emory peak – day 1
I’m going to try to do something here that I’ve never been able to do before. I’m going to try to review each day of our trip to Big Bend National Park (BBNP). Let’s see who gets bored first, me or you.
We started our road trip right after the husband got off work on Wednesday night. Packing is a lousy chore when you know you’re going to be sleeping in the car. We’ve done it once before, when we went to Guadalupe Mountain National Park, but it had been awhile and we had to make sure we had all of our supplies. We ended up forgetting our lantern but it didn’t make too much of a difference because we had a flashlight.
We recently purchased a Yakima bike rack for our roof rack and it was a bit nerve wracking to drive such a long distance with it. It was also weird to have to pay attention to all the bride and overhang clearances. Needless to say, we didn’t go through any fast food drive thrus.
We drove about 500 miles from Houston to Fort Stockton. This is always the best leg of the drive because we’re pumped, listening to good music, catching up on everything we’ve been putting off discussing, reminiscing about our college road trips, and most importantly, this is when I’m most awake. The drive was a little bit stressful because there were a ton of deer on the side of the highway and I was really nervous about the possibility that they might jump out in front of the car. It was kind of ridiculous how much deer we saw just calmly grazing on the side of the highway. We probably saw at least 50 deer. I’m not exaggerating. I had to force myself to stop looking to the side of the road.
It’s been awhile since I’ve driven around San Antonio but it’s gotten pretty nice! They have a ton of brand new shopping centers and restaurants everywhere. They’re really building up the city — I was taken aback by it.
We got to Fort Stockton at around 1:30 and checked into a nice little hotel. Fort Stockton is a nice, sleepy town. Felt like Friday Night Lights.
We left the next morning after taking advantage of the hotel’s complimentary breakfast and got to BBNP at 11:30AM to try our luck at snagging a good first-come, first-serve, campsite. We were in luck! We got a campsite in the Chisos Basin. If you ever go to BBNP, you should aim to stay at Chisos Basin. The biggest perk is that it’s a good ten to fifteen degrees cooler than the Rio Grande Village or Cottonwood (Castolon). It stays in the 70′s in Chisos Basin during the day and dips down to the 50′s at night. Perfect, basically. That alone is convincing enough for me to want to stay in Chisos Basin, but some other perks are that it’s near the Chisos Mountain Lodge (where there’s a restaurant) and it’s close to a lot of the great hikes. It’s also centrally located so if you want to explore the other areas of the park, you have a convenient home base to start at. Aesthetically, I also think it’s prettier than the other campgrounds because you can see the mountains. Oh, and this is only taking into consideration campsites with flush toilets. What can I say, we’re city kids.
Here’s what our campsite area looked like:
We usually make a point to do our most difficult hike our first day when our legs are still fresh and our hearts still eager. So we decided to tackle Emory Peak via Pinnacles Trail. This was a fairly nice hike because the weather stayed pretty cool and breezy throughout since we were at a higher elevation but looking back, I don’t know if it’s worth the work compared to the other hikes we did. It wasn’t too hard of a hike, there were a lot of flat and level breaks in between the steeper inclines. I think the hardest aspect of the hike was the length of it. It pushed my endurance to its limits.
Here are some photos:
I quit at the last mile. I just couldn’t push my legs or my lungs any farther. I was pretty disappointed in myself but I knew my limits. The last mile is significantly steeper with some hot spots without any shade. I found a shady spot to sit and convinced the husband to continue to the peak with the camera so that I could at least see what it looked like.
Here they are (he’s a pretty good photographer!):
It always feels really great to go back to your campsite and put your tired feet up!
Later that night we went to watch the sunset at “The Window”:
After a tasty dinner at the lodge, we headed back to our campsite.
We watched two episodes of The Wire on my MacbookPro before we finally called it a night and went to bed. We really have a hard time leaving technology behind. It’s actually a lot of fun, because we share earbuds and silently gasp and react to the show’s twists and turns to avoid disturbing others.
I am most regretful that I did not have time to learn to take photos of stars before the trip because the sky was breathtakingly beautiful. I have never seen so many stars in my life. They were blanketed over us in so many layers– it was so mesmerizing. I actually fell asleep with my glasses on because I didn’t want to stop looking at them. What a wonderful way to fall asleep. I may be a city kid but I think I sort of get what the Dixie Chicks are singing about in “Cowboy, Take Me Away.”
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