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UPDATED 8/7/18
Seminole Canyon State Park was mostly just a waypoint on our journey through West Texas, AKA the Trans-Pecos region. (I've seen this park mentioned as being part of the Trans-Pecos region, even though it is just east of the Pecos River.)
Still, we managed to get into a nearby city, Del Rio, which was nearly an hour away. On the way, one crosses over the Amistad National Recreation Area on the Amistad Reservoir, which is essentially a huge lake. It is so huge that it creates enough humidity to damage the petroglyphs found in some of the cave areas of Seminole Canyon State Park.
We didn't really check out Del Rio and barely emerged from the truck to check out the reservoir. The temps were well into triple digits and there's something about the heat in Texas that is, well, bigger than the heat elsewhere.
We did take advantage of the cooler mornings and hiked and mountain biked, collecting the pictures you see here.
We saw numerous copies of this Deer Dude guy throughout the Southwest, though mostly in New Mexico. According to a ranger, this is the original. It was not done by a Native American but by some artist "inspired" by...well, I stopped listening. But I'm sure it was very interesting. Also, as a result of groundbreaking new research involving visiting the area in the summer, one of us vigorously disputes the common interpretation of sun worship or celebration. We propose that he is cursing the sun and telling it to get the heck out of the sky so things can cool down.
This little fellow was our first tarantula seen in the wild. If you hold him up to someone else's ear, they will hear him also cursing the sun and the heat, if only they can stop shrieking long enough.
This is the now-dry gulch (as of the last few thousand years or so--or maybe it was hundreds of thousands of years--who can remember these little details?) below the cave dwellings we visited.
This picture is rightside up!
The area where we saw the most petroglyphs--there were others closer to the Rio Grande, but you needed a boat to get to it.
Petroglyphs, possibly showing a sun-cursing ceremony.
Just some beautiful stone. I forget if we were told that the top part was petrified wood or not, but it sure looks like it.
A closer look at an ocotillo. They apparently drop their leaves in dry spells and quickly grow them back after a rain.
Dung beetles! One of us found this exciting enough to insist on including this picture.
This is a little inlet of the Rio Grande on the US side.
Bike trail on the Rio Grande. That's a nice specimen of an ocotillo plant on the right.
Would We Come Back?
Would We Come Back?
We really liked West Texas except for the somewhat extreme heat. On the days we were scheduled to visit Big Bend, for example, the temp was forecast to reach 110 Fahrenheit. (I can't believe people still say Fahrenheit in our rushed culture rather than something like 110 "effy," or something. It's an outrage!) It was somewhere between San Antonio and and West Texas that we realized why siestas make so much sense--sleep during the hottest part of the day. At Seminole Canyon State Park, we did most of our physical activities such as hiking and biking in the morning. From about 10 am until sunset, Pippi would have been unable to walk on any paved surface and, if we left her in the trailer and there was even a brief power failure, the trailer would get too hot before we could get back, even with the cellular temperature alert system that we've set up. That limited us to going only to places dogs could go or one of us waiting in the truck while the other went inside to do an errand.
We definitely want to come back, though, just not in the late Spring or Summer. We enjoyed Seminole Canyon State Park a lot but it is likely we wouldn't stay there again simply because we already spent a few days there. Note: compared to the sad-looking private RV campgrounds we saw along the road, the state park was far, far preferable. One place that looked nice was the Amistad National Recreation Area outside of Del Rio, Texas (and not that far from El Paso). https://www.nps.gov/amis/index.htm But there were no electric hookups there, so definitely not a summertime thing.
Would We Live Here?
Would We Live Here?
No. Too hot. (This text is duplicated for all West Texas/Trans-Pecos River entries)
If we were going to consider living in West Texas due to the invention of personal air conditioners that bathed you in a thin bubble of cool air kind of like a giant, human-sized air condom, we'd then look at the water situation to make sure that area of the country could handle severe droughts without having to resort to water wars.
More recent water disputes are described here http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/03/opinion/la-oe-0503-moore-water-west-compacts-20130503 or just watch Chinatown, with Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway which is a great movie about the water industry in California.
To be fair, much of the Western US has this problem, not just West Texas.
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