Big Bend Trip - Río Grande Village

A few weeks ago a friend and I went on a trip to Big Bend National Park for a photo outing. What an awesome place.

We stayed at the Chisos Mountain Lodge the first night. Before it got dark we scouted for a place to get good sunset shots, and settled for a place about 200 yards from the edge of the lodge property.

It was a great opportunity, but one that I blew totally...left the white balance on the Big Cahoona set for incandescent light! All the great sunset shots were blue! Threw every one away. My friend - the landscape photographer from the Enchanted Rock shoot - really got some good stuff, though. Lesson? Shoot in RAW at all times. Fortunately there are dual chips in the Big Cahoona to enable that plus JPEG's at the same time. I'm going to soon buy Lightroom 4.0 and bigger chips, Lord willing.

The next morning before dawn we headed out to Río Grande Village. When it got light enough we hiked out to a peak that gives a pretty good panoramic view of both sides of the river. A "freak" storm (as one worker at Chisos called it) blew in the night before and was still going strong, plummeting the temperatures down into the 30's with a 50-mph wind whipping over the top of the peak. Really, really raw weather, but I loved being out in the cold taking pictures.

Thing was, it was very difficult taking decent shots in that kind of wind. Literally I had to lean into it with the tripod against my body just to keep even the heavy camera from blowing away into the valley. Wow.

At one point I swung around to look at the Mexican side, across the Río Grande, and saw the awesome sight captured in today's posting; this is a very small part of a six-shot panorama. The clouds blown in by the storm were cresting the top of the range, and the cold air made them literally spill into the valley like waterfalls through the crevices in the mountainside. I'd never seen anything so unique in nature - a slow-motion vaporfall into the Río Grande valley. Let alone the pictures...it was worth braving the weather just to see something like this in person!