2006/01 Southwest USA trip (MN-TX) - Ojito Adentro, Big Bend Ranch |
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Sunday January 22nd 
Happy birthday to me! I got a shower for my birthday, back at Saucedo. 62 is an important birthday in the USA, as that’s the earliest you can get a social security pension. Not that you get it immediately as it’s paid two months in arrears just in case you die and cheat the government out of some money. 62 is also important to us, as it’s the age at which we can buy a Golden Age pass which gives free access to all national parks and monuments and many other federal areas, 
as well as half-price camping at those places. The pass wouldn ’t help for where we were now, as Big Bend Ranch is a Texas state park, not a national park.
We were leaving the park this day but we wanted to see as much as possible, so we had a slow drive out. This was just as well as the road was busy with longhorn cattle, many groups of mule deer, 
suicidal quail and the occasional roadrunner scooting across the road. Unlike in the 
cartoons none of them went “Beep beep” and we have yet to see Wiley Coyote. For the roadrunner, safety always seems to be on the other side of the road. They are notorious for running in front of cars, and it seems like they go to warp as they hit the roadway. Their heads go down and their legs speed up to a blur. The picture here was a mistake on my part but I think it’s a good representation of the 
roadrunner’s life!
We hiked down to a grove of cottonwoods at Ojito Adentro, which means “inside spring”. The walk through the 
cottonwoods was easy but the end of the canyon was more of a scramble over rocks and under tree limbs than a hike. At the end of the canyon, water was seeping from a number of places and the result was a mass of ferns up the canyon wall, a strange sight in the desert. The picture of Sandie on the rock was taken from inside the cave. A little further on we saw some ocotillos starting to bloom, with red 
buds on the ends of those murderous “coachwhips”.
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Big Bend Ranch (4.19) |
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A lady flagged us down at Los Cuevos Amarillas (yellow caves). She and her husband have been the ranch’s campground hosts for the last two months. She’d flagged us down to show us the pictographs in the caves. The caves are really low overhangs, with the roofs blackened by thousands of years of cooking fires. The pictographs were probably 
painted by artists lying on their backs and that’s the best way to see them too. She 
showed us hands, stick figures, and a lizard. She came from Sydney, Australia and her husband from Texas. They used to run a resort up in Glenallen, Alaska, where we spent two very soggy days with John and Edna last summer.