Big Bend Trip - Depot Stairway

Since this was winter there were opportunities to take more pictures of things through things, such as these branches. This one is fairly cropped in...

Big Bend Trip - Sanderson Depot

We were headed through town, nice and slow-like, when about three blocks from Highway 90 I saw this run-down building. No choice but to stop and capture its rustic beauty. This shoot reminded me of the Zedler Mill experience, posted back in '08.

Big Bend Trip - Sanderson Buildings

The first stop we made out of Chisos was Sanderson. Sanderson had plenty of run-down places to take rustic photos, such as this one...

Big Bend Trip - Chisos Ice

This is the last of my postable pictures from the Chisos Mountains. Interesting that I didn't get any good pictures of the mountains themselves, but the unexpected snow and ice made up for it.

Because of the cold we decided not to primitive camp that night, but instead hit the road and headed towards Del Rio, with a couple of stops on the way...

Big Bend Trip - Dusted Sparrow

This shot was taken from inside the restaurant at Chisos Mountain Lodge. Further up the mountain there was a little less snowfall...just a dusting.

While eating breakfast we met a great couple from Nacogdoches, my hometown for eight years. They were retired, just traveling around and taking pictures - with a Nikon D300 no less! Naturally we took the opportunity to raz my friend for being a Canon guy.

Big Bend Trip - Another Winterscape

Big Bend Trip - Winterscapes

After stopping at the tunnel, my friend and I headed back to the Chisos Mountain Lodge for breakfast. As we reached about 5,600' in elevation it started coming down...snow! Naturally we stopped along the road and went nuts snapping photos. The snowfall plus a foggy background made for some great winterscapes, even though we were in West Texas in the middle of March. My gosh, the landscape is beautiful enough as a desert landscape - seeing it like this was, for us, a rare treat.

Big Bend Trip - Cactus Cluster

On our way out of Río Grande Village we passed through a short tunnel that cut through a hillside. Just on the other side was this cactus grove that featured these reddish needles, somewhat different from others seen in south Texas or back home in Mexico. The cloudy skies made for a good opportunity to capture their beauty.

Don't know what the little yellow thing is at the base of one of the needle clusters in the bottom photo...

Big Bend Trip - Pathway Trinkets

Caught this on the way down from Windy Peak. Kids will sneak over from the Mexican side and leave little trinkets like this on the path, hoping that some money will be in the jar when they come back the next night.

Notice that the three little guys on the right are all blown over in the same direction, because of the wind...and yet this was a ways down from the top of the hill.

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!