West Texas Adventure, Day 3
On the agenda for today was not one, not two, but three separate hikes, to Cattail Falls, Tuff Canyon, and Santa Elena Canyon.
I’ve posted a picture from near the Cattail Falls area before. It’s right down from The Window, which is probably the most famous landmark in Big Bend national park.
I can only assume because of it’s proximity to a very popular spot, Cattail Falls gets overshadowed, and is not well known at all. Which is just great for those that do figure it out, as they don’t have to share the trail with very many folks.
Although it is somewhat dry in Big Bend right now (it is the desert, after all) the falls are not the huge roaring spectacles that you would see in Kauai, but they are pretty cool, nonetheless.
As you hike across barren desert, through the prickly pear cactus, ocatillo, and lord knows what else that wants to poke you with a needle, you continue to descend… and as you do, it gets cooler, darker, and wetter.
Until finally you come across the falls themselves. This was extra nice in that it let me practice one of my guilty pleasures… special effects photography.
There were even spots down in the canyon where non-evergreen plants live, and some of them had begun to show fall color.
After climbing back up into the heat, we headed to Tuff Canyon on our way to Santa Elena. I’ll admit it. I didn’t want to do this one… I thought the picture in the trail guide made it look like a hole in the ground only about 10 feet wide.
Well, let’s chalk that one up to bad photography. Tuff Canyon is a remnant of a volcanic event millions of years ago, that left large amounts of soft volcanic rock that has been carved out by flooding through the years (there was no flowing water at the bottom in October, there may be at other times of the year).
There were however, a few little pools that seemed to be somewhat permanent, and it was there that we found a resident, which, again, you would not expect to find in the middle of a desert… a green leopard frog.
He was quite shy (he jumped into the water twice before we figured out what was doing the splashing), and while Alan scouted a bit, I stayed and scouted the pool, to see what would crawl out, and there he came. He knew I was there, and would not come any further out of the water than this while I was watching.
After Tuff Canyon (which I was glad we went to see after all) we headed down to Santa Elena Canyon, which I can say, without fear of contradiction, is hard to photograph. Walls 800 feet high tend to block out a lot of the sun.
Again, once inside the canyon, the climate becomes cool, dark and wet. As we hiked back, Alan and I both felt that the area had a real â??LOSTâ? feel to it, as we were surrounded by bamboo-like grasses that were 7-8 feet tall on both sides. The sun was beginning to set at we hiked back to the Jeep, and met our little friend, and today’s highlight critter.
That, my friends, is a Black Tailed Rattlesnake. I know nothing about this little devil other than what I learned from Google. While the larger, more famous Diamondback Rattlesnake is listed as â??toxicâ?, our friend here is listed as â??highly toxicâ? He was about two and a half feet long, maybe 3, and didn’t really seem to care much that we were there at all. He never got overly upset (he did raise his head a couple of times) and he never rattled. Alan and I took pictures and warned off the other hikers until the trail was clear, then we left him to continue his rather slow progression to the river. All in all, we probably hung around him for about half an hour. (And yes, I will confess… I wasn’t that close. I have a pretty good zoom lens 