West Texas and Big Bend

We spent our Thanksgiving in Fort Stockton, and I'll never make that mistake again, not the part about the holiday just spending anytime in Fort Stockton. We picked it because it looked like a decent size town and we wanted off the road for the holiday so we booked 5 nights, there is nothing in this town, they do have a Walmart but it is the smallest, oldest one I've ever seen and it had nothing. There were two grocery store, both owned by the same person so prices were right through the roof, we figured that we would spend a day visiting the Fort but that only took about 45 minutes and of course the Wi-Fi was down and they couldn't get it fixed until after the holiday.

Oh well on to Marathon, after setting up we drove into town and found a nice little garden park and the old city cemetery with real cowboy style graves.

Small Park in Marathon

Pond at the park

Water Tower

These Ruins hide the electrical system

West Texas style graves

It was still early so we drove over to Alpine to see if we could find a place for a late lunch, it was a good size town and had just about anything you would want. We found these two murals downtown and then down the block the Three Amigos.

Look for Hoss

The bottom is all the different Cattle Brands for the area

The Three Amigos

A new sunny day and we came her to tour the Big Bend National Park so we're off, it's just a 60 mile drive south to the gate of the park, our first stop was at the visitors center and that was a big waste of time. They didn't really care if you were there or not, so we took of looking for the Hot Springs, about thirty miles SW and we found the dirt road that lead us back to the old Hot Springs. These were started as a resort and the hot springs had healing powers, I can't imagine what the roads where like 

Hot Springs

Trail to the Hot Springs

back in the 30's and 40's but the place is reported to have stayed busy. After a pretty wild drive back the dirt road we came to the trail head, it was just a short easy walk back to where the resort was,(still there just a ruins now) there was a store and about a seven room motel. The trail back to the springs follows a cliff which had some Petroglyphs, I would thought that they were graffiti if they didn't have the sign there. When we reached the Hot Springs there were a couple of girls there enjoying the hot water (105 degrees). The old foundation of the bath house is the only thing that keeps the springs from becoming part of the Rio Grand River as you will see in the pictures.

Damaged Petroglyphs

Petroglyphs

Resort Store

Resort

The girls had told us about a ghost town outside the West Gate of the park so we started heading that way. The Ghost town is named Ghost Town, Texas it was an old mining town but when the mine closed up every one just up and left. There are ruins of old homes scattered all over the hillsides and it looks like people are reclaiming them and making them livable again, don't know if they are squatting or if they are buying the lots. We took a few pictures them stopped at the old town cemetery, I can't describe this cemetery so I'll just post a few pictures, we've never run across anything like this before.

Strange Cemetry

Some of the Ruins and Homes

And then we found this

Then it was just a long drive home, driving into the north gate it was just flat dessert for about 60 miles, we did see a few mule deer and a road runner but other then that nothing but horizon. The ride home up Texas Hwy 118 was through and around the mountains, it was a fantastic drive with a different view around every turn.

I could post another 50 pictures but I think you get the idea, there's a lot to do around here.

Fort Davis and McDonald Observatory

A long drive for us, we moved from Lubbock to Balmorhea Texas, about 260 miles which is about a hundred miles more then we normally do.

We're camped at the Saddle Back Mt RV Park which is a nice park with long level sites and good hookups, nothing else here and it is located in just about the middle of no where, really, I'll explain that later.

Today we drove over to Fort Davis National Park, about a 40 minute drive through the Mountains which were beautiful. Fort Davis located in the town of the same name, (named after Jeff Davis who at the time was the Secretary of War). Today it is one of the best examples of a frontier military fort, may of the 50 original buildings have been restored and the foundations of the others are highly visible

From 1854 to 1891 it served the people of West Texas by protecting them from the Comanche and Apache Indians, keeping the travelers heading to California for the gold Rush safe on the San Antonio – El Paso Road which passed right in front of the fort. Buffalo Soldiers from the Ninth & Tenth Cavalry’s and the 41st, 24th and 25th infantry served at the fort. Lt Henry O Flipper, the first black to graduate from West Point was stationed here. In 1891 after the soldiers had brought all the Indians into the reservations it was decided that the fort was no longer needed and it was abandoned.

We started out seeing the 15 minute video about the history of the fort then spent about an hour and a half walking around the buildings, after seeing the Commanders house and some of the restored Officers house's we can understand why nobody wanted to leave this place. Their quarters were huge and first class all the way, we would love to have one to live in. Also this is probably the prettiest setting for a fort we've ever seen.

Waiting to be restored.

Enlisted mans quarters.

Covered Wagon on the San Antonio-El Paso Road.


10th Calvary.

Officers Row and the Parade Grounds

After all this we drove over to the McDonald Observatory, normally we wouldn't have gone out of our way to stop here but one of my brothers worked here for NASA during the mid 70's so we thought that we would take a look at it, sure glad we did. It's about 18 miles from Fort Davis and when you get there you finish up your drive on Spur Hwy 72 which is the highest paved road in Texas, around 6800 feet above sea level. When we got there we found out that they had a tour starting in about 30 minutes so we signed up for that ($8 a head) . The tour starts with a 20 minute film explaining how the observatory came to be, remember I said that we were in the middle of no where, well they confirmed it for me by explaining that they did a study to find a location for the telescopes and the top of this mountain is considered the “Darkest Spot in the USA” because of it's height and the fact that is located in the middle of the desert (the middle of no where). They have clear skies for viewing the stars about 90% of the time, which is important when you have scientist coming from around the world to use the facilities, they have very little down time. OK, after the film our tour guide came in and we were able to observe the sun through one of the smaller scopes, which is wired up so that we could watch it on the big screen. We were able to see different sun spots and solar flares and then he explained how they happen and how they effect the earth along with a lot of other stuff.

108 inch scope

 From there we boarded the tour bus and he took us to the 108 inch scope, which when it was built it was the third largest in the world. We went up to the fifth floor where the telescope is located and he demonstrated how the scope can turn any direction and how the entire top of the building rotates so they can point it anywhere they want. It was pretty cool seeing the building rotating around and the monster telescope turning. Another 15 to 20 minute talk here on how everything works then it was back to the bus for a drive over to the newest scope.

The Highlighted area in the center is the Mirror

 This scope is now the fifth largest in the world and is a spectrograph scope or something like that, he explained it but lost me half way through. I did pick up that this scope can rotate 360 degrees but is locked at 30 degrees, it is able to view 80% of the sky because of the rotation of the earth, it might take a number of days but eventually it cover the entire sky. One reason for this type of scope is that it only coast 13 million to build, if it was the same type as the 108 inch scope which can point where ever you want when ever you want, it would have cost 100 million.

Nope, Not Epcot

This facility is owned and operated by the University of Texas Austin, but they work in conjunction with many other universities all around the world, they are currently working with a large group that is building a new scope in Chile which will be something like 8 to 10 times bigger then this one, and when it's completed it will be able to see farther into space then the Hubble Space Scope.

This is the project my brother worked on.

The tour guide was excellent he keep the interest of everyone there including a couple of 10 -12 year old kids, who asked some pretty good questions, the tour ended a little over three hours later with us being dropped of back at the visitors center. So if you ever find yourself in the middle of no where, look for the signs that say McDonald Observatory.

Ranch Heritage Center

We planned on spending today at Mackenzie Park, we started at the Prairie Dog Town, this was started in 1935 with two prairie dogs and is one of the top five visited attraction in Lubbock. There wasn't a ton of activity while we were there but a few of them were out watching us to see what we were up to. The funny thing was that some of them burrow under the fence to the neighboring driving range, which would make that into a large version of wack a mole.

 A few other things in the park didn't pan out so we decided to drive by the Ranch Heritage Center, when we first pulled into the parking lot it didn't look like there was to much there, but I had read that they had over 30 restored building so in we went. This is run by Texas Tech University and is located on north boundary of the campus, everybody here was extremely friendly and helpful , they told us to plan on an hour and a half and that is just what it took us to walk through. They have well over 35 structures spread out over the 16 acres, each is related to ranching and has been brought here from different areas of Texas and New Mexico. Each building has a sign giving its history, showing where it came from and a picture of what it looked like before being moved and restored. I took a ton of pictures so here are a few. 

Notice the chimney made out of logs.

This stone house was built after Indians raid their wood house and burnt it to the ground. This one was all stone without any windows just the gun ports in all four walls.  The starcase and door on the side were added later.

They started getting a little bigger and fancier as we went along.












 A range bunkhouse for the Boss and the Cowboys.


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Where the BIG BOSS lived.

This is part of a range fence (barbed wire) that stretched 80 miles across New Mexico.

A normal style wind mill.

And a weird Wind mill.

A water wagon

A herd of Texas Long Horns on the front lawn.  There are about 15 of these.

Almost forgot my favorite, a Cow Chip Shed, this is where kids would go out and gather dried cow chips and store them in the shed so they could burn them in the winter

and of course a bucket of cow chips

There were a lot of Jack Rabbits here and they are huge, about the size of a small dog, and they don't jump or hop they run like a cat, weird.




This just a very small sample of what they had there.