Ernst Tinaja trail, Big Bend NP, day 5 part 1

Howdee all,

March 23

Another hot day in Texas..funny how that happens. We arrived to very cool, almost cold weather in the 50s. It warmed up to the 60-70s and the last few days it has been 80-90s while hiking…we bring lots of xtra water on our hikes.

Today Jeff and I decided to hike the,

Ernst Tinaja trail

1.4 mile hike

Difficulty.. easy

A four and a half mile long drive up Old Ore Road to get to the trail head.

Be prepared for a bumpy drive.

We stopped along the way when we saw this beauty.

  The flowers were almost as large as the cactus itself.I got lost in its Yellow glow…A real beauty in the desert.    More beautiful, narrow white dirt road…be prepared to pull over for oncoming cars. While traveling to the trail head I spied this poor little critter…How do you suppose he met his demise? I suspect a Loggerhead Shrike decided to roast him before dinner. Shrikes sometimes spear their prey onto objects and come back to eat them later.

The cactus are budding..some of these buds are new leaflets..others are flower buds.

This is the start of the Ernst Tinaja trail

The trail follows the wash, over water shaped rocks..

And Gravel

Into the Tinaja or Tanks

and canyon of highly-convoluted rock layers.These tanks hold water ..year round

   Be careful near the tinaja's edge. Over the years deer, javelina, and even mountain lions have been found drowned in this tinaja.

We stopped here for lunch.

After wandering further upstream

to check out this strange formation.This is a nice trail for families i think children would love to scramble around on the rocks..

More desert blooms   We traveled further into the canyon..

    Up a few dry waterfalls

Until we reached this area…Jeff poses before climbing up.

   This was the end of the line for me…too difficult to climb up.

So back down the trail…things always look different in another direction You notice things you hadn't before..Like this huge boulder below.

flowers growing out of rock crevice

Cactus spines being lit up by the sun

A nice hike both ways

I notice this little home? in the overhanging rock. What type of bug made this?

Spring flowers, glowing in the sunlight

And then back down to the very strange rock

with colors of gray, orange, yellow Greens, blues and orange Pinks and orangeA very nice place to linger…

This hike was very easy, except for the last part when we had to do some scrambling. We were told you can follow the canyon out to make this a longer hike, but you needed another car waiting at an access point.

From here we went on another small hike..

To be continued ..

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Richard and Muther..I changed the photos so that the source picture would be larger. I don't know why it changed to a smaller size in the first place..let me know if you like the size or if I need to make them larger.

Richard, if there are certain pictures in previous posts you would like larger to use, let me know.