred to me how easy a trip like this is now compared to when I was working.  Back then we would have done the entire drive in one day, because we would only have so many days of vacation scheduled and then I’d have to be back to work.  Its not like that now, we have some constraints, of course, but they are generally optional things like a tennis team match or a volunteer meeting.  My personal plans can trump most other commitments now.  We also would have had to plan in advance, but we decided to go on three days notice this time.   And that is typical, we rarely do anything that is planned out more than a week ahead in retirement.  

We couldn’t leave early on day one of the trip, I had a volunteer meeting I could not easily skip, because I’m running the show on that particular project, and my wife had a doctors appointment.  We hit the road about lunchtime and drove past Dallas and checked into a LaQuinta Inn.  That’s a step below our usual Hampton Inn or Hilton Garden Inn hotels but we were in rural Texas and our other options were Motel 6 or Super 8 and…no thanks.  It wasn’t bad, relatively clean and comfortable.  The only strange thing was the recliner in the room was a total wreck, like it fell off the back of a truck at sixty miles per hour.  But we didn’t need it so it was not a problem. We forewent the free breakfast and found the fifty year old downtown diner where the locals ate.  The food was awesome and the people treated us like family.  We spent the rest of the day driving down to Marathon Texas, just outside the northern boundary of Big Bend.  We stayed at the Gage Hotel, a historic old hotel that had been refurbished.  They had an excellent restaurant as well, we hiked over to the Gage Gardens and walked around, had dinner at the restaurant and turned in early for a full day the next morning.  

We rose early and drove to the park before daylight, nobody was manning the gate so we drove in for free.  It would have been free anyway with my wife’s senior National Parks pass.  We planned to drive more than hike on day one and our first excursion in the park was the Dagger Flats Auto trail.  It introduced us to the different plant species we would be seeing the rest of the week.  It was pretty interesting to read the signs and observe the varieties of succulents and other vegetation.  After that we went to the Fossil Discovery Exhibit.  Amazing to think that creatures as big as T-rex and the massive prehistoric crocodiles roamed what is now an arid dessert. 

We continued our driving tour on Glenn Spring Road all the way to the Rio Grande river separating the US from Mexico.  Its a very small stream this time of year, shallow and barely flowing.  We drove then hiked to the hot springs that are just on the side of the river but they were pretty full of people soaking in the hot water so we skipped doing that.  It was cold and windy and while a warm soak would have been fine getting out would have been hypothermic!

After that we navigated toward the South end of the park where we would stay the next three nights in Terlingua, Texas.  But on the way we stopped to take on our first real hike,  the lost mine trail to the peak.  If you are like me you probably think Texas is a low elevation place, particularly south Texas.  But that isn’t true.  The trail started at 5400 feet elevation and climbed to over 7,500 feet at the tip of Lost Mine peak.  It was nearly five miles and very steep, and just about right for a warm up hike before we got serious on day two.  The wind in the park was intense, I can’t really compare it to Arkansas because its just an order of magnitude stronger in Big Bend.  Literally everything has to be tied down or it will blow away.  To get to the very top of the mountain you had to walk a fairly narrow path with drop offs on either side, and in that wind keeping your balance was just a little bit frightening, but we did it.    The other thing about hiking Big Bend is that elevation.  We live at 220 feet above sea level.  There is lots of oxygen in our air, and believe me, if you live at 220 and hike at 7500 you can feel the difference.  You end up exhausted doing things you would not even notice back home where there is actually air to breathe. Things like tying your shoes!  And hiking several miles with day packs, full of lots of water, is much harder than we expected even though we’ve hiked at higher elevations before.  

Water, its pretty important when you are hiking a high desert.  We always have a back up water filter in one of our packs and in Arkansas and most other places you can find water almost everywhere you hike.  We carry water but not a lot because we can make our own if needed.  But in a dessert, like most of Big Bend, there is no water, zero water.  It rarely rains, there are very few springs and I did not see any ponds or lakes at all. 

Maybe its our aging bodies but that first five mile hike was much tougher than I expected.  We had originally planned on an 18 mile hike for day two but after considering how hard day one was we decided to cut that hike down to 10.2 miles.  We could still make our objective of getting to Emory Peak, the highest elevation in the park, but we decided to skip the extra eight miles the South Rim trail would require.  It was a good choice.  We’ve done 18 miles many times in the past, we did 24 miles rim to rim on the Grand Canyon one time in nine hours, but we were younger then.  We are now in our sixties and maybe a little smarter.  Certainly a little slower. 

We got a fairly early start on the Emory peak climb but it took a long time to get there.  The trail was moderate for about half the route but it got difficult the higher you went with a lot of rocks to go around and plenty of things to trip you up.  The last mile and a half was particularly tough and the last hundred yards were just a mad scramble up the side of the mountain.  The last thirty feet are a semi-technical climb that could easily be life threatening.  Then of course there was that crazy wind trying to throw us off the mountain.  Anyway, we made it and made the return hike back safely.  But it felt like a marathon and my legs were jelly by the time we finished.  It seriously confronted me with the fact that I’m not as good as I used to be.  Even my marathoning wife got whipped a little by the hike.  But we were thankful we could still do something that hard together. 

The last day of hiking we did several shorter trails, maybe five or six miles in all.   We went into Santa Elana canyon which was breath taking.  There was a spot where the Rio Grande was maybe eight feet across, and the other side was Mexican territory.  And the canyon is like that the whole way, with a three hundred foot tall canyon wall on one side in Mexico and an equally imposing wall on the US side.   We also hiked to Tuff Canyon, The Burro Mesa Pour Off and to Balanced Rock, another pretty dicey scramble that felt as more like canyoneering than hiking. One thing I should point out is that Big Bend is a little unique compared to places like Yosemite or the Grand Canyon.  Those places get very  crowded during tourist season.  Big Bend doesn’t get crowded because it is too hard to get to.  We saw only a handful of people on our hikes.  Some places we saw no people at all.  We prefer National Parks that do not feel like Disney World or Times Square, where you see other people, but not thousands of them.  If you like seeing nature without hordes of people its the park for you!

We stayed at the Chisos Mining Company hotel in a three unit rock house up on a hill.  It was nice.   We had a good time each evening driving into Terlingua’s ghost town and eating at one of the cool restaurants that cater to tourists. The Star theatre is the most well known and it is excellent but the others were good too.   We also had great next door neighbors, a bunch of middle aged guys on dirt bikes.  They were a fun group of Texans.  The temperatures ranged from the low thirties in the mornings to the seventies in the afternoons.  Like all high desserts the temperature fell like a rock when the sun set.  The wind was relentless but we got used to it after a day or two.  It was an awesome trip with my best friend in the world, my wife.  Hiking trips with just the two of us keep us close. There is so much time to talk on the road trip and so much to observe on the hikes and scenic drives.  I feel very fortunate to have a partner who loves active pastimes.  I truly believe one reason we’ve been happily married for forty-three years is we’ve both worked to find hobbies we can share and that we could return to after our kids grew up and moved away. We had several friends who found themselves living with complete strangers when the kids left, and those marriages did not do well.  

I think the trip encompassed what I find best about retirement.  It wasn’t particularly expensive and there was nothing fancy about the lodging or most of our meals.  In fact it was a sandy, gritty, sweaty exhausting experience at times. Our legs were screaming at us on some of the hikes, but it was fun! I know a lot of people do not get why we enjoy the dirt and the scapes and the falls and the cactus punctures and the sore muscles.  I can’t really explain it either.  But when you are at the top of a mountain that took hours to climb looking out at a vista that you could never adequately explain with words, its a great feeling.  And when you get back to the cabin and have a glass of wine and reminisce about the days adventures with someone you love,  its so worth it.   

What about you, do you find strenuous outdoor adventures exciting and worth the pain or do you prefer more leisurely leisure? Sometimes in the middle of a very hard hike I question my sanity.  

As an aside, we enjoyed the scenic drives through the park and you can see all the cool sites without hiking at all.  So if you like driving better than hiking it is still a great destination.  One of the best we’ve been to for seeing everything from our vehicle.  We took a high clearance four wheel drive SUV but we saw a Prius doing just fine. 

What is your favorite national park?  I’d say Rocky Mountain National Park or Glacier National Park are probably my favorites so far.