Since this was a fairly complex trip, it would probably be a good idea to provide an outline before getting into the details. Here is how the trip was organized:
| Thursday, Feb 15: |
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Travel Day – meet at Chisos Mountain Lodge for dinner at 6:00 PM - go to RGV |
| Friday, Feb 16: |
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Shuttle Day – meet at noon for shuttle - come back to RGV for pot luck dinner |
| Saturday, Feb 17: |
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First day on the water – to the canyon, camp in canyon
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| Sunday, Feb 18: |
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Second day on the water – exit canyon, camp |
| Monday, Feb 19: |
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Third day on the water and take-out – Head back to RGV
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| Tuesday, Feb 20: |
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Get more gas, shuttle to take-out and put-in – get on the water (4th day on the water).
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| Wednesday, Feb 21: |
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5th day on the water – take-out and disperse.
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| Thursday, Feb 22: |
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Travel or continue, depending on expediencies, plans and desires.
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This trip started (after travel) on Thursday evening before the shuttle day with a dinner at the Chisos Mountain Lodge in Big Bend National Park. After the dinner, we went to Group Camp D in Rio Grande Village where we listened to the wind beating our tents all night (18 mph base with gusts to 37 mph).
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The Pot Luck Dinner
(photo by Nancy Clark)
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Dawn mercifully broke on Friday and we spend some time sorting out our paddling equipment and food and getting our permit before the shuttle. We executed the 150-mile shuttle, meeting David and his dog (Sage or Sadie) at Heath Canyon / La Linda, and took care of the administration there (payment, and what appears to be a 30-minute mandatory conversation with David, very similar to how it worked with Fred, God rest his soul), and headed back to Rio Grande Village (RGV) for our traditional pot-luck dinner – great food, great company, and a lot of wind – a generally great way to officially kick off the adventure (except for the extra diligence required to hang onto our plates).
BOQUILLAS CANYON SEGMENT:
We got up Saturday morning after another windy night (about 15mph with gusts to 30 mph) and started schlepping boats from the campsite to the boat launch. We are grateful to Larry, who brought some wheels for our heavily laden craft. Thanks to everyone’s excellent cooperation, we were on the water by about 10:00, as planned.
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Our spread-out
camp site (kw)
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The Put-in with
8 of our 12 (kw)
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Fran and Larry
underway (dap)
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‘Twas a beautiful day of scattered clouds. The riffles and shallows of the pre-canyon section provided excellent acclimation to help us get used to controlling our heavier-than-usual boats. About a half hour after we got going, Larry spied a great horned owl and pointed it out to the rest of us. It just sat there up on the cliff in the sun, quietly and smugly surveying the colorful group of boats and their occupants as we stared back and took photos. We left the owl, moving on to the ICE station, the Boquillas Crossing and the village of Boquillas del Carmen. We dangled our hands in the hot springs feeding into the river, and finally passed the Boquillas Canyon Overlook.
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The Great Horned Owl
(photo by Bob Scaldino)
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Village of Boquillas del Carmen
(photo by Bob Scaldino
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By about noon we entered the spectacular Boquillas Canyon with high walls rising on both sides of us and continued through the spectacular, ever-changing landscape, and picked a spot for lunch and conversation on a convenient gravel bar just as a mutiny was gathering momentum.
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Entrance to Boquillas
Canyon (David Portz, dap)
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Bill Nixon paddling into
a grand vista (dap)
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Bob next to a very
interesting textured wall (kw)
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The unfolding vistas of the Canyon continued with us through the next several miles of alternating sort-of-swift and moving water until we arrived at our campsite about 11.5 miles from RGV. This is our favorite, for those who have been this way before. It is a series of sand and rock benches and hollows with some grass, leading to a twisting, pushed up slope ending in the peaks above. We set up camp, and started preparing dinner. This year there were no organized food groups outside of the 3 couples, which works out to 9 different meals being prepared at each meal time – lots of opportunity to see a variety of solutions to a common need. I believe the Nixons had the most enjoyable meals.
Here are snapshots of our campers at our first campsite (most photos by David Portz)
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| Fran Wilcox |
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Duane Hecklesberg
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Harmon Everett
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| Kent Walters |
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Bob Scaldino
& Karen Newcomb |
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Bill & Hazel Nixon
(Nancy Clark) |
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| Larry Peterson |
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David Portz (dap) |
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Duane with John
and Nancy Clark |
After another noisy night, courtesy of a constant wind with hefty gusts and some visits by horses, Sunday we did the breakfast thing, and the striking camp thing, and the figuring out how the heck we were going to get all that stuff back into our boats thing, and before we knew it, we were underway. There was some pretty solid cloud cover, so it was very comfortable paddling along the ever-changing walls of the canyon. We pulled over on another gravel bar for lunch just upstream from “El Conejo”, the Rabbit, aka “Rabbit Ears”.
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Iconic Boquillas Canyon
(Bob Scaldino)
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More canyon views
(dap)
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“The Nose” or
“The Chin” (dap)
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El Conejo
(David Portz) |
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Karen likes it
(photo by David Portz)
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We paddled out of the canyon and into a low, hilly landscape with more open views of peaks and walls around us, taking us to our second campsite. This was about a 15-mile day, so this campsite was particularly welcoming with its grassy covering and sandy underlayment. It was easier to push our tent stakes into than the previous site. Again, we unpacked, set up tents, did meal prep, ate dinner, cleaned up, enjoyed a beautiful sunset, and most sat around to visit around a fire. We heard stories about Harmon’s Uncle Doug (from the catalog of a bazillion stories), other hikes and paddles, Scotland, bar jokes, other jokes, an unsupported assertion that water is deadly poisonous, and some pure lies.
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Camp 2
(Robert Scaldino)
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Sunset over the
Rio Bravo (dap)
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Dawn on Monday broke very pleasant. The early risers viewed a beautiful sunrise (please see David’s photos on the HCC website). We took some time with breakfast, striking camp and packing the boats, thinking that the group that camped upstream from us could get to the end and start the process of getting gates opened and maybe even a ride to the vehicles. We watched them go by, and launched about a half-hour later for our last 6 miles. The weather was magical for this segment, with just the right amount of cloud cover and a tail wind. This is where the trickiest rapids appear on the trip, and we had a great ride.
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Kent & Larry at breakfast
(photo by David Portz)
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Hazel loves the riffles
(photo by David Portz)
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Drivers going to get
their vehicles (David Portz)
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All too soon, meager signs of abandoned civilization started appearing. As luck would have it, the group that passed us had a different shuttle arrangement, so they did not, in fact, trigger David to meet us. However, luck was indeed on our side – as we were dragging our boats and butts out of the water and starting to organize the gear for transport, David showed up with his dog in an ATV, and hauled the drivers up to the cars, saving us a mile of walking. Don’t worry, he was well-compensated for his fortuitous assistance, paving the way for enthusiastic help in coming years.
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Nancy and John at
Stillwell’s Store (David Portz)
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We loaded boats, gear and people down by the river, and all of the vehicles that went down to the river made it back out without getting stuck (this is not a foregone conclusion). We met one last time as a group at Stillwell’s, a store on the road that leads to the other road that goes away from the park and toward the park, and had ice cream, soft drinks, Cheetos and other delicacies. We did a final sort on all of the boats and equipment and said good bye to those who had to leave us to get to work the next day, and the remainder of the group continued the rest of the shuttle back to RGV.
We arrived at Panther Junction Ranger Station just in time to get our permit for the next day’s activities. Eight of us camped the night at RGV and saw a couple of double rainbows.
SANTA ELENA CANYON SEGMENT:
On Tuesday six of us continued on to the second adventure, shuttling to/from Santa Elena River Access (the take-out) to our new put-in at Lajitas. This shuttle took a long time, and we didn’t get on the river until about 1:45 PM. The paddle started pleasantly, with lots of interesting side canyons and low walls, allowing us to view much of the larger landscape and features around us. Before long we were confronted with a pretty significant and steady headwind that slowed our progress somewhat, but provided additional variety to our trip. The geological formations were very different from those in Boquillas Canyon, with light grey bottoms, red columned middles and white caps.
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Hazel and Bill starting from Lajitas (kw)
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We stopped just after 6:00, I believe, at a lovely campsite. We hurried through camp set-up and dinner to beat the dark, which brought a chill that felt colder than anything we had previously experienced on our trip. Everyone hit the sack earlier than usual, and I believe we all slept pretty well.
Wednesday came with warmer temperatures and a bright, almost cloudless sky. After all of the usual morning activities, we got on the water and paddled a couple of miles to the dramatic entrance of Santa Elena Canyon. We came around the corner of a low wall that slanted up from the river, and suddenly we were between two sheer walls that rose above us a few hundred feet. Wow! From this point on, for about 10 miles, we were in awe of the gash we were trespassing. The walls on either side were very close together almost the whole time, and very nearly straight up, with some overhanging. The sun did not reach the water except in a very few places.
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In the beginning of the canyon (kw)
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Beginning of the canyon (kw & dap)
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There were some interesting water features in this section. The current ran straight into some of the inside corners in the wall, as if there was some kind of tunnel or undercut just under the surface. If you were able to ram straight into the wall, maneuvering out of it was still treacherous because of the pressure wave that built up in front of the wall, which exerted a great deal of force to overcome your correct body-to-the-wall position (if you happened to fight your instincts properly) to flip you. I have not experienced that particular manifestation of swift water before, and narrowly escaped a wet exit. Others were not so fortunate. Regarding that last observation, please note lest I sound boastful, that I spent more than a few moments upside down on both segments, so do not think, oh esteemed reader, that I was any better than anyone else in this regard. The scenery changed to other-worldly, with large, white rocks in the water that were softer than most of the surrounding walls. Erosion had turned them into fantastic shapes that reminded the author of icebergs.
Rock Slide Rapid was pretty tame at the flow we had, but it did make everyone anxious because you cannot see what’s coming, and all of the blind corners are pretty tight.
After Rock Slide, the walls were lifted and maintained a “tilt” that created a huge optical illusion that we were aimed down at a steep angle, but the flow was no faster than anywhere else on the river. This continued for miles to the end of the canyon.
After exiting the canyon, we paddled for about a mile to the take-out, did the reverse shuttle in a couple of hours, and loaded the boats and gear in the dark.
ROLL CREDITS:
The photos on this report are just a small sample of those available for viewing. I encourage you to peruse the photo albums of this trip consisting of hundreds of pictures on the HCC website. Please note that as good as these photos are, they cannot do justice to the feeling one gets being there in all of this indescribable grandeur.
LESSONS LEARNED / FUTURE CONSIDERATIONS:
• Stay away from the cane
• Study how pressure waves form against walls and figure out a different way of dealing with them (surf or nudge kayak to open side? – Other?)
• Consider meeting at the take-out (La Linda for the Boquillas trip) to allow a later start for those who are trying to minimize days away from work.
• Consider a 3-day trip for the Lajitas to Santa Elena segment to allow for some extra exploring
• Schedule trip the first week of February – earlier than President’s Day weekend and Spring Break
• Bring extra PFD (inflatable in original packaging to meet requirement)
NOTE: Cottonwood is the closest campground to the Santa Elena River Access, but appears to be closed in January and February, so need to consider primitive camping at Ocotillo Grove or Terlingua Abajo, if possible (no reservations), with a backup plan of reserved camping at RGV.
SPECIAL THANKS:
We are grateful to Duane Hecklesberg, who volunteered to shuttle back to RGV even though he was leaving from the take-out – an extra couple of hours and 100 miles or so.
We are similarly indebted to Harmon Everett, who volunteered to shuttle a boat to the put-in at Lajitas – again a fair distance and time commitment.
Thanks to all of the happy spirits that made the trip such a treat – the whole group is what gives character and joy to the trip, and we had a very good group. The “Specialness Quotient” was very high.
Gratitude to David Portz, who quietly assisted in so many ways during the trip, on the water and off, and took so many of the photos you can see on the website.
We make special note of the graciousness of the folks who run Stillwell’s Store, because on the first shuttle, I realized we did not have the required extra PFD. When I asked if they sold PFDs, they said no, and then proceeded to go to the back of their property and found one they let me borrow for the trip.
Kent Walters
