We left Seminole Canyon State Park on Thursday morning and drove to Big Bend National Park. We covered the remaining 80 miles of “no services” road through the desert, watching the changing landscape as the hills turned into mountains. We continued on to Marathon where we stopped for groceries. We had stocked up in Eagle Pass at an HEB before going to Seminole Canyon, and had expected that we would pass another grocery store along the way to Big Bend NP. When we reached Marathon, we were surprised to find that the grocery store was basically a camp store called The French Grocer, which had minimal selection for produce, and a lot of overpriced basics. We decided it would be better to suck it up and get things like overpriced frozen vegetables rather than driving further into Alpine and spending in fuel and extra mileage what we would have saved by shopping elsewhere.
We continued south to the park through a lot of nothing but beautiful desert and mountains. The road from Marathon turns into the park road, and after checking into the park, we continued another forty miles or so to the Rio Grande Village Campground where we had managed to book one night, stopping at pull offs along the way to take photos.
We continued south to the park through a lot of nothing but beautiful desert and mountains. The road from Marathon turns into the park road, and after checking into the park, we continued another forty miles or so to the Rio Grande Village Campground where we had managed to book one night, stopping at pull offs along the way to take photos.
We pulled into the campground and found our spot. I took the dogs for a walk on the grass while Tom set up the camper, and the first thing I saw was a coyote just wandering through the campground. I yelled to Tom to come out with his camera, and one of the rangers heard me and moved to shoo the coyote out of the campground, but not before Tom got a few photos. I then continue to let the dogs wander through the grass, where I saw many kinds of poop. After settling the dogs in the camper, we went to find the camp hosts, whom we had met in New Orleans at Faubourg Brewery. I mentioned the coyote, and Nancy told me that the coyotes go through fairly frequently, as well as javelinas (which we know as collared peccaries), as well as horses and cows which cross into the campground from Mexico. That explained the wide variety of poop!
The campground is right on the Rio Grande, so we took a wander on the trail that runs around the campground and went down to the river to touch the water and take another look at Mexico, which is much closer to Big Bend National Park than it is to Laredo since the Rio Grande isn’t quite so grand closer to the headwaters. The landscape surrounding the campground is stunning, so we spent more time taking photos than walking. We were surprised when we looked at a map and realized that the campground is on an oxbow in the river, so the majestic mountains surrounding it are all in Mexico.
We spent a quiet night in the park and didn’t hear any planes, trains, or automobiles, other than the odd camper leaving super early the next day. Because we could only book one night, we had booked two more nights at the Big Bend Ranch State Park on the other side of the west entrance to the national park. Our plan was to take a drive down the Ross Maxwell Scenic Drive, with stops for a few short hikes. We only made it about eight miles down the scenic drive, however, because we stopped for a hike on the Upper Burro Mesa Pouroff trail which, despite being only about 3.5 miles, took us almost two hours by the time we climbed around a bunch of boulders in the wash and took a bunch of photos.
We got back to the camper around 1PM, so we decided to get lunch and head to the state park, where we could sign into our campsite there after 2PM. This meant we didn’t drive the rest of the Scenic Drive, but we didn’t know what to expect with the state park camping situation and wanted to give ourselves plenty of time to get to the visitors’ center there before it closed so we could find our campsite and get settled well before dark. We ended up being very happy with this decision, since the Big Bend Ranch State Park camping situation is very different than anything else we’d encountered so far on our trip.