Cross Country 2016: Day 31 - Big Bend National Park (Day 2)

Santa Elena Canyon and the Rio Grande

Today we passed the three-quarters point of the trip and also passed the 7,000 miles driven mark. And to follow up on my comments about the size of Big Bend, we have driven over 200 miles in the park in two days and still didn’t see everything.

We started this morning with a hike into Santa Elena Canyon. At least that was the plan, but again weather forced some changes. We hiked down to the canyon with no problems but there is a creek that you have to ford to continue the walk into the canyon. We brought our water shoes to cross, but recent rains had swelled the creek to where it would have been waist deep. We watched one couple struggle to do it and decided it wasn’t worth it. The canyon itself was so beautiful itself, rising 1500 feet above the Rio Grande. It was just magnificent and probably the best sight in the park.

Javelina

At this point, I want to talk about some of the animals we have seen in Texas. I’m going to have to use downloaded images because we just couldn’t catch shots of them with our camera. The most impressive was the Javelina, which we saw on our drive today. It looks like a wart hog or maybe a pig, but it isn’t closely related.

Roadrunner

We have also seen several Roadrunners and they aren’t anything like the cartoon. They are brown and really tiny, but they can accelerate like the cartoon one. We saw a coyote at night outside of Pecos and in fact almost hit it. If we could just see an anvil falling from the sky, we could complete our Looney Tunes trifecta. Of course we have also seen a large number of lizards, Texas jackrabbits, and birds of all kinds. No tarantulas or rattle snakes, which are common in the park, but that is okay with us.