Another Windy Day

It's a coolish day, after a really nice warm day yesterday. And the wind was already picking up as we left our campsite and rolled down the mountain to the desert floor. On the way out of Big Bend Park just before we reached Route 90 we went through a Border Patrol checkpoint. This is probably the 4th or 5th checkpoint we've encountered since we got near the Mexican border in California. They have nice German Shepherd dogs that sniff Miss Travelaire to see if she's taking any drugs, and lots of cameras to take her picture. But they are always very pleasant.

 

Going east on Route 90, we were heading right into the wind, and at times it was hard to keep Miss Travelaire from wandering off the road. The motorhome is not too streamlined so the wind resistance is quite severe. Going up any sort of grade with the wind agains't us makes it shift into a lower gear, and I imagine the gas mileage was not too great today.

 

Western Texas is a barren and depressed place, I'll tell you. Old abandoned buildings like this one and dilapidated ranch houses, signs of a happier past, are dotted all along the landscape. And the land itself is a barren desert with scrubby bushes and spotty grasslands, not like the comparatively lush vegitation of the Arizona desert. The highway is lined with ranches, but the cows must really have to work to make a living!

 

We said goodbye to the mountains, and looking forward was a flat landscape, although cut across here and there by canyons of mostly dry river beds. We are coming down the eastern slope of the continental divide now. The desert floor rose from below sea level when we were near the Salton Sea in California, up to above 4000 feet in New Mexico, and it has been loosing altitude since then to the point where we are at 1400 feet here tonight. We came across this deep canyon, of the Pecos River, which winds its way from Northern New Mexico down through Texas to the Rio Grande. We had just gone over this very high bridge over the river. Pretty much all of the other canyons were dry, at least at this time of the year.

 

Not too far beyond this point we camped at Seminole Canyon State Park (N29 41 39.8, W101 19 08.8); this is another dry canyon as you can see in this picture.

 

There are lots hiking trails here along the rim of the canyon, and Doreen and I went for a 3 mile hike along this nice inviting trail after getting settled in to our campsite.

 

There were numerous big rock piles all along the trail that people had built, so Doreen added her rock to this one. You can see how the wind is almost blowing her over!

 

Now, after telling you of how barren it is around here, I have to admit that the desert is not completey stripped of colour. We came across lots of tiny desert flowers that were in bloom like these, which brighten up the landscape.