Texas - The Big Bend – Early Spring

March 3rd to 9th, 2004

My third visit to the Big Bend National Park was planned for the early Spring, and after leaving home at 6am on the 2nd March, over-nighting in Midland, I entered the Park just before midday on Wednesday 3rd March. It had been foggy all the way down from Midland, but just after leaving Marathon, the sun started to break through, and from then on, clear skies reigned. In keeping with previous records, I have organised these pages into a daily narrative, and a link to the pictures that I took on each day. At the end of each days pictures, the back link will return to this page.

Day 1 – Wednesday 3rd March – Persimmon Gap, Dog Canyon and Dagger Flats

Day 2 – Thursday 4th March – Old Maverick Road, Terlingua Abajo, St. Elena Canyon, Tuff’s Canyon, and Mule Ears trail.

Day 3 – Friday 5th March – The Chimneys trail, Cattails trail, and the Grapevine Hills trail

Day 4 – Saturday 6th March – South East from Panther Junction, Ernst Tinaja, Rio Grande village, Boquillas Canyon and Hot Springs

Day 5 – Sunday 7th March – The South Rim trail

Day 6 – Monday 8th March – Terlingua, Lajitas, and the Big Bend Ranch State Park

Day7 – Tuesday 9th March - Dagger Flats, the road to Marathon, and the Chihuahuan Desert Research Institute

I was back in Midland by nightfall on Tuesday, so as to be ready for a 7am flight to Dallas, and then via JFK New York, back to London Heathrow at 6:40am the following day.

For the technically minded, the photos were taken with my trusty Minolta 700si, 28-105mm f2.8-4 Sigma lens and Minolta 100-300 f4-5.6, using Fuji Velvia 100ASA slide film. The slides were scanned on an Acer 2740S film scanner at 2700dpi, and saved as high resolution jpegs. Minor adjustment to a few images were made using Adobe Photoshop 7. This and the daily narrative pages were made simply using Microsoft Word as the html editor, and the picture galleries were again created with Photoshop, and then edited to add any additional return links. Editing and gallery creation were done on a home built Pentium 3.2GHz system, all running under Windows XP Pro.

I’d welcome any comments, reports of bad links, problems with loading or viewing, so I can improve the site. Just email me. Don’t rely on this being the email address for ever, it probably with change as spammers pick it up and I get flooded with junk.

Enjoy.