Ward’s Adventure Travel Research & Trip Journal

Dad and I talk about the next trip. Then we take the next trip, bringing Jack and Joe along with us. For any single ladies in the world, Joe offers his unique value proposition and leaves his phone number at the end.

Moving forward with our next backpacking trip. Spent this episode discussing the options for an inexpensive vehicle that could double as a hard-shelled camper. We discuss the downsides of camping in truck toppers and panel vans–mainly the potential creepiness factor, thanks to a couple of infamous psychopaths who have used the same for kidnapping people and transporting bodies. After discussing it, we agreed we may be wise to find an alternative solution. We’ll see.

Once we get our motorcycles to Lake McBride, we end up talking about hiking, backpacking, and camping–specifically about retrofitting a truck or a van into a motel on wheels for our future trips to national parks.

We’ll be doing a few motorcycle adventures over the coming months. This is our first episode along those lines. We start talking about it near the end.

Finally making this lost episode public… This one is for true fans of the show, those who deserve to hear it. Please comment if you’d like to hear us do more podcasts, because we are considering how best to use our time in 2015 and beyond. Any feedback will help. Note: This episode was recorded prior to the Big Bend Trip, but it is just as apt today as it was then (perhaps even more apt).

Part 5 of 5 of our Big Bend Nation Park trip. This will be our final podcast episode for a while, as we decide on where we’d like to backpack next.

Part 4 of 5

Part 3 of 5 in Big Bend National Park

Part 2 of 5 in Big Bend National Park.

Dad and I podcast live from Big Bend National Park. The first half is from our campsite the Tuesday evening we arrive. The second half is Wednesday during a lunch break while hiking Window trail. Partial Transcript: Bob: Okay, we’re live. Ward’s Adventure Travel Research and Trip Journal, and guess where we’re at…Big Bend National Park. We’re sitting here at our campsite. Dave: Big Bend, Texas. Bob: Big Bend, Texas. Dave: And you wouldn’t believe it, but it’s chilly here in Big Bend, Texas. Bob: It’s going to be in the lower 30’s tonight. Dave: Yes, and Bob and I are sitting here at a picnic table in our winter coats. You’d think we were in Iowa, snow blowing around us. Bob: Well, at least there’s no snow. It is a bit chilly, but this is really cool because the basin is actually a bowl surrounded by these cliffs. Dave: Really high cliffs. Bob: And the campsite is nestled right down into this bowl. It’s just the sweetest thing. So right now the sun has dipped, it’s six-thirty p.m on the 17th of February. The sun has dipped down below the ridgelines, and we still see some sunlight shining on these ridges to the east, these peaks. Dave: We should post some pictures so they can see, because this really is cool. Bob: Yeah, but my camera’s in the truck. So we’ve cooked our dinner, we’ve eaten, we’ve got our tents pitched, and it’s a really laid-back campground, really nice, smaller than I’d thought it was looking from the aerials, it’s smaller. Dave: Yeah, there’s probably 20 people here, 20 campers. And there’s a few tents, and a few hard-shelled campers. Bob: The campground is apparently all full, booked and reserved. Dave: It is? Well, who are these people? Bob: I noticed what they do is put a sign on a pole, on a campsite. Like ours says Bob Ward, and it says 16th thru 22nd. Now the one over there says some other person’s name, 19th thru 22nd. So that’s going to be unoccupied for two more days. Dave: Oh, I see, and then… Bob: Somebody is going to come in. Dave: I think all of ours are tents only, the ones we’re going to be in. Aren’t they? Bob: Well, they’re… Dave: There’s no place for them to park here. Bob: Some of them have a parking stall that has been paved into the campsite a bit, and if you have a camper you can park there. Or if you have a car, you can park on that. Ours just has a little parking spot for a car off the campsite. Well, we’ve got to talk about our impressions. So we left Monday. We should talk about the trip out here, how that went, and our initial impressions about everything. Dave: Well, this was kind of a nice trip from me, because Bob did 95% of the driving, because I had a cataract operation on my right eye, so I’ve got one eye and the other eye is healing, so I see about…well, if you stood in front of me I might be able to tell you were there, with my right eye. With my left eye I can see 20/20, but it’s still a strain to just use one eye. Anybody who’s never been one-eyed before–that’s most of us–you don’t realize what a benefit that second eye is, giving you a depth perception and an ability to move around things, so if I come by somebody, if they’re on my right side, I’m liable to knock them down, just not even realize I’m that close because my depth perception is off. And so Bob did most of the driving, which left me there to snooze away, which was okay. I didn’t mind that. Bob: On Monday we left at nine o’clock in the morning. Then we got off the road, I think at ten. We drove for 12 hours, so we must have gotten off the road at nine. We drove from our place all the way to, what was the town…? Dave: Witchita Falls, Texas. Bob: Just across the boarder of Texas, and then we got a really great LaQuinta Inn for sixty bucks, and we slept from about 11 p.m. until five, and got up at 5 a.m., and we were in the car and on the road at five-twenty. And then we drove the rest of the way. So today we drove another eight hours. Dave: Yeah, we got in here about two o’clock, two-thirty, somewhere in there. Bob: No, it was more like…we got into this park, stopped at Persimmon Gap, which is the first visitor center. You’ve got to pay twenty bucks for your car, so we paid our twenty bucks, they give you a receipt that you tape onto your windshield. So once you’ve paid for your vehicle, then you drive another forty-five minutes to the basin campground, which is where we’re at. When we got to the basin campground, there were two girls on bikes. They were hitching a ride. They had ridden twenty miles. Dave: Up hill. Bob: And they were exhausted. Dave: With a down hill wind. Bob: They had another twenty-two miles to go, and we didn’t have any room in the back of the truck because it’s a shortbed truck and dad had his backpack back there. We had just bought…we stopped at Odessa or Midland. It was Midland Walmart, and we got all of our food there. We each got six gallons of water. Dave: And we find out we don’t need any water. Bob: Yeah. Dave: Because they’ve got water right here. Bob: We didn’t know that. Dave: We didn’t know that. That was our safety factor. We said, you know, for eighty-eight cents a gallon we can buy six gallons, and we know at least we have water. If they have water, that’s fine. So it was all right. Bob: Anyway, so these girls had two bikes, road bikes, and they had them loaded down with gear, kind of like backpacks. They’re paniers, you put them over the rear tire, over the front tire. These things were heavy, and they wanted to put those in the back of our truck. Well, the extended cab, that was all full of the rest of our crap, so we said, “we don’t have any room in the cab for you two girls.” Anyway, they got their bikes piled up in the back of that short bed, and they sat on top of their bikes and let us drive them maybe five miles, because we said we’re turning off at the Chisos campground turn. Dave: And they said that was alright. Bob: They had another twenty-two miles to go where we dropped them. Dave: Yeah, they said “We’ll pick up another ride.” Well, they better hope so, because they looked exhaused. Bob: We had to leave the tailgate down, and their bikes were hanging off so much that we had to take some tie-downs and tie their bikes into the truck so that they wouldn’t slide out. Dave: So they wouldn’t slide out and they’d have to fight holding them in. Yeah, that was neat. Bob: I felt a little bad dropping them off, knowing that they had twenty-two miles left, and maybe they’d have to ride or hitch, but we told them that in advance. Before they agreed, we said, “We’re turning up here at the corner, and what do you want to do?” And they said, “Well, can you at least take us that far?” And we said okay. Dave: It was five miles up hill. They would have been exhausted. Bob: It saved them five miles. Dave: Yeah, it was better than nothing. And it gave them a good place to camp out for the night. They just need to pitch a tent and camp out. They got all their stuff to camp out, so they don’t need… Bob: What’s inside those paniers? Dave: Well, they must have some way. Bob: After we dropped them off, then we start coming up these switchbacks. The campgroud is up pretty steep. And it’s a climb. And we saw another biker, and passed him. Dave: This was a guy though. Bob: This was a guy and after we passed he starts waving in our rearview mirror. I see this guy waving like, “Stop! Stop! Help me!” But we didn’t know what his signal was. Dave: Plus, he’s a guy. We have less sympathy for guys. Bob: Anyway, we kept going and left that guy. Dave: So long sucker. Bob: He’s probably going to come here, come riding past our campsite here and say, “You a-holes. I’m just now getting here.” Dave: And we’ll have to say, “Sit down and have a little wine with us. We bought some box of wine at the Walmart. So we’re sitting here drinking wine and yucking it up. If he stops by, we’ll give him some wine, and he’ll be okay. Bob: Who? The guy? Dave: The guy. If he stops in… Bob: Those girls are long gone. They went west. Dave: But the exhausted guy was coming this way. Bob: He’s not here yet. Dave: No, he probably won’t make it either. Bob: We’re right on the corner, so we can see all the traffic that’s coming in and out. It’s really quite a nice little area to call a home-base. Dave: Yeah. Bob: But what I want to do tomorrow, or at least at some point before we leave, is walk around–because it’s a nice walk, like walking around a city block–and I want to look at the campsites and say “Which one one we really like to have?” And mark down the number. Dave: I like this one. Bob: But we haven’t even seen any of the other. Some of them are more secluded, like that one across the street, directly across there. It’s got a covered canopy, but it’s also secluded. There’s more space over there. But I want to look… Dave: That one right there also has a space for a…oh, they do have a tent set up there. Bob: Yeah, but what I want to do is go around and say “That’s a really nice one,” and mark down our top five sites, because they’re over twenty, twenty-five sites here, maybe forty, and if we ever come back, it’d be nice to know which sites do we want. Dave: Yeah, probably would. Bob: Because all we did was look at the Google maps aerial to do the best we could to pick a site, and when it came down to reserving it, there was only one left with this covered picnic table, so I just went ahead and got it. I mean, it’s fine. But the nice thing is right here, just directly across the street, which is probably sixty feet, the campground hosts, husband and wife, are in an RV. Dave: Which is a non-paid volunteer type thing. Bob: And they’re right there, and what they do is answer any questions that you have. And that really gave me a lot of reassurance because they said all the trails that we’re going to hike are well-marked, and easy to find. So you’re not going to get lost going out to hike on any of this. Dave: They also said that they’re really nice trails, and good trails. Well worth the walk, and we’ll really enjoy them. Bob: So from here, Emory Peak is right there. Dave: Right. It’s about twenty-five hundred feet up. Bob: It’s the highest point in the park. When we were at the cabin we were looking at the map, and you don’t get the same sense of space and distance that you get when you’re here, because it looks so far away from the campground when you’re looking at it on a map. And you think, “How are we going to get there?” Well, you’re looking at the peak right there. Anyway, so the hosts said that it’s a full day hike up there and back. Dave: I think they said 8 hours, wasn’t it? Bob: Yeah, a full day, up and back. Dave: If you don’t dawdle. If you dawdle it could be longer. Bob: And that’s leaving from the trailhead, and so then they talked about the other trails, said Windows Trail is a nice one. That’s a day hike. You go out and back. Also, on the south rim loop, they said that the south rim loop was well marked and easy, but it would take you…you could get all the way around it in 12 hours of hard pushing, but most likely it’s better to do that in two legs. Do an eight hour–kind of where we talked about camping–and then wake up the next morning and come back up the other side. But what they said was you have to go up to the visitor’s center and get a backcountry camping permit, and you have to tell them where you’re heading, and it sounded like they were going to have to see if there were any campsites available. So there’s a limited number of campsites available, and they might actually assign you one. So we’ll find that out when we decide to do that, but the first day, they didn’t recommend us doing anything other than a short hike. …

Before, after, or while listening to this episode, check on the pictures related to this post… Also, thanks to those who by my books! Pic 1: Picture of me trying on hat in the store next to the Mexican brown bear and the two friendly, smiling sales clerks. I’m clearly uncomfortable standing so close to this bear. (Hat made by Henschel Hat Co. USA – “Aussie Hat” – $65) Pic 2: Picture of dad and me wearing our hats! The mule is Jane, whom I rode in Colorado. Jane is in my Kip Stone Adventure novel called Mountain Cabin (Epic Adv – Stone 2).  Picture of me trying on hat in the store next to the Mexican brown bear and the two friendly, smiling sales clerks. I’m clearly uncomfortable standing so close to this bear. Pic 2: Picture of dad and me wearing our hats! The mule is Jane, whom I rode in Colorado. Jane is in my Kip Stone Adventure novel called Mountain Cabin (Epic Adv – Stone 2).  

In this episode, dad and I discuss ideas for packing. What to take. What can be left behind. How this trip is different from the SNP trip. Desert hiking with a base camp site will allow us more flexibility to have comforts readily at hand. Things we will want in the desert but didn’t have for the forest include: binoculars, harmonica, podcasting gear, jugs of water, extra blankets, different hats, and so on. For about 15 mintues (starting at 30 minute mark), we also discuss the creepy crawlies we’ll likely encounter. Scorpions, centipedes, spiders, snakes, ants, and so on. That’s pretty much it. We are obviously more relaxed about his trip than the last, only because we plan to take day hikes that return to our base campsite every day. On the SNP, the plan was to hike into the woods for 7 days with everything loaded into our backpacks. Not happening this time. (Didn’t happen last time either, for those who followed that trip.) Anyway, long ramble over…

First half of show is completely off-topic. We’ll be in Big Bend National Park soon, and we aren’t really stressing out about the planning, which is good. Compared to planning the A.T. trip, this one is much more relaxed. Since we have a campsite reserved, we’ll just go down and hike whatever hike we want. We’ll pack the car with food, water, blankets, and so on, and whatever we need will be readily at hand. Soon, we’ll probably be researching small campers, because day hiking loops back to a base camp is the way to go for us.

038 Curious Ways to Die or the Morbid Happy Hour

Here are some maps we used during the episode… Chisos Basin Satellite Map by Google Campground Site Numbers(White-numbered campsites may be reserved. Black-numbered are first come, first served.) Chisos Basin Campground Reservations Website Below Campsites Are Available for Reservation as of 31-Dec-2014(see black numbered sites above for first come, first served)      

During this podcast episode, dad and I discuss Big Bend National Park primitive campsites for backpackers, as well as the Chisos Basin campground. The campground seems like a sensible option for backpackers, and dad and I plan to reserve a site to use as a base camp during our visit. On any given night, we will then decide whether to camp out at a remote (“primitive”) backpacking site or just stay at the campground. It will depend on what hikes we decide to take. At the present moment, we are considering the following hikes: South Rim Loop Lost Mine Trail Emory Peak Trail Window Trail Santa Elena Canyon Trail

We discuss a 2 day, 1 night backpacking hike called the South Rim Loop in Big Bend National Park. The trailhead is just south of Chisos Mountain Lodge. Day 1 is a 5.25 miles ascent along Laguna Meadow Trail to a campsite along the Southwest Rim. Day 2 is an 8.6 mile descent back to the lodge via Pinnacles Trail.  (Sidenote: We will probably need to take Boot Canyon Trail on the descent–rather than Southeast and Northeast Rim Trails–due to peregrine falcon closure dates.) We called the Chisos Mountain Lodge and made reservations, which we recorded live, and so we have set a firm travel date around the week of February 20th. We made a lot of progress on this episode, and although it ended up longer than most, it’s chock full of details. In this episode, I present to dad the “South Rim Loop” hike, an overnight backpacking hike in the Chisos Mountains, departing from the Chisos Basin Trailheads and Parking Lot (near the Chisos Mountain Lodge). Day 1, ascend 1884 feet in 5.25 miles. Day 2, loop back and decend for 8.6 miles. Promises incredible views and possible black bear sightings in Boot Canyon.  I discoverd the South Rim Loop in E. Dan Klepper’s book 100 Classic Hikes in Texas. Search Google for “Chisos Mountain Lodge” to get amazing satellite images of the surrounding topography in Big Bend National Park. Chisos Mountain Satellite 1 shows a good image of the area. Click for larger image.   Chisos Mountain Satellite 2 shows promising green space. Click for larger image.   Chisos Mountain Satellite 3 shows part of the surrounding desert. Click for larger image.  

Great news! If you thought our episodes have been running long, this one will only use up 57 minutes of your life! Since you’ll never get those minutes back, I’d like to assure you they won’t be totally wasted. This is an important episode of Ward’s Adventure Travel Research and Trip Journal. As the title suggests, we discuss Flying Versus Driving To Big Bend National Park. Although on the surface, that title sounds boring, it is important because, the as it turns out, it takes 18 hours to drive from Dad’s cabin to the Chisos Mountains and the Chisos Mountain lodge, which is just too long, AND from Midland Odessa Airport to Chisos Mountain Lodge, it takes 3 hours 51 minutes (see this Google map). In the next two weeks, we’ll be researching some of the best places to hike in Big Bend National Park. So listen up, and if you’ve read this far, thank you. Can anyone guess why I’ve typed up SO MUCH DETAIL? Post your guess in the comments section for this episode on EpicFieldNotes.com. P.S. We’ll be going in February 2015, just about the best time to visit Big Bend National Park, the  Rio Grande, Devil’s Den, Emory Peak, Ernst Tinaja, Hot Springs, Lost Mine Trail, Santa Elena Canyon, the South Rim Loop, and more.

Dad treats listeners to one of his favorite old cowboy songs (about 35 minutes into the show). The song is called Shifting Whispering Sands. In addition to the music, we continue our discussion of Big Bend National Park, and successfully move our trip planning forward. I used the following links in preparation for this episode: NPS Page: http://www.nps.gov/bibe/index.htm Videos: http://www.nps.gov/bibe/photosmultimedia/multimedia.htm Photos: http://www.nps.gov/bibe/photosmultimedia/photogallery.htm Backcountry: http://www.nps.gov/bibe/planyourvisit/backcountry-main.htm Backpacking: http://www.nps.gov/bibe/planyourvisit/backpacking_chisos.htm Chisos Mountain Backcountry Campsites:  http://www.nps.gov/bibe/planyourvisit/upload/Chisos-Mountains-Backcountry-Campsites-2007-final-draft-high-res.pdf Day Hikes: http://www.nps.gov/bibe/planyourvisit/day_hikes.htm Bookstore: http://bigbendbookstore.org/store/

A surprise visit from Laura improves the quality of our podcast! She talks about her travels, including hiking to Machu Picchu. She enlightens me and dad on the logistics of that trip–how she got there, who she traveled with, and why to both. Intense mountain elevations, she got put on oxygen about 14,900 feet, loved the changing scenery, jungle regions, river valleys, town of Aguas Calientes Peru, fortress with cool rain gutters, flew into Peru, small flight to Cusco Peru, then bus to trailhead for 4 days, 1 guide, 1 horseman, 3 cooks/porters, not via Inca trail, but via Salcantay route, took train back, other details. Also, how to pronounce Chihuahua. (Not Cha-whowa-whowa). Plus, some guy named Chad stalked Laura to the cabin, and made a few diplomatic comments in hopes of impressing her and winning her favor. See pictures and make comments at Epic Field Notes. The second half of this episode, dad and I discuss Big Bend National Park. Here’s a link to article on alternate routes to Machu Picchu: http://travel.nationalgeographic.com/travel/peru/machu-picchu/alternate-trails/ Laura at Machu Picchu Laura, Fiona, and Kim at Machu Picchu Machu Picchu Photo by Laura Ward