Big Bend day 4: Balanced Rock, Rio Grande Village, and the Window

Look--a picture of me! I didn't know Neil took this so it was a fun surprise to find it just now when I'd asked him about a different picture. 

On our last day in Big Bend, we had a lot we wanted to fit in! We started off by driving the Grapevine Hills Road out to Balanced Rock (yes, it's doable in a minivan, but you'll have to take it slow, and it probably helps if the driver is used to driving stuff like the Shafer Trail or the White Rim Trail. I mostly just squeezed my eyes shut when a particularly large rock appeared and prayed that we wouldn't scrape anything too vital on the undercarriage). 

Such a gorgeous road though!

Balanced Rock is a fun hike because it's SHORT (only like 2 miles roundtrip), but there's a huge payoff and it's gorgeous the whole time. Plus there's a lot of wildlife--we saw too many lizards to count, sheep, and a rattlesnake. (Yikes!) 

I told Jules that the landscape looked like Bryce Canyon and Goblin Valley had a baby. It was very different from most of the park and looked much more like southern Utah or Arizona. 

Sheep!! There were a dozen or so of them, including two very darling babies. 

Gosh the scenery was just SO good, soooooo many cactus blooms. This route was absolutely packed with strawberry pitaya and I think they're my favorite. 

Super curious as to the fruits, if you've eaten them please tell me what they taste like (I mean strawberries obviously but still). 

Seriously. So. Beautiful. 

Neil took the picture below, Matty's little wave is just darling. 

And I'm here again! Thanks, Neil, for actually documenting my existence. 

And we made it to Balanced Rock! 

Matty is very into yoga and he wanted to be sure I clarified that he is doing the Balanced Rock pose from Cosmic Kids Yoga. 

Gosh I love this man, I started a running note on my phone of all the ways he shows me he loves me that are camping-specific (like making sure I get one of the synthetic-fill blankets we use for camping vs down (allergies), bringing and blowing up a little knee pillow for me bc he knows I sleep better with a pillow between my knees, setting up the tent and everyone's bed stuff, driving from 12:30-7:30 AM so I can get a really solid block of sleep, heating water for showers while I'm grading, sooooo many trips where he has fixed someone's car and totally saved their vacation, washing dishes, playing frisbee with the kids so I can have some zen time with a book, going on "star walks" with me every night, remembering to bring his wallet on hikes so we can always get ice cream at the camp store, etc.). 

And then I walked around the other side and found teenagers sprawled out in the shade, haha. 

More strawberry pitaya...all the heart eyes for this. 

And a pic to try to show how flowering EVERYTHING was, like every possible little plant had flowers out, no matter how teeny. 

I also have to note one of the potentially scarier parts of this hike is the rattlesnakes. The little boys saw one and none of the rest of us did (we were following behind and had paused to look out over the valley again). Jules told Nathan to run up ahead to tell Matty to wait for the rest of us, and we heard Nathan yell "Matthew, stop right where you are! Snake!" and oh my gosh, I totally freaked out. But Matthew stopped the instant he heard Nathan's voice and the snake zoomed across the path right in front of Matthew. I am so so so grateful for Juliet's prompting Nathan to go ahead, for Nathan's alertness to his surroundings, and for Matthew's immediate obedience. 

Whew. 

After leaving Balanced Rock, we drove south to Panther Junction and watched the park video (which both Matty and I absolutely loved, Abigail had opted to stay in the bookstore reading a parks book she'd found and when we came out of the theater Matthew marched up to Abigail and told her "You would have learned so much! I learned so much! The video was very very informative!" (which was seriously so cute, I don't know why). Then we picked out our sticker and headed south to Rio Grande Village, which honestly was so boring. We'd originally had camping reservations there in December 2020 (which we cancelled the week before when the Covid cases were surging in Texas) and dang I am so glad we didn't go then, because a) camping in Chisos was way more central and so much prettier and 

b) we would have missed the superbloom, and c) we didn't know it when we cancelled, but the days we were supposed to be there had record snowfall and the park roads were closed, so we would have been stuck in our campsite. 

Anyway, I think Rio Grande Village is probably fun if you are planning a day trip to Boquillas del Carmen, but the crossing was closed when we were there, and we had zero interest in hiking to the hot springs when it was 95 degrees, so we drove the Boquillas overlook road, checked out the village area, and then drove back to the Chisos area. 

Once we got back nobody wanted to do anything but sit in the shade and read or play games, so Neil and I went up to the camp store to get more ice. I found the book that Abigail had been so engrossed in and bought it for the kids, plus another more junior edition (these are SO good and I would totally totally recommend them, our kids were reading them out loud to each other in the car). I even looked them up on Amazon while I was in the bookstore and realized I would be paying more but they were good enough to make it worthwhile, hah! Here's the Guide to National Parks and the National Parks Guide (junior). 




Once we got back, we convinced everyone to do one final hike to the Window, and I am SO glad we did! This was seriously the best hike, everyone was in such a good mood, the weather was perfect, and it was just so so so fun. We mostly had the trail to ourselves going down and then passed a few more people on the way back up (one good thing to know about this trail is that it is ALL downhill, so if you go down in the morning and come back up in the afternoon you will be miserable. The park has all these warning signs at the top of the trail talking about how they respond to more emergencies on this trail than any other). So plan for that if you do this trail! We found it was perfect when we started around 5 PM and it took us about 2 hours to do the 5 miles. 

When they realized that three of them were wearing green shirts, they asked me to please take their "cool guys" photo. Matthew's face, I can't even handle it. And look at Nathan in this photo--he is just so comfortable and happy scrabbling around on these boulders. 

The first mile or so is through typical scrubby forest/cactus stuff and then it dips down into the rocks and starts getting really fun. 

Seriously such a cool hike!

These three pictures aren't from the actual hike, just a side detour across the rocks the kids all were dying to do. (I think everyone came back with a new set of gashes after this one...we seriously went through so many band-aids in Big Bend that we had to stop in Alamogordo to restock. It was nuts. And poor Juliet and Nathan both had awful nosebleeds over and over! Like four/day. Going from humid Midwest to dry desert is no joke.) 


And here's the Window pour-off! It is super super slippery here because the rock is so highly polished (all the water that cascades down the whole canyon in monsoon season gets funneled out here), so we were very adamant about nobody getting anywhere remotely near the edge. I just looked up the distance to the valley from the pour-off edge and it's 220 feet so yeah, nobody's going near that. 



We kind of had a snacky dinner (and then I made skillet pizza when we got back to the campground) here and had it to ourselves for about half an hour. Once some other hikers showed up, we packed up so they could have the same solitude we had (but I don't think they enjoyed it for long, there were a lot of people going down to watch the sunset there!). 

Can you see how reflective and polished that stone is? So slippery! 

Then we invented a really fun new game on our way back up where you use your trekking pole to stab the dead leaves of prickly pear lying detached in the trail and you fling them as hard as you can off the trail and see whose can go the furthest. This was soooo fun until I ruined it by suggesting that the four of us who were trailing the front four yell ahead for them to wait and then all run towards them yelling like banshees and fling our prickly pears towards them. I do not know why I didn't think about the fact that throwing cactus at someone was not a good idea, but yep, I totally nailed poor Nathan in the leg and I felt soooooo awful (and then he saw how bad I felt and started telling me he was fine and it didn't hurt at all as I was cleaning up his scratches. He is such a sweet kid and he wants so much to avoid ever hurting anyone's feelings--there was another family camped near us and he was playing with their kids quite a bit the first two days and then heard one of the kids say something that made Nathan feel uncomfortable, so he was worrying his little heart out over the fact that he didn't want to play with them anymore but he didn't want to tell them that. He has such a tender heart). 



Anyway, RIP the flinging game. 



When we got back to the trailhead, the sunset was juuuust starting to peek through the Window and the light on Casa Grande was absolutely incredible. So incredible, in fact, that our kids ASKED us to take photos of them with it, which does not happen. 



And as the sun went down farther, the light changed again...



We'd talked every night about going to watch the sunset through the Window at the overlook, but we'd never made it because we were always doing something else. Neil said this was our last chance--let's go for it! So we piled in the car, drove to the overlook, and BOOKED it out to the overlook--but can you see who else was running with us between Neil and Matthew? 



I was just in absolute heaven watching this (and Neil got a picture of my very intent face). 



So beautiful and such a perfect goodbye to Big Bend, which is truly phenomenal. I think it's in my top five now, which is really saying something! 

 

Big Bend day 3: Santa Elena Canyon

On our third day in Big Bend, we drove southwest to the Santa Elena canyon area. This is probably what you've seen if you've ever seen photos of Big Bend. The cliffs on the left-hand side are in Mexico; the cliffs on the right-hand side are in the US. The Rio Grande is maybe knee deep here, tops. 

But I'm getting ahead of myself! We left our campground that morning (one of my favorite parts of the trip happened that morning, which was when a mostly-still-asleep Matthew yelled behind closed eyes very early in the morning "Shut your beaks you morning chickens" because there were flocks of mourning doves all around our tent and they were LOUD, I just thought it was so funny when Matty was so grumpy at them and then all the rest of us called them morning chickens from then on) and took the Ross Maxwell Scenic Drive to Santa Elena. This drive is supposed to be one of the highlights of the park and holy cow, it did not disappoint. The cactus blooms were INCREDIBLE for thirty miles. Just absolutely incredible. This area was mostly prickly pear and ocotillo, but just fields upon fields packed with blooms. 


Luke recognized the ocotillo from one of our very favorite books, Roxaboxen by Barbara Cooney. There was a point in time where I read this book to four-year-old Luke every day, and there's one part that talks about "when spring came, and the ocotillo bloomed, and they sucked the nectar from its blossoms." 

So Luke insisted that we try the nectar, and it was soooo good! I can't really describe how happy it made me that this memory he had from his childhood was something he was able to connect with something in his real life 8 years later. Books, I tell you what. 

Then we stopped by a few historical sites; Neil was really enamoured of this windmill and spent awhile lecturing on how it was still working after 80 years, etc. etc. Hashtag Dr. Bailey's most animated lecture voice and we all know what's coming. 

This was a little geological bit from the scenic drive that was so interesting! So many types of stone in this tiny little chunk. 

When we got to Santa Elena, it was SO HOT. Somewhere in the 90s. Ugh! None of us do particularly well with heat and even less so when we've just come from 30s at home and are totally not adapted. We made lunches and packed our Camelbaks and then most of us climbed back in the car to eat our lunch and hung onto the AC until the very last possible second. As we started off the path to the river, I grumped something to Neil about "It better not be this hot the whole time or this will be the worst hike ever." But then we got to the river and immediately forgot the heat because Terlingua Creek, which you have to cross to get to the path that runs along the river down the canyon, was really high (probably waist-deep for 6'5" Neil). I'd read stuff about this in the park guide and I was absolutely determined that it would NOT ruin our chance to go down the canyon!

So we walked down the creek to see if there was any spot where it got shallower. The little boys found one and started to cross and so I followed them and oh my gosh, it was the most disgusting nasty mud I have ever been in. It was greenish gray and when I stepped out of the water it was like I'd poured a bucket of slime off my foot. I ended up rinsing it off in the river and it took sooooo long to get it all off. Meanwhile, Neil had crossed at a much shallower and not disgusting spot with Juliet & Luke, and Isaac and Abigail had found a totally different way to go that basically involved scaling a steep slope and running along it like mountain goats. (Note: on the way back we all went the Isaac & Abigail way and THEN on the other side I saw a sign by the parking lot that said please don't cross an alternate way if the creek is high and I felt really bad. Sorry, NPS!)

This is the part where the little boys crossed, you can get a sense of how mucky the bottom was...ugh. 

Anyway, all that drama aside, we crossed the creek and headed up the switchbacks for the path along the canyon. Boy this part was HOT so it motivated us to zip up those switchbacks quickly! 



Then we walked along the edge overlooking the river for maybe a mile or so? 



Eventually we worked our way down out of the high cliffy part and down by the riverbank where we were shaded by the canyon walls, and it was so heavenly cool and breezy down there! 



Oh gosh I was just sooooo happy to be out of that sun, haha. Sidenote: I totally forgot to bring any makeup on this trip (I was packing my toiletries while I was on the phone) and that was kind of a shock the first morning, but hey, it was nice to only spend like two minutes getting ready every morning. Just sunscreen and go. 



There were a ton of huge boulders to climb around on down close to the river, and the kids had a blast with those. 

We also spotted a turtle (Texas slider IIRC) floating next to this rock, every so often he'd go up a little further on the rock and then go back down into the water. 



Eventually we made it to the very very end of the path where it dead-ended into the cliffs and there were some enormous rocks halfway out in the water. Jules, Luke, Isaac, and I stretched out on one of them and just talked and dozed and ate our snacks and watched kayakers and listened to the water lap at the cliffs. It was one of my favorite parts of the whole trip and I'm so glad Neil got a picture of it! 

(And I think I finally figured out Luke's sunscreen, he's been allergic to everything we've tried so far, even the stuff his dermatologist prescribed AND the stuff the allergist prescribed, but I woke up at 2 AM the morning after this and thought that I should try my moisturizer which has 30 SPF in it on him and voila!! Anyway, that's why his sunscreen looks so weird.) 

So beautiful--Isaac said he wished we could stay there forever and I totally agreed. But eventually we pried ourselves up and headed back up the canyon, and then we stopped again so that we could soak our feet in the Rio Grande and people could throw rocks and skip rocks, etc., and very absolutely most definitely not wade across to touch the Mexican bank because that's prohibited. 

Sheer heaven and so absolutely beautiful. 

Jules and I eventually got everyone to join us--seriously bliss!! 

And then finally back to our campsite in the Chisos. A few more photos from that night--my Louis L'Amour book that was describing the same landscape I saw when I looked up...

Successful Dutch oven cinnamon rolls!

Little boys working on Junior Ranger booklets



And a bunch of blurry photos I took trying to capture how beautiful Casa Grande was outlined against the moon. The little boys went to bed early that night and then we went on a little walk around the campground with the older four kids, Abigail pointed out the International Space Station (she was tracking it via app) and we all watched it zoom across the sky, and we watched the coolest rings form around the moon and then spread out through the sky as the moon got higher. 

You can kind of see the rings in these...

And then turning towards the Window, a very bright Venus. 

So beautiful--watching the moon come up every night was one of my favorite parts of the trip.