Day 21, Pecos to Big Bend NP and El Paso

Woke up this morning in Pecos at a Swiss clock hotel along Interstate 20. It was our jumping off point to turn south to visit Big Bend National Park tucked into a little triangle in south west Texas. Though the area was dry as a bone, we had to move our car from the parking spot next to our room to keep from water dripping off the roof and getting us wet as we packed up. The drive south was usual as we quickly caught up with the fog that apparently had deposited the water in Pecos. Must have been in it for about 20 miles and 'poof' it was gone. We could look behind us and see the cloud of mist.

The drive was wonderful. We started seeing huge, uninhabited mountains--some were mesa wannabes others were already scraped flat across the top. The flat valleys must have been 30 miles across. There were large vistas wherever you looked. Very few people, a good number of roads to ranches with interesting names and occasionally a very small town. Since I know little of geology, pictures will have to do here to explain the immensity and grandeur of the land. A couple of mountains looked like those we saw in Jordan. Others were definitely made of different rocks. There were places of upheaval of the land and a few places of water erosion like the Grand Canyon. The general area is the Chihuahua Desert that extends to the Copper Canyon in Mexico we visited about 4 years ago. Copper Canyon is primarily canyons so you are on top of the land looking down. Here you had both but mostly looking up at mountains...most about a mile high. Equally exciting was our exit from Big Bend National Park along the Rio Grande north through the Big Bend Ranch State Park. We saw only a couple of Border Patrol trucks. Anybody who could make it through the rugged mountains on the Mexican side and the same thing on the US side would have to be very determined, very clever and in excellent shape.

We decided to push on to El Paso late in the afternoon after a pick-me-up at the local laundromat/coffee-shop-with-wifi in Marfa. Starting about 30 miles aways from El Paso we followed the lights from across the Rio Grande in Juarez, population over 1.5 million!! That was a surprise. El Paso has about 800,00 and was voted the safest city in the US while Jaurez is about the most dangerous city in the world right now with horrific drug wars going on. Apparently the drug lords are purposely keeping the war on the Mexican side of the river. Our hotel room looks across to the lights of Juarez.