October 9, 2023 – Big Bend National Park, TX

 



Monday morning, we headed back into Big Bend National Park and drove the Glenn Spring Road, a 4-wheel drive road on the east side of the Chisos Mountains.   It started out as a gravel road but got much rougher the farther we went.






        We had great views of the Chisos Mountains.







Some of the gulleys and washes had beautiful red colors.







    We stopped at an old corral and livestock dipping trough.







While walking around the corral area we saw this rust-colored millipede (we think it is a millipede).






We drove across, in, and alongside many washes and gulleys.  The rock formations and colors were beautiful.







This cliff was very interesting – looks like lace.







We saw a horse and a mule grazing – but we are not sure what they are eating as it is pretty barren here.




We took a side road that led to the Mariscal Mine.  Martin Solis discovered Cinnabar (Quicksilver Ore) here in 1900.  Ed Lindsey developed the mine and packed his ore by burro to Terlingua.  W.K. Ellis bought the mine in 1916, constructed furnaces, and shipped out 894 flasks of refined Quicksilver before the price dropped following World War 1.  Several owners later the mine was closed in 1943.




We took this warning sign seriously and did not walk around the site.






We ate our lunch in what little shade the Jeep provided and took some pictures, from the parking area, of the remains of some of the old buildings.







On the way back out from the mine we saw the horse and mule again and they had moved to the other side of the road.  We also came upon two mares and a foal.  We were just in time for lunch. 

The Glenn Spring Road ran into the River Road East which we took back to the highway.

This was a great drive although it was long and hot.




Every day as we went into the park, we drove past these longhorns in a corral at the edge of Terlingua.  Tonight, they were closer to the road, and we saw how big the horns on the bull were.  We don’t know how he could hold his head up. 





Another great day of sightseeing and another beautiful sunset.


 



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

June 4-6, 2009

Image
June 4, 2009 We drove Northwest of Jasper along the Yellowhead Highway to Mount Robson Provincial Park. We saw a moose along the river in the distance but wasn’t close enough to get a picture. We saw Yellowhead Lake and Moose Lake, and had a picnic lunch at the Mt. Robson Visitors Center. The scenery is spectacular – a picture of Mt. Robson. Our site at Whistler campground. June 5 We left Jasper in the sunshine and warm but the further North we got, the colder, rainier and more grey it got. As we turned north on route 40 to Grand Paririe, we started to hit a little snow. Didn’t last long but really woke us up. It stayed rainy and grey until we got to Grand Cache then it started to clear. We also got our first real windshield chip today, but a trip to WalMart and a windshield repair kit later we were fixed. The land here is somewhat hilly, swampy and covered with trees. There are some really big oil and gas complexes and some large lumber mills such as the one we saw in Grand Paririe.
Read more

August 24-26, 2009

Image
We headed towards Flathead Lake Monday morning and stopped in Kalispell to get our air conditioner repaired. It had stopped working a couple of weeks ago and August is not the time to be without an air conditioner. The RV dealer we stopped at gave us the name of the guy who does their air conditioning work. He was able to fix the air conditioner (a switch had burned out) in a couple of hours and we were on our way. We drove to Polson, MT at the south end of Flathead Lake and are going to stay here for a few days. We are staying at Eagle Nest RV, which has a cherry orchard on one side, a golf course on one side and a horse pasture on another side. It is a really nice park with lots of grass and trees. Unfortunately, we are at the end of the cherry season and we might not be able to find any fresh cherries. Tuesday morning we decided to take a drive around Flathead Lake. This is a very scenic area with lots of fruit orchards. We found a fruit stand and bought cherries, peaches, tomatoes
Read more

July 28, 2009

Image
We left Valdez this morning in rain and fog and retraced our route back up the Richardson Highway. We ran out of the fog and rain after we went over Thompson Pass and thought we would be able to see more of the scenery. Not to be, shortly we ran into more smoke. We stopped at the visitor center at Wrangell-St. Elias National Park but it was really smoky so we didn’t stay very long. The ranger there (we think he was a ranger but he looked about 15 years old!) told us that there are currently 60 fires in Alaska and the smoke here is from the fires North of here around Fairbanks. Wrangell-St. Elias National Park is the largest national park in the US at 13.2 million acres. There are only 2 short gravel roads in the park so access is limited to backpacking, hiking and flight seeing. The park is mainly wilderness and has 4 major mountain ranges in it and includes 9 of the 16 highest peaks in the US. Unfortunately, because of the smoke we were not able to see any of them. We turned off the R
Read more