Rebecca Henderson

“We crossed the wild Pecos,

We forded the Nueces,

We swum the Guadalupe,

And we followed the Brazos”

from Texas River Song by Townes Van Zandt

Well, on this trip so far we’ve only crossed the wild Pecos and gazed in the distance at the Rio Grande, but this song keeps going through my head. As does this quote I recently read in Three Dollars Per Mile by the Texas Surveyors Association:

“The Pecos is a remarkable stream, narrow and deep, extremely crooked in its course, and rapid in its current. Its waters are turbid and bitter, and carry, in both mechanical mixture and chemical solution, more impurities than perhaps any other river in the south. Its banks are steep, and, in a course of two hundred and forty miles, there are but few places where an animal can approach them for water in safety. Not a tree or bush marks its course; and one may stand on its banks and not know that the stream is near. The only inhabitants of its water are catfish; and the antelope and wolf alone visit its dreary, silent, and desolate shores. It is avoided even by the Indians.” 

— Captain S.G. French’s description of the Pecos River from an 1849 exploratory mission for the U.S. Army

My first visitor in the Northwest arrived last Saturday (if you don’t count my dad, who didn’t so much come up here to visit me as to make sure I arrived safely in the first place), and I had to drive to Seattle to meet her flight. Like my last road trip in January, on Saturday I was checking weather forecasts and road conditions up until the last minute in order to make the right decision about which route to take across the state through potentially snowy mountains. The night before I left for Seattle, the Washington State Traveler Information website said there was heavy snow in Snoqualmie Pass, and I spent the entire next morning watching their notifications as they changed from “snow chains required” to “snow chains must be carried” to “no restrictions” by the time I left the house around noon. It’s an adjustment for me in travel planning — once upon a time, I obsessively watched for fog and rain that would keep planes from landing and taking off in Yunnan when I expected visitors. Now it’s snow and ice on roads.

So, I made it to Seattle without problems, and we headed for the Oregon coast and my first time to hike in the Northwest, outside of my weekly training at Badger Mountain. To help us decide which trails we wanted to do, I checked out a stack of books from the library and had my previous suspicions confirmed: I’ve got a lot of hiking ahead of me.

The options seem to be limitless. Looking at the maps and the lists of trails, I felt a bit like those times when I have just come back to America from living overseas and have to buy breakfast cereal for the first time. I’m used to there not being so many options, and having to make a choice can be overwhelming. An entire aisle of cereal, when all I could buy for months on end was a Chinese version of either Frosted Flakes or Froot Loops. Where do you even begin to decide? Mini-wheats? Bran flakes? With or without raisins? Granola? Cinnamon Life?

It’s the same when a girl from Fort Worth moves to the Northwest. Where do you begin with hiking in Oregon? The Columbia River Gorge? The High Desert? Mt. Hood? The Wallowa Mountains?

We started on the Oregon coast.

Our time along the coast mostly involved walking in the area right around Cannon Beach and Haystack Rock (including a cold and rainy 3 mile morning run on the sand), with a longer hike at Cape Lookout to look for migrating whales. We had a break in the typical Pacific Northwest rain for most of that hike, but we still got to experience the mud. It slowed us down, especially at first when we were picking our way daintily through what we thought were just a few muddy patches, trying not to get our pants too dirty. Soon we accepted that those “muddy patches” were closer and closer and in reality the entire hike would be sticky and slippery. So we changed our tactic to plowing through the mud as quickly as we could without falling down. Pants can always be washed. We didn’t see any whales, but the views of the coast from the height at the end of the trail were still worth every splashing step through the mud to get there.

More tomorrow…

Three days to get from Fort Worth to Bakersfield, CA, and another three days to get from there to Kennewick, WA.  Dad and I figure we added about 800 miles to our trip by taking this route through West Texas to southern California, but it ended up being worth it.  Other than a little rain during the last half of the trip, we had great weather the whole way, for which we are grateful.  Snow and ice scare Texans on the road.  I may have developed some great rainy season driving skills in the mountains of Yunnan the last several years, but I am no ice road trucker.

This was my dad’s first time to be in California, and I think he was culture shocking a little at times.  When we stopped for lunch after crossing the border into Oregon, folks were wearing cowboy hats and work boots and camo again, so he could breathe a bit easier.  I think he’s enjoyed the past couple of days in the Northwest.

We saw a lot of beautiful country between Texas and here.  The deserts of the Southwest have their own fascinating peculiarities, and I could really see myself spending more time there.  Who knows.  We breezed through the LA area without really stopping, out of sheer determination to stay ahead of rush hour traffic.  My previous California travels were limited to LA and San Diego, and neither of us were prepared for I-5 when you get to the San Joaquin Valley.  We gasped when we came down out of the mountains and the land opened up in front of us and we could once again see for what seemed like a hundred miles.  By the evening of the next day, we were pretty sick of looking at those miles and miles of fields and orchards and were ready for the mountains again.

Clouds obscured the summit of Mt. Shasta as we drove through that area, but we saw the bottom two-thirds or so.  We couldn’t see Mt. Hood at all.  It rained the morning we went through the Columbia River Gorge, but I saw enough to know that I can’t wait to go back on a sunny day, if there is such a thing as a sunny day outside of Portland.

And now here I am in Kennewick.  I’m told that they have 300 days of sunshine and only 7 inches of rain a year.  And lots of parks and trails along the Columbia River.  It’s good to be here, to get settled in and get connected to the church here, and to pick back up with my writing schedule — starting today.

on the loop road in Saguaro National Park

Chihuahuan, Sonoran, Mojave — I’ve seen them all.  And I could actually tell a difference between the three deserts.  Don’t ask me for a comprehensive report of those differences, but I could at least give you a positive ID on ocotillo, saguaro, chollo, and  the Joshua Tree.

Our original plan on the first leg of this winter road trip from Texas to Washington was to head towards the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, but that idea got scrapped when the National Parks Service website reported ice on the roads in the park the day before we left.  Then about 30 minutes (literally — I’m not using my gift of exaggeration here) before we left Fort Worth, we found out that there was ice on the road to Amarillo, which meant we couldn’t go through north Texas that day.

And my dad’s flight from Washington back to Texas next week meant that we really needed to leave that day.  So, we headed for southern Arizona via El Paso.  Back through West Texas, this time with my dad narrating the journey with stories from his childhood.  It’s definitely not the direct route, going to Washington state by driving first to the Mexican border, but I’m glad we ended up doing it.  A little tired as I type this at the end of Day Three of driving, but glad to see West Texas with my dad.

El Paso, I don’t know, I really think I could live there.  They’ve got good tacos.  From there we drove along the border of New Mexico and Mexico, into southern Arizona and through Saguaro National Park.  New desert.  New cactus.  From a distance the saguaro seems to be the steeple of a church on the mountain ridges, but closer up you can see it is the created, raising arms of praise to the Creator.

We spent the night in Phoenix and then headed west to southern California and Joshua Tree National Park for a drive through the huge rocks and yucca.  Bakersfield tonight, somewhere north of Sacramento tomorrow, somewhere in Oregon on Friday, and Tri-Cities, Washington, on Saturday, Lord willing.

After a long weekend with friends in Ponca City in mid-November, I haven’t really done any traveling outside North Texas for about six weeks.  That’s the longest I stayed in one place during 2010, with the exception of my two months in Kotzebue, Alaska — and that was only because there are no roads in or out of Kotzebue.

My next big trip, the road trip I’ve been planning for almost a year, is coming up next week.  On Monday I’m leaving for Washington with my dad — he’ll fly home from Washington, but I’m staying for a while.

This trip has changed quite a bit over the past several months.  It started as a two week ramble through the West during lovely fall temperatures, with a friend or two along for the first half of the ride.  Then it got pushed back to January so that I could be home for the holidays (though my friends and I still did the first part of the trip in West Texas in October).

Now, at long last, I’m taking off for the Northwest.  Poor Dad, 6’1” is really too tall for a Hyundai Elantra, but he’s a trooper and making the ride anyway.  We’re planning on going from Fort Worth to the Tri-Cities, Washington, in 5 or 6 days, depending on the weather and how Dad’s legs are coping with the lack of room in my car.

The plan is to go west from here to the California coast and then north to Washington, in hopes that this longer route will keep us out of the winter weather typical on the shorter route through Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and Idaho.  Maybe we’ll see the Grand Canyon, though northern Arizona could have road closures due to snow, so we’re keeping our itinerary open to southern Arizona as a back-up plan.

The last couple of weeks they’ve had flooding, snow, crazy low temperatures, and everything else we want to avoid in Arizona, Nevada, and southern California.  Parts of I-5 have been closed by snow.  So who knows, maybe the northern route really is the way to go.

Either way, I’ve practiced putting the snow chains on my tires — who would have imagined a year ago, when I was still driving around the tropics of Yunnan with the windows rolled down because the A/C in the truck was broken, that I would find myself lying on the ground with my head stuck under the car to put on snow chains?

I hope my practice is wasted, and I hope that I get to Washington next week with a boring blog entry to post about our uneventful drive.

(I have a couple of entries I’ve already written about books in 2010 and 2011 that I’ll post from the road next week, so please check back.)

sunset at White Sands

Part 10 from the road trip series “The West Texas Idea”

After climbing Guadalupe Peak, we drove to Whites City, New Mexico, the nearest place to get a hotel room.  Our campsite at Guadalupe Mountains had a fantastic view and gave us a glowing array of colors at sunrise, but it was nice to shower and sleep in a bed after a full day of hiking the mountain.

We woke up the next morning in New Mexico, decided to skip Carlsbad Caverns, drove back to Texas to eat lunch at a famous hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant inside a car wash and gas station in El Paso, then drove back to New Mexico to camp at White Sands National Monument.

Well, we planned to camp at White Sands.  They have a small number of primitive campsites (read: no water or toilet and a mile of walking off the road), and we thought it would be worth it to haul a bare minimum of our junk out to the site so we could watch sunset and sunrise and all the stars in between.  A night sleeping on the dunes would be a perfect way to close our road trip.

But we ended up being 2 for 3 for our campground success rate.  Once again, like had happened at Chisos Basin in Big Bend, we found out when we arrived at White Sands that the campsite was closed, this time because of a missile test in the restricted area of White Sands Missile Range that surrounds the national monument.  So, no camping on the dunes to end our trip.  Instead, we spent the afternoon walking around in the southern New Mexico heat, stayed long enough to watch the setting sun turn the sand from white to orange, and started our drive back to Fort Worth a couple of days earlier than expected.

NEXT in The West Texas Idea

at the cemetery in Terlingua

Part 7 from the road trip series “The West Texas Idea”

To the northwest of Big Bend National Park is a triangle of towns—Alpine, Marfa, and Fort Davis—that we made the next stop on our road trip.  We took the scenic way of getting there by driving west out of the national park, through the ghost town of Terlingua, and into Big Bend Ranch State Park along FM 170.  Words cannot do justice to the scenery along FM 170, but since I’m writer, I should try.

Tufts of green grass dotted towering cliffs the color of adobe bricks.  Boulders bigger than Janel’s car perched tentatively on the hills above us, toying with the possibility of crashing down at the whim of the next wisp of wind.  Majestic vistas of the river below spread out in front of us from pull-off overlooks at the top of mountains.  “You know what you’re supposed to take a picture of by the places where they’ve made pull-offs in the road,” Jen said.

She also commented that she’s been on Highway 1 in California (something I’ve yet to experience, but maybe one day soon), and FM 170 along the border of Mexico is just as spectacular—but most Americans have never heard of it nor would they be willing to make the long haul to get down to this area and see it.

Blind curve after blind curve, blind hill after blind hill, more roller coaster than road.  Drives like these thrill me and sicken me with their combination of grand sights from the heights and the depths and the possibility of a mangled death around the next turn.

After the most delicioso of taco lunches on the border at Presidio, we drove to our hotel in Alpine, the Antelope Lodge.  I imagine this place to be a remnant of the old-style motels that my grandmother described from the 1950s.  When Jen called to make the reservation, she asked for a confirmation number but was told that they don’t use computers.  No confirmation number necessary because the elderly lady running the front desk writes down all the reservations by hand in a notebook.  The lodge was made up of individual houses, two guest rooms per house, with parking outside your door and a tiny kitchenette, just like my grandmother used to cook for her husband and young kids.

Our first activity in this area was at McDonald Observatory near Fort Davis (the top point in this triangle of towns), a research facility of the University of Texas.  Three times a week they have star parties open to the public, and we scheduled this section of our trip so that we could participate in one.  By this point we had already done a lot of star gazing at Big Bend, but the “constellation tour” by the UT astronomer under the cloudless sky that night added quite a bit of interesting information to what we had been looking at.  And we got to look through one of the massive domed telescopes to see Jupiter and four of its moons—mind-boggling to think of just how far away those five bright circles are.

We didn’t spend much time in Alpine aside from driving by Sul Ross State University and looking for dinner on Sunday night.  Though we found several places that only served beer or homemade sangria open that night, the only places serving food were Sonic, McDonald’s, and Penny’s Diner.  I told Jen and Janel that I couldn’t handle just sangria for dinner, not unless they wanted to carry me back to the Antelope Lodge, so we opted for the diner.

NEXT in The West Texas Idea

Part 2 from the road trip series “The West Texas Idea”

I’m back from my West Texas road trip.  My dirty clothes are out of my backpack and spread in noxious piles across the floor awaiting the washing machine.  I’ve moved my photos from the camera to the computer and am trying to organize and label them.  I’ve made a dent in going through my e-mail and snail mail, and now it’s time to start looking through my journal pages from the past nine days of travel and figure out which of my stories and experiences are blog-worthy.

As I’ve done in the past, I’ll try to keep the next several blogs about my trip from being a minute-by-minute account of all we did, but rather hit the highlights and give a general idea of the tone of the trip and some of the people we met.  Also, I realized a while back that since I switched to the new blog host last spring, I haven’t posted any pictures with my writing.  In a way I prefer emphasizing my writing over my poor attempts at photography, but for this series of blogs I will go back to posting a photo with each story.  Look for stories on Pecos (my dad’s place of birth); Big Bend National Park; the triangle of towns at Alpine, Marfa, and Fort Davis; the Guadalupe Mountains; El Paso; White Sands, New Mexico; and a blog with some of my observations and musings on camping and my fellow campers.

It’s good to be back online—I don’t have an iPhone or smart phone or anything but a regular old cell phone, and even if I did we were out of cell service (regular or 3G) for much of our trip.  I always enjoy being disconnected for a week or so, but it’s also nice to catch back up with folks when I get home.

NEXT in The West Texas Idea

Plans come about in many fashions.  The plans for my road trip through West Texas and New Mexico came about over a (long) period of time, mostly by me and a couple of friends starting off on one idea but getting distracted towards another.

I was supposed to be driving from Texas to Washington this October, with the purpose of staying for several months to write and to get to know the area and the folks in a church up there.  That’s a long way to drive by myself, so I asked my friend Jen if she wanted to go all or part of the way with me and fly back to Texas.  She thought that sounded like a good idea, so she set aside the vacation time.

“You know, I’ve been wanting to go to Big Bend National Park—what do you think about driving through that area on our way?” I asked her.

“Sounds like a good idea,” she said.  It’s on the border of Mexico, sort of the wrong direction to go from Fort Worth to Washington, but still, we both decided that’s the route we needed to take on this road trip.

“You know,” she said, “that’s not too far from White Sands, New Mexico—why don’t we go there too?”

“Good idea,” I said.  I didn’t have any particular hankering to go to White Sands at first, but Jen’s been wanting to go for years, ever since she got stuck on hold in 2003 with the customer service rep for AT&T over an internet issue at our rent house in Fort Worth.  The guy on the other end of the line found out she’d just moved to Fort Worth and told her that she ought to take a day trip to White Sands.  The 11-hour drive from Fort Worth to White Sands is as much of a day trip as Big Bend is on the way to Washington, so Jen is just now getting around to going out there.

OK, so we’re up to Big Bend and White Sands.  Recent months of Texas Monthly gave us a few more ideas of things to do in little West Texas towns, scenic drives in the area, art galleries to visit, restaurants that we can’t pass up.

I told my aunt about the trip.  She and my dad and their other siblings grew up in West Texas and went to Big Bend when they were kids, and she and her husband love the area still.  “You know, if you’re going all the way out there, you should climb Guadalupe Peak,” she said.

I looked at the map.  Guadalupe Mountains National Park is sort of on the way from Big Bend to White Sands.  Good idea.  We added it to the itinerary.

“You know, this is the kind of trip that Janel would enjoy too,” I said.  Janel also lived in that rent house in Fort Worth in 2003, and the three of us have gone on a few road trips over the years—Fort Worth to Monterrey, Mexico (before it was deadly to do so). Buffalo to New York City to Niagara Falls to Toronto. Seattle to Vancouver.

“Good idea,” Jen said.  So we asked Janel.

“Sounds like a good idea,” Janel said.

“You know, my car is kind of small.  And we really ought to camp at all those parks and places we’re going to visit.  And I really should stay home for the holidays this year.  So why don’t we go in a bigger vehicle to carry all our gear, and I’ll just come back to Fort Worth with y’all and go to Washington in January?”

“Good idea.”

So we’re leaving this Wednesday, and I won’t be blogging again until we get back.

(Please click NEXT to read more on the West Texas road trip.)

Fort Worth to Amarillo isn’t the most interesting drive in the country—my second day of driving from Texas to Wyoming is when the real scenery began.  Somewhere between Amarillo and Dalhart I watched the sun come up over my right shoulder.  I was the only car on the road for miles of two lane-no shoulder highway that morning, no houses or other signs of civilization, a peaceful way to greet the day slowly and quietly, no radio, just me and my thoughts and the sky growing brighter.

I breezed across the corner of New Mexico and started gaining elevation as I went through Colorado.  After I remembered I gained an hour in the new time zone, I decided to hurry my way across the state so I could get to Estes Park in time to go into Rocky Mountain National Park that afternoon.  I bought a National Park Pass for the year at the entrance—I plan to get my money out of that pass during my road trip through West Texas and New Mexico next month and from Texas to Washington early in 2011.  I just couldn’t stop smiling with the thought of all those parks when I bought the pass that afternoon.

There was plenty of time for me to get out of the car for a while and see the late afternoon sun over Sprague Lake with the Continental Divide in the background.  Leaving the park, I saw quite a few elk along the road, but I had to look closely to see past all the cars and not rear-end someone slamming on their brakes to join the crowd parked on the road.  I definitely enjoyed the area away from the elk more than this part right on the main road.

Waking up the next morning to the cool mountain air made me feel more alive than the sluggishness of recent mornings in the Texas heat.  I drove back into the park to see part of the Trail Ridge Road that goes as high as 12,000 feet, but I started freaking myself out on the narrow, winding roads after a while.  My overactive imagination still gets a bit too stimulated after our truck accident in the mountains of Yunnan last year, and I decided it would be better to turn back after I’d seen about a quarter of the Trail Ridge Road.  No need for me to go any higher, and it turned out later that this was a good decision for me to make.  I went back down to a nice meadow I’d seen the day before and spent some time reading before I had to get back on the road to Wyoming.

Once I got past Laramie, Wyoming, the new GPS I got as a gift from my sister started giving me some pretty funny directions.  A couple of times it told me to go off in some crazy direction where there wasn’t a road, but I could see from the road signs the right way to go, and I made it to the general area of the farm without any problems.  Getting from the general area to the farm itself proved to be a problem, though.  I drove around on dirt roads until I was hopelessly lost, and it took a couple of phone calls to the farm and some serious backtracking before I got to the right place.  I drove to the middle of nowhere, turned right, then drove a few more miles into nowhere, and now here I am at the lovely Raspberry deLight Farms, where people drive from all over the state for fresh raspberries.

When I pulled up, the first thing Greg (the owner of the farm) said to me was “Hey, your back tires are completely bald!”  They weren’t when I left Texas, but sure enough, now they’re slick as slick can be.  That night when I was trying to go to sleep, I couldn’t stop thinking about how horrible it would have been to have a blowout on the Trail Ridge Road, or anywhere else between here and there.  Losing a tire at 12,000 feet is just the kind of trouble I usually get into, so I’m glad I turned back.

I’ll be working here at the farm for the rest of this week, until I’ve earned a new set of tires to drive home.