Visiting the Big Bend – Part Two

In this part two or our visit to the Big Bend area,(click for Part one) I am going to show you more of the scenic grandeur of the place.  I know that this blog is mainly about birds, but sometime I just have to get out of that mode for awhile.  Not that I didn’t watch for birds during our visit.  We saw a total of 35 species, but I was also overwhelmed with all of the beauty.  You will understand when you see this scene to welcome you in the morning.

Big Bend Sunrise

What a way to start the day.  For breakfast we headed to La Posada Milagro in the Terlingua ghost town for their fantastic burritos and steaming hot coffee.

Energized and ready to go, we piled in the car and headed out.  We entered the Big Bend National Park and headed for Ross Maxwell Highway.  It is a route that will take us past some high scenic views and on down to Santa Elena Canyon.  Again, I will mostly let the photos do all of the talking, as to be perfectly honest, I am not an expert on the geologic materials of the land.  A lot of lava created formations dot the area.

This highway skirts the western side of the Chisos Mountains and there are some great scenic pull-offs.  Such as the Sotol Vista pull-off where this photo was taken.  From an altitude of what I surmise to be about 6500 feet, you can see Santa Elena Canyon, about 20 miles distant.

View from Sotol Vista

This is Tuff Canyon, so named for the white material that is beneath most of the topsoil in the region.  There is a hiking path to the bottom of the canyon, but we were content to just roam the rim.

Tuff Canyon

Tuff and volcanic rock formation.

This next photograph, I have named “Texas Moonscape”.  One of my favorite photos of the trip.

“Texas Moonscape”

A lone Loggerhead Shrike surveys the desert for maybe a snack.

Loggerhead Shrike

Old ruins are scattered all over the big bend area, many of them are in this national park.

Old ruins and Cerro Castellan in the background.

Farther along the way, we passed the Cottonwood Campground.  It is a popular RV campsite, but one of best birding areas in the park.  We decided to spend some time checking it out.  We saw many species there including this Vermilion Flycatcher.

Vermilion Flycatcher

Rock Wren

Arriving at Santa Elena Canyon is an awesome sight to behold.  This image shows the Rio Grande exiting from it’s nine mile run through the canyon and heading downstream to cut more canyons on it’s journey to the Gulf of Mexico.  These walls reach a height of 1,500 feet.

Santa Elena Canyon

After spending some time at the canyon, we decided to return by the Old Maverick Road.  It is a thirty mile rough, washboard road that will eventually return us to the park entrance, but not before showing some amazing scenery and this old Mexican Jacal.  A man by the name of Gilberto Luna built it when he was first married.  He lived there all of his life, had five marriages and many children, finally dying in 1947 at the ripe old age of 108.  So if you do the math, this jacal is roughly 150 years old.  The National Park Service manages to keep in close to original condition.

Gilberto’s Jacal

That pretty much concludes our visit.  Of course, this is condensed as I had taken several hundred images.  But I believe I covered the main points.  I hope you enjoyed the journey,

Red-tailed Hawk

and on the way out of the park, I managed to capture this amazing beauty.  What a great way to end the trip.  I can never get enough photographs of the beautiful Red-tailed Hawk.

Click any image to see beautiful enlargements.

Happy Birding!

 

Bob’s Best of the Big Bend

When I noticed that Far Flung Family Center was asking for people to submit favorite photos of the Big Bend for their Facebook page, I thought I’d post a few of my own favorite images from my past visits to that magnificent area.  This place is dear to Ann’s and my own heart.  We visit there around twice a year, and always find new thrills.  These photos are not of birds, but some of my own favorite images from Big Bend National Park

Rio Grande with Santa Elena Canyon in background

Above is one of my favorite images in Big Bend National Park.  We were on the Ross Maxwell Highway heading down towards the eastern entrance to Santa Elena Canyon.  Aproximately five miles before reaching the canyon proper, the Rio Grande makes a bend towards the highway.  I used a wide angle setting on my 24-105mm zoom that was attached to my Canon EOS 7D.  With that, I was able to compose the picture to include the canyon in the background in the upper right.

Santa Elena Canyon

This is the eastern delta of Santa Elena Canyon.  The Rio Grande comes out of the canyon here on it’s journey to the Gulf coast.  As you can see in the picture, the water is running pretty shallow at the time of this photo.  You can see some canoers  getting ready to paddle upstream into the canyon.  The walls soar upwards to 1,500 feet, and you might see Peregrine Falcons flying overhead, as they nest in these cliffs.

Mountain Paintbrush

One of the wildflowers that you might see in the Big Bend is this Mountain Paintbrush.  I love the vibrant, glowing reds of the blossoms.  Mountain Bluebonnets are plentiful here in the spring, also.

Desert Storm

A desert rainstorm can pop up anytime, with cooling rains.  Those tall desert plants in the foreground are Ocotillo.  They are tall with glowing, fiery red blossoms on the tips of the stalks.  We have two in our yard at home that are about 18 feet tall.

Mountains in the Mist

This is an image that was taken on a really, really wet day, early in the year.  Heavy, water laden clouds were everywhere.  The mountains of the Chisos range were peeking about the lower clouds.  I was having difficulty keeping my cameras dry, so I was photographing from the car window.  That is not a difficult task, however.  Fortunately, traffic was very light, mostly because of the obvious bad weather.

Desert Butte

On drier days, this is a very familiar sight in Big Bend National Park.  Great vistas of mountains and buttes.  In such an environment a person has trouble in deciding which way to aim the camera.

Bobcat photographed near Rio Grande Village Campground.

Wildlife abounds Big Bend National Park.  High in the Chisos are approximately thirty black bears.  Throughout the rest of the park are bobcat, deer, rabbit, birds, hawks, small varmints, not to mention about two dozen or more mountain lions roam.  Recently, desert long-horned goats have been introduced to the area.

I was fortunate to photograph the Bobcat near the Rio Grand Village Campground in the eastern part of the park, near Boquillas Canyon.  As I drove through the deserted campground, he, or she, leaped from the brush and promptly sat down near a tree.  I used my 100-400mm lens from the car for the photo, before it loped off, nearly in the path of a hunting coyote.

Mule Ears Peak at dusk.

Another of my favorite images from the park, is the photo of the Mule Ears Peaks, taken near dusk.

I hope you have enjoyed this pictures and narratives.  Prints are available for sale if you are interested.  Just contact me for particulars.  Click on any image to see an enlargement.

Big Bend National Park Images

I have been going through old images again.  It’s what I do when I don’t have anything excitingly new to publish.  I just like to see what kind of trouble I can get into, or stir up.  Anyway, here are some photos that you may not have seen.  When I am not photographing birds, my other passion is the rugged and beautiful landscape of Big Bend National Park.

Santa Elena Canyon and Ocotillo

Santa Elena Canyon is one of my favorite spots.  A person can take Ross Maxwell Scenic Highway, that travels the western flanks of the Chisos Mountains, and ends up at the mouth of this awesome canyon.  The Rio Grande River flows through it, creating the immense 1,500 foot walls, that are a scarce 50 yards apart.  A trail of less than a quarter of a mile takes you right up face-to-face with the base of these walls at the entrance.  An easy, but sandy, walk.  The above image was made from about 2 miles away, from the nearby old Maverick Road.  We had just visited the ruins of Roberto Luna’s jacale and were headed back towards the canyon.  The ocotillo was in full bloom and I couldn’t resist this shot.  It was shot on film with my old EOS3.

At another point on the highway, there is a turnoff to have a great view of the Mule Ears Peak.  You can easily identify why it got it’s name.  The view is always changing with light and time of day.  The photo that I have here was taken early in the day, if I remember correctly.  I love the ‘layered” look of the smaller foot hills.  I have photographed the peak many, many times, but I have never gotten an image that really knocked my socks off.   This one is one of my better ones.

Mule Ears Peak

On one trip we made to the BBNP, the weather was very, very rainy and drizzly.  I was excited that the mountains were sometimes covered or shrouded in cloudy mists.  It seemed that I was stopping every mile or so to shoot an impressive scene.  So, it was inevitable that I would forget where one of my images was taken.  I remember stopping for the shot, because of the peaks above the clouds, but on subsequent trips I haven’t been able to remember the place.

Mountains in the Mist

I hope that you have enjoyed these scenic photos from my past.  Click on any image to see an enlargement.

Photography: Showing scale in images.

This is a short post about an interesting subject.  Steve, over at  http://photographyfree4all.wordpress.com/  blog, or see my blogroll at the right, posted an interesting article about showing scale in your landscape and scenic photos.  He is so right in describing how necessary it is. 

Here is one of my photos of Santa Elena Canyon, in Big Bend National Park.  The canyon walls rise 1,500 feet and I wanted to show the scale in the photo.  I was on a narrow trail on the north wall, about 100 feet above the Rio Grande River.  I was trying to show a total view of the walls in the photo, so I needed to do a vertical shot.  I needed that something to show scale, as Steve mentions.  I noticed a hiker plodding along the shore below me.  I waited until he walked into the frame, before snapping the photo.  Here is the result, and you will see the tiny hiker down in the bottom left corner.  Click on the image to enlargement.

Hiker in Santa Elena Canyon

It always amuses me, when I have this photo on display at art shows.  People will notice the canyon walls first, then when they finally notice the hiker, it is like,  WOW!, it blows their mind.  But without the hiker, those grasses wouldnt look as large as they actually are.

Some scenic photos.

The subject of this blog is supposed to be birding, photography, and utter nonsense.  Well, you’ve seen a lot of my birding photographs, and hopefully got a laugh out my utter nonsense, but I’ve never got into talking about my scenic photography.

Actually, landscape and flower photography was my major effort before somebody got me hooked on birding.  This afternoon I ordered from B&H Photo a Canon 10-22mm, f3.5-4.5 super wide angle lens.  I have decided that I need to get back to some scenic landscape and flower photography. 

Now that doesn’t mean that I am abandoning my birds and wildlife.  Absolutely not!  However, this does give me an excuse to show off a few of my older landscape photos here.  See how smooth I got that all in?? 🙂

First up is one of my favorite shots of Santa Elena Canyon.  I had waded across Terlingua Creek so I could take the trail up to an observation point inside the entrance to the canyon.  After reaching that OP, I continued a little further on the trail.  I decided to get a vertical shot of the canyon, but I needed to show something that would give the photo some perspective.  I stood on this 4-foot wide trail, about 75 feet above the Rio Grande River and waited for that tiny speck of a hiker that you can see down in the lower left of the picture.  Then I was able to get a very nice exposure, showing the sheer 1500 foot vertical cliffs.  That large rock you see along the shore around the bend is probably about four stories tall.  How’s that for perspective?

Hiker in Santa Elena Canyon

This next picture I have entitled “Beachcombers”.  We were vacationing in Michigan visiting relatives.  We were at the beach on Lake Michigan and my wife and her mother decided to search the shoreline for driftwood, etc.  The patterns of their footprints and the eroded pilings in the water caught my eye.

Beachcombers

The photo of the mission ruins was taken down at Menard, Texas.  The mission, as you can see, is mostly fallen down.  As a matter of fact, as we speak, it is really in pieces, as a conservationist group is in the act of completely restoring it.  However, when I took the photo I liked the way that I could get the two arches to interact.  I sold the one-time rights to Wild West Magazine two years ago for an article they were doing about the Presidio De San Saba mission.

Presidio de San Saba

There is a movie set on the Rio Grande river just a little west of the resort of Lajitas.  Several movies including “Dead Man’s Walk”, and a Brooks and Dunne music video were made there.  When I first discovered the place it was really on private property.  I just wandered on to it, thinking I had run across and old Mexican village.  But then I noticed that some of the “buildings” were just imitations.  Of course, it is now part of Big Bend Ranch State Park and open to the public.

Casa Adobe

I hope you enjoy the photos.  If so, I may add some more at a later date.  Click on any image for an enlargement.