Been down in the dumps for a few months. I needed to go touch some grass, or rocks, or cacti. So I did.
Wife and I get up bright and early, Thursday morning. We rent a car ("not my car" became a common refrain while barreling down caliche roads), load up, and head out.
After a seven-hour drive, twenty state troopers, thirteen border patrol agents, and two border inspection checkpoints, we're finally deep inside the park. The desert is in bloom! (we had to plan eight months in advance for lodging during the bloom):
My wife fell in love with the ocotillo cacti, the tallest cactus in the pic, with red blooms at the tips. It's hard to see, but the shrubs also have small yellow flowers. Prickly pear (not in the pic) were also flowering. Off in the distance is the Chisos mountain range, the crown jewel of the park. I decided to save it for the last couple of days, when we had reservations at the lodge there. For our first day, we would head down to the Santa Elena Canyon (park map for reference), but not without stopping at one of the park's premiere overlooks on the way, Sotol Vista:
The most prominent notch in the distant plateau is where we're headed. It looks small from the overlook, but when you're down in it?:
That's the Rio Grande. There were people swimming in it, but considering how large of a watershed it has, my wife and I opted not to go in. If you ford the river, you can see where a hiking trail picks up and the handrails line the path on the right side of the vid.
With the sun setting, we hit the road to head into "town" just outside of the park, in Terlingua. We booked two nights in the pressurized, translucent bubble pictured here. Since it'd been a looooong day and was quite cloudy, we opted to keep the cover on the translucent portion that night to facilitate sleeping in. Finally, we went to the (THE) local bar & grill, and caught the sunset from the patio balcony:
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Friday morning. Here's my view of the distant Chisos range off to the southeast from the bubble's fire pit:
It's the No Big Bend Day. We load up the car around 9:30 AM, and head up to McDonald observatory, about a two-and-a-half hour drive north, in the Davis Mountains. We tour the tourist-y areas, and then drive up to the legit 'scopes, which are on a pair of nearby mountaintops. Friends, the views were staggering:
That little dome? It's nothing. Probably some grad student trainer 'scope or something. The real badboi is the Hobby-Eberly, currently working on a dark energy survey, which will surely compliment ongoing James Webb observations. Anyway, we went inside the little viewing room inside the big dome. These seemingly-curved support beams are actually a reflection in the 11-meter parabolic mirror:
Most impressive is the fact that this entire structure, including the optics and detectors up above, has to constantly rotate along two independent axes to track targets as the Earth rotates. And it has to rotate as smoothly as possible.
Next, we head up to Balmoreah Springs, an old CCC/FDR project wherein they built a one-and-three-quarters acre natural swimming pool. It was a perfectly beautiful day, and we had the place almost to ourselves! In the summer, and especially summer weekends, there are typically around 700 people. The water was nice, and I did a pretty sweet can opener off the 12-foot diving board.
After a couple drinks in Fort Davis, we close out Friday with a coveted "Star Party" at McDonald observatory (again, book months in advance). Long story short, we somehow got incredibly lucky that other people are too dense to follow instructions, and we got some good telescope time before about 1,000 other people realized that the telescopes were open for viewing. As one does with a telescope, we were treated to a feast of Messier objects, including an open cluster, a globular cluster, and a couple of galaxy clusters.
The day ends with me driving the rental back to Terlingua at midnight, in the middle of nowhere. No cell service. Plenty of close scares with wildlife near and in the road at 75 mph. Guys, I went almost a hundred miles (literally) without passing another car on the highway. It was some Last of Us shit. My adrenaline was pumping so hard that I couldn't sleep for a couple hours after we got back to the bubble. Which was fine, actually, because we took the cover off, so I was sipping beer in bed, watching the stars.
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Saturday. Head straight into Big Bend, and down to the Southeast side of the park. Did a few short hikes, and then, finally made for the Chisos basin. It was too early to check in, so we hiked the iconic trail, "The Window". That's the view as you're headed towards the trail's namesake:
The people you meet on trails are reliably amazing. The guy who took our pic there was someone we ran into repeatedly, even the next day, on the trail. He was a 65-year-old training for the Grand Canyon. He was out doing about 15 miles a day. You can catch a glimpse of him here on our way back up.
We scarfed down an overpriced dinner at the lodge, and I caught a view of the sunset from our little porch:
After sunset, we make friends with the neighbors. One of them is a guy from NASA who works QA for the Orion project, so we talked shop for about an hour while his buddy set up a telescope in the parking lot. TWO nights in a row with a star party! Could not believe our luck. We toured another ten Messier objects that night, and counted six satellites go by above us.
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Wife and I are up a bit before 7 AM, Sunday morning. We check out of the lodge and head out to the Lost Mine trailhead, where it's notoriously hard to score a parking spot, but score we do, since it's so early. Guys... Guys. This was the most amazing hiking experience of my life.
No.
Here's four Mexican Blue Jays going by, with the Rio Grande valley far off in the distance.
It was so quiet at the summit, before the wind started up for the day, and with no one else around.
And back home we went. We visited the Judge Roy Bean visitor center on the way, and it was... weird. Couldn't separate mythos from objective history too much of the time. At least the gardens were beautiful. We saw a roadrunner there. I was too tired to catalog anything else. Still buzzing from that last hike, though. :)
Oh and I did want to specifically tag kleinbl00 so that they can enjoy tons of video footage with the sound of a brisk wind, I know that kleinbl00 absolutely adores the sound of air finessing microphones
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That looks like a fantastic trip. I did a pretty sweet 450° faceflop off that diving board because 12' is higher than I realized.
1) It's adorable that you think "wind noise" even registers among the list of "annoying things I have listened to professionally" 2) You two look super happy and that makes me happy. Also buy a beard trimmer. 3) Your pictures hit me with visceral revulsion but that's likely contextual. There's nothing inherently evil about ocotillo. 4) The stargazing almost, but doesn't quite, make up for the desert. Those bubbles look awesome.Oh and I did want to specifically tag kleinbl00 so that they can enjoy tons of video footage with the sound of a brisk wind, I know that kleinbl00 absolutely adores the sound of air finessing microphones
1) Outranked by vocal fry(?). 2) Yeah my wife and I's life together is like fairytale shit. Her fault. I trimmed my neckbeard portions two days ago, but there is an entire related documockery called "Public Hairs" in the works that will probably never see the light of day. 3) NM is not invited to the benign TX nature party. 4) The bubble was alright. Very novelty. You still need to get out of the bubble if you're looking for anything with an apparent magnitude of about 3.5 or more. But there's apps to compliment everything, I use "Sky Guide", but need to recalibrate my iPhone compass. P.S. get fucking better. DO IT. Just do it. copyright
You know, I actually thought about my list of "annoying things I have listened to professionally." My first indication I was "different" was when my college roommate asked me to "turn the music down" and was annoyed to discover that the sound that bothered him was the pile driver of the research building going up across the courtyard. I actually found the ringing melodic and soothing. We did have a cast member once who was such an abysmal death metal singer that he had perforated his larynx at some point. No one would believe me that's what we were listening to because just a few of us had any experience with death metal vocalists, let alone terrible death metal vocalists. We changed out his microphone three times, changed out his transmitter twice, put him on different channels... it probably took six hours to convince certain other people in the booth that no, he fucking sounds like that. Which ultimately was time well spent because when the memo came down from Corporate asking "why does he sound so ass" we could say "why don't you get in the room with him and ask?" But I mean... I used to create zombies for a living. What's a little vocal fry? What tends to annoy me is "we know the audio sucks, you have to use it anyway." We landed a $10k noise suppression unit because the interior designer really liked the look of an industrial fridge. Worked out great for us, we ended up with an extra 8 channels of noise suppression. On low-budg stuff you have to deal with it because everyone's incompetent and in a hurry. Big budg stuff is just lazy. I worked with a great director on a tiny little project once where he took off his headphones and said "is that helicopter going to bone our audio?" and I had to say "not nearly as bad as the quinceanera singing Happy Birthday across the street." He rolled his eyes, we laughed, whatcha gonna do? I had another director literally fly from Belgium to bumblefuck nowhere Castaic to shoot a three-person short film for some reason. And because it was Castaic and hot, we shot under a tree. And because it was it was Castaic and hot, there were 25-30mph winds blowing the whole time. Director, idiot, looks at me and says "is wind noise going to be a problem on the microphones?" I respond "No, but the wind noise through the leaves that you're shouting over will be." I worked on another show that really, really, REALLY wanted to be Big Brother. The contestants would, for inscrutable reasons, have a 90 minute meeting every day under a tree in the middle of the goddamn desert in the heat of the afternoon. And we weren't using nearly as good mics. And the wind noise on the mics was pretty bad? But the wind noise on the tree was a thumper. Super kept asking me "how would you guys deal with this on BB" and I'd say "we wouldn't let them do this." But that didn't fly because they would never manipulate the cast for audio, just for every other fuckin' thing. I think the thing I hated the most was this one guy. Internet loved him. Still a legend of the show. Also a chain smoker. Also a pacer. Also relied heavily on expectoration to demonstrate emotional range. When that dude was pissed he'd cough like a cat with a hairball and spit everywhere and he was pissed 90% of the time. Nothing quite like listening to a chain smoker hack up a lung for sixteen weeks straight. It mostly only bothered me when I was eating, though - I tended to stay away from anything with a white sauce or gravy that season (we ate in the booth while we worked back then - pre-Union days). At one point the exec producer led a bunch of friends through the booth to watch a really crucial comp. This dude won, which led to him winning his season (eventually). But in winning he was... not gracious. He'd cuss at everyone else/spit. Yell at everyone else/spit. Scream at the sky/spit. One of the producer's friends asks "why does he spit so much" and unprompted, unrehearsed, unconsidered, as if God himself was channeling through me, I said "he hates the taste of his own soul." The producer looked at me and nodded.
Love this! Looks like you had a great, relatively quiet trip. Was not expecting the desert to look so green!
Yep, the trip was somehow simultaneously relaxing and invigorating. The green stuff was mostly in the mountains, and was kinda in its own microbiome. If anyone tries to gut our national parks system, I'm gonna have to take drastic action.
I'm doing alright! Good to hear from you. I'll be back in your neck of the woods, I think, at the end of this year. Maybe next year, at the latest. We'll be in touch :).