2020 Winter Camping Trip Day33, 2020/12/28
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| First part of the trail |
Day4 in Big Bend National Park! We did 3 hikes on the final day in Big Bend. First one was Chimneys. 5.6 miles with 400 feet elevation gain. First 2 miles are completely flat in the great plain like in the left picture, then there are hills. These hills are quite interesting, because there are many petroglyphs and home of Native Americans remains intact.
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| Chimney in the distance |
On the way we saw cactus, but they were mostly red. I heard that it was drought in 2020-2021 winter, probably that was the reason they were red. Some were completely dead. Hope they will get some rain soon.
Chimney is the rocky portion in the distance ahead in the right picture. The most interesting area is the most left rock.
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| Petroglyphs |
There are many petroglyphs on the rock. It is literally a lot. For me it was hard to tell what they meant, but it is exciting to see them. Some are wavy lines some are like faces? Some are circles and crosses. It is interesting to think what they were trying to convey by these, or maybe they just had fun drawing.
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| house |
Next interesting stuff was a house! There is a rocky area with flat ground with roof: rock is a shape like roof for the flat area, as you can see in the left picture. Wow. People lived there. This is a harsh environment: super hot in summer and cold in winter. How could they live there? How did they sleep? On the rock? In the cold? A lot of questions. It is fun thinking about them.
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| Hole |
Another evidence they were actually living there was many holes. As you can see in the left picture, it is obviously human made. These holes were used to grind stuff like grains and nuts etc. The holes were really used for years since they were very deep! One of them were more than 30 cm deep. Also I saw some portion of rocks were black, maybe due to fire. They might cook over fire.
This hike was really nice: somehow this is not popular and nobody in the chimney area when we were. On the way back some people were going to the chimney area. I highly recommend this hike.
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| Mule Ear |
The second hike of the day was Mule Ear Spring hike. It is 3.8 mile out and back with minimal elevation change.
Why is it called mule ear? It is a cute reason. You have an answer in the left picture. You can see the trail as well in the picture. The trail go towards and pass along the mule ear and goes to the spring. Spring itself is not very impressive, just like a small paddle, but it was okay.
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Mule Ear
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This left picture was taken when we were passing the Mule Ear. It is a cool rocky structure.
It was very nice to see the Mule Ear, so we sat down on the good viewpoint and enjoyed seeing it with snack. The Big Bend was quite a way: Texas is big and Big Bend is the real south end of Texas, but it was definitely worth going there.
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Santa Elena Canyon
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The last hike we did was Santa Elana Canyon. First of all, it was very popular trail and hard to get a parking spot at the trailhead. Besides, this was our third hike of the day, which was evening. For most people this might be the first or second hike of the day.
The canyon is massive. That's real immense. As you can see in the left picture, it is very tall. The right side in the picture is US side and the left side is Mexico. This is amazing sight. Only down side was that there were many yahoos. Maybe early morning would be a good time to go there.
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