The End of Big Bend

The next day was really pretty nice. The whole trail crew, including Colin, had hiked down the night before because they had a search and rescue training to go to, so we were on our own. Colin’s instructions were to just clean drains in partners on the Boot Canyon trail, then up to the South Rim (where we went on the day we “learned how to mellow”), down Laguna, then ending with the Colima Trail, the trail our campsite was on. That whole thing makes a big loop. Elena was my partner for the first time. We had a bit too much fun for most of the day. We had a few drains to clean that had a kind of little lake near them. When you clean drains, it’s usually just clearing out rocks and leaves that are clogging it. Elena and I both got really distracted for a while by throwing the rocks from our drain into the lake just to enjoy the sound. Isn’t throwing rocks in water one of the best sounds ever? The first time we did it, we ended up falling WAY behind everyone else. We started walking down the trail and came to a fork. One way was labeled Northeast Rim and the other was labeled South Rim. Elena remembered that when we went this way before, we took the trail to the Northeast Rim, which lead to the South Rim. But I remembered hearing Colin’s instructions, and he just said to go up the South Rim. We decided to take the South Rim fork for a while, and just turn around if we didn’t see anyone soon. We walked for a while, and just as we were thinking we were wrong and were about to turn back, we ran into Ryan. Whew. We were really behind. We fell behind again when we found another lake to throw rocks into, but not as bad that time. Everyone had a pretty good time that day. Cleaning drains isn’t hard work physically so we mostly just got to enjoy the nice day and pretty scenery. Scott kept trying to hurry us along, but he clearly didn’t get that Colin was purposefully giving us a nice easy day while he wasn’t there. Oh well. We never really paid much attention to what Scott said anyway. By the end of the day when we were nearing the end of the trail, everyone got pretty silly. Everyone kept singing Disney songs as they would pass by other pairs to get to the next drain. It was fun.

That night, Amy had to go to the bathroom at like 4am like I did the night before. And just like when I needed to go, she couldn’t get the Crappy Tent zipper open more than just that little slit and she had to crawl out through the bottom like I did. Since I was awake, while she was gone I managed to get it open the rest of the way for her. The Crappy Tent strikes again.

The next day, we saw Colin in a bad mood for the first time. He is normally one of the most good humored and mellow people I’ve ever met, but not that day. Most of us were just a couple minutes late to meet up with him at the cabin for some reason. I think that was the main reason for his bad mood, but I think it was also an accumulation of things Scott did. I haven’t written about it much before, and I won’t go into detail on the internet, but Scott was a pretty bad team leader and it frustrated Colin a lot of the time. Anyway, we hiked the two miles or so up to our regular worksite and changed into our steel toes like usual. Then, Marc, Tabitha, Amy, Marie, and Davis found out that we were being sent back down all the way to the Pinnacles Trial. That’s one of the trails we use to get up to Emory, which means it’s pretty far from where we were right then. It also means that we hiked like a mile and a half up to our regular worksite for nothing, and would now have to go back the way we came. We were also told to just keep our steel toes on, not change back into hiking boots. Our task was just to go partway down Pinnacles and clean any drains that might need cleaning (even though we had cleaned those drains about three weeks ago) and get rid of any big rocks that are in the trail (and we knew from hiking that trail several times that there were a lot). We were all as sure as we could be that this was punishment. It was kind of sad. The work wasn’t hard once we got there but I for one wasn’t very happy about hiking an extra three miles or so for nothing.

It was about 11:30 by the time we finished that and got back to our regular worksite. For the half hour before lunch we just had to go along the new trail and collect brush that had been piled along it and carry it down to where it intersects with the old trial. Apparently this was so that next round, when another NCCC team would be in Big Bend, they could use that brush to stuff that part of the old trail. So essentially we were kind of doing that team’s work for them.

After lunch, Tabitha and I were sent back to our logs. We really didn’t want to because of how frustrating it was the last time we worked on them, when we thought we had gotten a log in tightly and it just popped out. We took that log out and put another in its place, and got like two more logs I think. They worked this time. Also, it had been really pretty cold all day. In the afternoon when we were working on our logs, it actually started snowing. It was May 1. In the desert. Colin and Ryan passed us to go work on something and they stopped to talk for a minute. Colin made us all hold hands and reflect upon the fact that it was snowing on May 1 on the Mexico border and said this would be a day we would tell our grandkids about. Apparently his bad mood was over and he was back to his usual goofy self.

We were coming down from Emory the next day, but we had to work for a while first. Since Tabitha and I were finally done with our logs we had another job. A few other pairs had been working on doing that several logs right next to each other thing. After those logs are in really tightly, you’re supposed to cover them with dirt since the purpose of those logs is to raise the level of the trail back up to where it was before it was eroded and to get vegetation to grow on it again. Tabitha and I were sent to plant Prickly Pears on all the spots with the dirt-covered logs. Planting Prickly Pears is probably the easiest thing ever. All you have to do is cut a pad off of one and lay the pad down on the dirt. It will just drop roots right there and grow a whole new plant. We made that last until lunch time because there wasn’t a whole lot we needed to do that day. We had our usual hour-long lunch with most of the team. After an hour, Colin came over to tell us all to get back to work, but then everyone (including Colin) ended up sitting back down and talking for like another half hour. We were pretty sure Colin was getting pretty sad about us leaving soon.

Something I haven’t written about before: Almost the whole trail crew at Big Bend loves to hula hoop. Not kidding. Apparently it was Laura who started it. She’s the one that was on Colin’s team when he was a Sun Unit Team Leader two years ago. She makes her own hula hoops out of gardening irrigation pipe and tape. She got most of the rest of the trail crew into hooping, who then got a bunch of rangers and other park employees into it. Pretty soon after we got there, Colin had brought out a few extra hoops they had for us to play with. We all decided we wanted to make our own hoops, so we bought a bunch of irrigation pipe, decided what colors we wanted, and ordered our tape from some website that had a bazillion different kinds of tape in a bazillion different colors. Our tape had finally arrived while we were on Emory that second time, so we made our hoops the night we came back down. Colin let us come upstairs in the Remuda and we watched a Tenacious D DVD and ate some delicious cake Colin had made while we put our hoops together and taped them up.

The next day we worked at Santa Elena Canyon. There’s a longish sandy walk to get from the parking area to the river and canyon which apparently some people have trouble walking on. There were rolls of this kind of boardwalk stuff that we needed to lay out. It wasn’t hard. The hardest part was carrying the rolls out to where they needed to go because they were pretty heavy. You literally just line the roll up with the boardwalk section before it and unroll it. We also kicked sand on top of it a little and into the cracks between boards so it would stay put a little better, but that was it. Since that was not a task for 11 people, Colin sent Marie, Ryan, Churchill, and I down to the beginning of the trail that leads a mile or so into the canyon. The trailhead wasn’t very obvious because there were a lot of plants growing around there so he just wanted us to clear the plants to make the trailhead look nicer. It was during this task that Scott came over with his phone for me to find out that I had been hired as next year’s UDA. Yay!

That job at the canyon only took us till lunch. After lunch, we went and checked out all the gear we would need for our river trip the next day. The crew had very nicely planned a river trip for us to go on with the crew. The best part is that the crew got to come down from Emory early and the trip was counted as a work day for us and for them. Colin, Julie, Matt, Alex, Laura, and Rachel were the members of the crew who hadn’t left for the summer yet. Shaggy, the Trail Supervisor, and Joseph, the crew’s packer (he does all the stuff with the mules), also came. It was pretty fun. I was in a boat with Marie. We went back to Santa Elena Canyon and paddled our canoes about three miles upstream. We pulled off on the Mexico side of the river and ate lunch. Then, we explored the canyon on the Mexico side. The crew had been to this place before, called Fern Canyon. Right there on the Mexico side you can climb pretty far back into the canyon walls. There weren’t as man ferns as there usually are (I think it was still too early in the year for them or something) but it was SO COOL. The funniest part was the Birth Canal. This was where there were two rock walls close-ish together with a boulder balanced on top of them. There was a pool above the boulder that sent a waterfall down between the boulder and rock walls. The only way to get past this part was to wade across the pool at the bottom and climb up that waterfall between the rock walls and boulder. Ridicuous. There were a few places that a few of us wouldn’t have been able to climb up if it weren’t for Colin climbing up first (he is super tall and super strong) and giving us a hand up. We climbed way back until we couldn’t go any farther without climbing equipment (it was a pretty sheer rock wall without a way to go around it). I think that was one of my favorite memories of Big Bend.

The day after that we had a day off, and Colin and Rachel were leaving for a trip to Mexico (a real trip, not just crossing the river like we did). They were leaving at like 6am, meaning we wouldn’t see them again because we were going out in Terlingua and spending the night there after the river trip. (That night was ridiculously fun. We ended up sleeping just in our sleeping bags under the stars again, but this time in the “parking lot” which is on the main road. We literally slept 10 feet off the main road. That’s how safe Terlingua is.) Anyway, when we got back to the Remuda the next morning, Colin and Rachel were gone. Colin had left us some candy and some cookies he baked the day before. He also left us the best note ever. It was all about how much he enjoyed having us there and how much fun he had with us. It was just the right combination of sentimental and hilarious. We were all really sad to be leaving the park and our awesome supervisor.

We left the next day. For some reason, even though we didn’t have that far to drive before arriving at our hotel in Roswell, NM, everyone decided they wanted to get on the road at 6am. To accomplish this, we agreed to the idea Colin had given us. He said we should pack up EVERYTHING, including our tents, the night before. Basically just have our bags and everything ready so that we could just sleep outside in our sleeping bags and then in the morning all we would have to do would be to roll up our bags and pillows and throw them in the truck. Everyone liked this idea except for the part where there were gigantic ant hills all over where our usual camping area is at the Remuda. The ants weren’t really a problem when we were in a tent, but no one really wanted to sleep without a tent there. We discovered that there weren’t any ants in the corral behind the Remuda. (The mules don’t live in this corral all the time, only when Joseph is getting the mules ready to go bring the trail crew their supplies, so the mules weren’t there that night.) That’s right, we decided to sleep in the corral. And no, it didn’t smell too bad. It was actually really nice. The corral has a perfect view of the Window. I laid there with my glasses on for a while after going to bed just looking at the night sky and scenery. It was probably a perfect last night.

And that’s the story of Big Bend! I can’t believe I’m finally done with it! Pictures will be coming eventually (and oh my goodness, there are a lot of them). In the meantime, like I said, there are a lot of pictures already on facebook, as well as the slideshow video we made for our debrief.