Oatmeal, Texas

We emerged from Big Bend Country and West Texas to land on a little ranch in the town of Oatmeal. The 2020 Census put the population of Oatmeal at 20. The town is unincorporated, technically a part of Betram in Burnet Country in the Texas Hill Country outside of Austin.

The town’s claim to fame appears to be the the Oatmeal Festival held each year over Labor Day weekend. There are town offices, a town windmill, at least one cemetery, a water tower painted to look like a can of oatmeal.

At one time, there was a Black section of town, but there’s no trace of it now. Recently, a police officer discovered an overgrown cemetery on the side of a road that was the town’s Black cemetery, but we couldn’t find clear direction to it. There was talk of preservation efforts and, perhaps, the town wants to keep away vandals and souvenir hunters until they can do something.

Moon setting over Pine Canyon

If I had a choice, I would have chosen a longer focal length than 35mm to make this image, but 35mm was all I had. To my eye, the moon looked a whole lot bigger, as it always seems to do compared to the images I capture.

As it is, you have to kind of work to spot the faint moon. Still, the image has a certain John Ford vibe that I like.

Century plant, not in the wild

I’ve covered quite a few miles traveling around Big Bend region, and the only agave plants I’ve seen in blood were both cultivated. I posted a while ago about the one I saw at the Chiso Basin Lodge. This one was in the garden of the Panther Junction Visitors Center, the main ranger station for Big Bend National Park.

The fact that his agave was planted besides a paved walkway didn’t take away from its grandeur. I like the look produced by the Catlabs 320 Pro developed in 510 Pyro.

Around Pine Canyon (mostly sotol, part II)

I don’t know if it was the time of year or the particular patch of the Chihuahuan Desert, but our campsite was surrounded by sotol and I couldn’t stop taking their picture.

Around Pine Canyon (mostly sotol, part I)

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.

Two takes on a skull in a creek bed in Big Bend

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.

Candedilla Wax Works, Glenn Springs, Big Bend

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.

Back to Big Bend

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.

Recalling autumn in black and white

Here it is December already and autumn is a fading memory.

Back to black and white

I’ve posted a lot color images these past few weeks, but the majority of my work is in black and white. If I go out with one camera, it’ll be loaded with black and white film. If I have more than one camera on me, at least one will be loaded with black and white.

That was the case on my trip to see the Bread and Puppet Theatre this past August up in Glover. These shots were made in the group’s museum where they house puppets – many of them towering – and props from past shows. It’s pretty creepy and at the same time awe-inspiring.

I’ve also included a black and white version of the Cheap Art bus, as well as an image of a storage building that caught my eye because of the way the light was falling on the clapboard siding.