|
January 15, 2000
| Click on thumbnail.
|
My
second day (1-15) at Big Bend was an out and back ride to Rio
Grande Village and Boquillas Canyon, about 70 miles overall, but
without my 60 pounds of luggage.
The ride to the river was basically one long descent –
from 5400 feet elevation at the campground to 1850 feet at the
river. I had lunch on
the riverbank, looking across the water into Mexico.
It’s a significant river politically and agriculturally,
but it’s really not very impressive in size.
Where I had lunch, the river was about 100 feet wide, and
in the canyon, where it was moving much faster, maybe just 30 feet
wide. A roadrunner followed me part way from the store to the
river hoping for an invite to lunch.
Instead, all he got was his picture taken from pretty close
range.
At
Boquillas Canyon, I hiked a mile-long trail to the mouth of the
canyon where the river has carved, over millions of years, a real
impressive gorge through the mountains. The mountains were
spectacular in themselves – the Sierra Del Carmen Range, shared
by the U.S. and Mexico.
The
ride back to the campground (all uphill) wasn’t nearly as much
fun as the ride to the river, but with the temperature in the
upper 70s, the humidity very low and lots of sunshine, any cyclist
who complains should be forced to spend January in Ohio. |
At
the Visitor Center I learned that the Big Bend region was a shallow sea
about 85 million years ago. A
few million years later, the sea had retreated and the region was a lush
paradise, home to Tyrannosaurus Rex, Triceratops (my favorite dinosaur),
and the largest creature that ever flew, a pterodactyl named Quetzalcoatlus,
with a 35-foot wingspan. Yeah,
that’s about the same wingspan as a typical fighter jet.
Big
Bend has been a National Park since 1944 when the state of Texas donated
over 700,000 acres of land to the Federal Government for that purpose.
The state donation was made possible by the individual donations of
land by scores of Texans. Annual attendance the past two years has been about 340,000,
which sounds very small next to the 3 to 5 million at such places as Rocky
Mountain, Yellowstone and Yosemite National Parks. However, even this attendance level is straining the
resources of the Big Bend region, especially water, as it has been very
dry in Texas for the past year. I
hesitate to say this in print (you know the power of the Internet), but it
really is one of the top ten National Parks in the system and deserves to
be seen by a lot more people. I
for one will be back.
Click
on bicycle to see favorite photos: Part A 
Part B
|
  
  
Copyright ©
1999 - 2000 PBS 45 & 49
All rights reserved.
E-mail questions or comments to web editor, webmaster@wneo.pbs.org
This page was last updated on 01/29/02.
|
(Great
Adventures to Scenic Places)
