Adventure Date: April 12, 2018
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We took a hot ride down to the Pecos River mouth where it joins the Rio Grande River. The continuing drought shows its effects all to well in this area. This will be at least a three blog report due to all the pictures involved.
This National Park area is down below the Texas Highway Department lookout point up on the top of the canyon/river cliffs. Plenty of parking is available and you could park a few trains in the parking lots. It is a nicely maintained and pleasant area in spite of being remote enough to make “out in the middle of no where” seem like in downtown Del Rio, Texas.
The necessities building is always clean and welcome for an old fat man. The drinking water fountain has good tasting water.
A word of warning is in order. Except for the floors in the necessities building, there is no flat horizontal surface in the rest of the area. In the picture above the slope of the parking lot in front of the building is real.
We let Sierra do the walking for us to go around and down to the head of the lower area were the boat ramp runs for what seems like a half mile when you are walking back up it. This is looking upstream from the boat trailer parking lot.
That white open structure on the left used to have a nice welcome shading roof on it. Time and weather took it away last year. A few years ago, the OFM met a Mexican couple there who were having a snack. They offered the OFM some samples and it was great food. We visited for over two hours that day.
In a later blog we will cover a few of the interesting things we saw on the walk down to and the trudge back up from the boat ramp.
Near the upper parking lot is a great nature trail that leaves the lot and meanders along the top of the cliff. It finally comes out where the cliff gets next to the road between the parking lots.
As you can see the views of the area get nicely dramatic. Sometimes you might get lucky and get to see a Border Patrol airboat coming in from a patrol of the river. It helps give you perspective of the height of the walls of the canyon. By the way this is an excellent kayaking place if you time it between the strong winds.
If you follow the nature toward the mouth of the Pecos, you will get to a point of rock to look out toward Mexico through the mouth of the Pecos.
As you can tell there is not much water flowing in the Rio Grande either. Look carefully and you can see that the OFM did NOT go stand on that point of rock referred to above. There are two picnic tables with shade shelters right behind where the OFM stood for that last picture.
The OFM has been here many times. Every time we come here we spot more things new to us making it wonderful as a place for trying to have tooooo much fun.
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