2006/01 Southwest USA trip (MN-TX) - Old Ore Road |
|||
A canoe company arrived at Solis to pick up people who’d been canoeing the Mariscal Canyon, just upstream of us, so we left the crowd behind and headed back to the main road, this time going the easy way! We booked up for some more nights of backcountry camping and then drove up into the Chisos Mountains. These feature great spires and hoodoos, and they are much greener than the Chihuahuan desert, with junipers and 
oaks, as well as many agave plants. The agaves are also called century plants as they are supposed to flower after a hundred years and then die. The time period is more like 25-50 years, but the flower is magnificent, a stalk 10 feet high. All the plants we saw with stalks were dead, so that much is true. The flowers mature into complete plants, high on the stalk, and when the stalk finally falls over some of those plants will be lucky enough to take root. The Chisos Basin had its own herd of deer that were working the campground and the parking lot, looking for unhealthy food.
After our days in the wilderness the Chisos Basin seemed crowded with lots of weekend hikers, so we justdumped our tanks at the campground and filled up with water and headed out towards our campsite at Telegraph Canyon, along the Old Ore Road.
 |
Big Bend - Chisos (0.45) |
 |
|---|
We had plenty of time to get there in daylight, but first we just had to drive out to the Dagger Flats road, and that had this really neat forest of ten-foot-high dagger yucca. The name is well-earned, as each leaf ends in a hard dagger point, just an inch or so from its neighbours.
When we finally got to the Old Ore Road we found that it was mainly rock with lots of holes and trenches, so the going was slow. We came to an area of horizontally layered rock, and the hill down to a stream was contoured like a great crumbling staircase. This took a while to bump down, and then, of course, we had another staircase to climb on the other side of the stream. Then we were treated to a really gorgeous
sunset, and, after all the picture-taking, we were left with about ten miles of this rotten road to cover in the dark (again!). I had to get out with a flashlight a few times to see where the road had gone. 
The campsite was on a spur road, a welcome sight.
Sunday January 15th 
I took an early walk up the canyon following the old abandoned telegraph line route. Last night in the dark the canyon had
seemed to be looming around us, but in daylight it was quite open and we were a way from the canyon walls. The area seems to favour the little barrel cacti called rainbows, and Sandie loves those, so we made a late start and had even slower progress for a while. But we got lots of cactus pictures. The last 15 miles of the Old Ore Road were very scenic, with lots of cliffs, canyons, and hills. One of these was so steep that most of the luggage stacked on our bed slid back and fell off, so by the time we came off the road, the camper was in an even worse mess than usual.