Chihuahuan Desert - Blog Posts
Park visitors can explore excellent surviving traces of the old Butterfield road that wrap around the base of El Capitan, out into the Salt Flats and up to the New Mexico state line
From the Marufo Vega Trail looking across Texas mountains to the Sierra del Carmen across the Rio Grande
A strangler from one of my backpacking trips. I run a tight ship but I did cover him with rocks! Seriously, though, I’ve run across several of these unmarked graves in the backcountry. The desert can be hot, dry, & unforgiving
From the Sierra del Carmen range in Mexico, mines extracted lead, zinc, and silver starting in the 1890s. In 1910, a 6-mile tramway was built across the Rio Grande to present-day Big Bend National Park, where the ore was unloaded from the iron buckets and freighted by mule-drawn cart to the railroad in Marathon. You can see the ruins of the tramway towers’ concrete footings on the riverbank, and the popular Old Ore Road through the Big Bend backcountry. The iron buckets can also often be seen.
Guadalupe Mts. NP is in Texas but the only vehicular access is via a lengthy drive into New Mexico & back down. Would you believe I once took a route through Roswell & was abducted by aliens? Didn’t think so 😁
The Sierra del Carmen, just across the Rio Grande from Big Bend in Mexico, rise to over 9,000 feet