On this trip to Big Bend, I twisted my knee on a hike on the South Rim Trail, which limited my mobility for a couple of days. That left me to spend a day hobbling around our Pine Canyon campsite while my partner did a little exploring. Here’s what I came up with.
These were shot with my Leica M6 on the Catlabs 320 Pro, one of my favorite emulsion, especially when developed using 510 Pyro.
Ok, so not so alone. You can see plenty of others dotting the landscape in the background. This was in the Pine Canyon area of the national park. Sotol are plentiful in the Big Bend region, but they do give off a solitary feeling, especially with the wide-open sky as a backdrop. I love the flora of the Chihuahuan Desert.
The agave is known as the century plant because the stalk that bears its flowers only emerges at the end of its life, which can be decades. This particular agave was just outside the lodge at Chiso Basin in Big Bend National Park. I don’t think I saw another one in bloom during our extensive wandering in the park.
A yucca is a common sight around the Big Bend region, but this particular sample along the River Road in Big Bend National Park caught our eye. It’s the same one seen in the post about the Sierra Mederas del Carmen a couple of weeks back, an image that fits the yucca into its environment.
I don’t know much about yuccas, and the ones I’ve noticed before are shorter. Last March, I was lucky enough to visit the Big Bend area when they were in full bloom thanks to a wet winter. I’m told that bloom was particularly magnificent and I was lucky to come across them.
Last time I was in far west Texas, I fell in love with the thorny Ocotillo. It was March after a wet winter – In face it had snowed the day before we arrived at Big Bend Ranch State Park – and the desert was in bloom. Many of the ocotillo were topped with red flowers.
This time around, the ocotillo sported leaves – short stubby greenery that hugged the stems, hiding the thorns from a casual glance and giving them a fuzzy appearance from a distance. But I knew the thorns were there, having had intimate contact with them the last time around. Still, seeing another facet of this desert plant made me love them more.
Big Bend National Park offers some spectacular landscapes, but just across the Rio Grande in Mexico, the Sierra Maderas del Carmen towers over the rive valley like a fortress. The range is part of a protected natural preserve, but far less developed and far less accessible than what we have on the U.S. side.
The first two images were made with the Leica M4-P and Summicron 35 on Cinestill BWXX, a film stock I love for its rich blacks and strong contrast.
The next two were shot on the Voigtlander Perkeo II 6×6 medium format camera, again on Cinestill BWXX. I messed up in developing this roll leaving a bit of staining on the negative.
Being a huge fan of onsen hot springs in Japan, I couldn’t pass up the chance to visit the one in Big Bend. We stopped at the trailhead that leads to the Boquillas Hot Springs to cook dinner, then visited a few other sites before sundown before heading back to take a dip in the warm waters after dark.
At one time, these springs right on the banks of the Rio Grand were a huge attraction. There’s an old post office that’s been converted into a visitors center and the remains of a ‘motor court’ that housed visitors.
Today, they’re just the empty buildings.
Shot on Cinewtill BWXX with the Leica M4-P.
The dramatic cliffs seem to hand over the motor court but are actually a way down the trail toward the hot springs.
The post office looks like a movie set.
And a medium format shot taken on the Perkeo II, which looks even more like a still from an old-time movie.
There was no way our little rental faux SUV was going to make it down even the first steep slope onto the Black Gap Trail, a high-clearance, 4×4 only trail – marked ‘primitive’ on the maps – off of the Glenn Spring Road.
Our car (a more accurate description than the subcompact SUV label the manufacturer likes to use) was already taking a beating on the relatively tame Glenn Spring Road. I was worried enough about what the rental agency would say when I turned it in at the end of the trip.
So we parked the vehicle and walked down the trail to see the actual Glenn Spring, which was flowing nicely but petered out onto a mostly dry creek bed. I decided to make my way down the creek embankment and follow the creek for a bit and came upon this:
This was taken on my Leica M4-P with the Summicron 35. I also made an image with my Voigtlander Perkeo II, a favorite travel medium format camera because it’s so compact. I think I like the square framing better. Here’s the shot:
I’m told it’s a deer skull. I figure someone place the skull on the rock. It was just too perfectly set and there were no other signs of where the rest of the body may be. Then again, maybe it was the work of some scavenging desert critter.
If I stood up, you could see anyone walking along the Black Gap Trail, but the creek bed was invisible from the road. Than and the fact that the National Park folks stress that it’s illegal to carry out just about anything you might find in the park probably explains why the skull was sitting there.
Happy new year. We’re still on the Big Bend journey.
There’s not much of the community that was home to almost 80 people in 1916, according to the National Park Service.
From the NPS website:
“During the second decade of the 20th century, there were several ranches near Glenn Spring, and the village was a social center.
“In 1914, ‘Captain’ C. D. Wood and Mr. W. K. Ellis built a factory near the spring to produce candelilla wax—another form of “liquid gold”. They employed 40–60 Mexican workers to operate the factory, and hired O.G. Compton to run the general store and post office. Candelilla, the wax plant, was the primary raw material needed for the wax business, and the Glenn Spring area not only had an abundance of the plant, but it also had water, another essential ingredient for the wax rendering process.”
What we found was remains of an old corral and a dipping tank, as well as graves marked by stones laid out on the desert floor. It’s a desolate-looking place far from everything and we had a hard time imaging the area as a center of anything.
This is the same roll of the Catlabs 320 Pro developed in 510 Pyro shot on the Leica M4-P with the Summicron 35mm.
The last days of October found me back in Texas to take another stab at exploring Big Bend National Park. This was a re-do of a trip we took in March, when a family emergency led to my partner having to opt out. That trip, I took in Big Bend Ranch State Park (The series of posts from that trip start here), right next to the national park, but not easily gotten to from one to the other.
I loved Big Bend Ranch and hope to return soon. The views in the national park, though, were somehow more grand. It was farm more popular, though hardly crowded. I could go an entire day in the state park without meeting another person unless I sought them out. That wasn’t the case in the national park.
The first set of images come from the South Rim Trail out of the Chiso Basin, a long hike for me on our first day. The day started cold – a front had moved through the previous day coating everything in ice – a rare site, I’m told. You can see that ice on the branches in the second image. That ice was gone by mid morning, even as we gained elevation. We were walking in mist most of the morning, but the sun came out about noon.
Captured by Film 