Broke Mill RV Park, Del Rio, Texas
Listen to advice and accept instruction, and in the end you will be wise. ~ Proverbs 19:20
Blaine the Magnificent came through once again! Yesterday afternoon, he somehow, miraculously managed to fix my blog issues! And I worked late into the evening getting posts in for Blaine to edit. But we made a lot of progress, so I felt good about spending today outdoors.
And what a glorious and wonderful day it was! Except I was a bit overdressed for the weather. I didn’t realize it was hitting 70 today. I dressed for mid-fifties. But it’s all good.
We drove about 25 minutes (35 miles west of Del Rio – the speed limit on the way there is 75mph 😊) to Seminole Canyon State Park and Historic Site today.
Not too long before we got there, we were surprised to discover that we had to go through a Border Patrol check-point. Even though we were, and were staying, in America. I dug out our driver’s licenses, but in the end, we didn’t need them. The guy just asked us if we were Americans and sent us on our way. I guess we were pretty obvious – a Jeep with Ohio plates, Blaine’s OSU ball cap, the Gringo accent and lily white skin . . . I’ll bet there’s not too many of those in Mexico. 😊
Shortly after, we lost cell service. Sigh . . . .
Seminole Canyon is best known for its ancient pictographs, rugged limestone terrain and spectacular canyons that lure visitors. Fate Bell Shelter contains Pecos River rock art dated 4,000 years old, considered to be some of North America’s oldest pictographs. . . . An impressive rendering of a panther on the wall of another cave can be seen from a scenic overlook. ~ from their brochure
Look it over.
Can you guess why?
Whoda thunk?!?
At the Visitor Center, there was a lovely woman named Jerri, who gave us our pass and extoled the virtues of her obviously much loved Park. So sweet and so helpful!
We walked through their small museum which had more history on the area than we really felt like paying much attention to. I know. That’s really unusual for us. But we had at least nine miles of hiking to do today.
It’s much, much smaller than the original. : )
We discussed the possibility of taking their 3pm tour if we returned in time, but by the time we returned, we decided we just didn’t have the umph or desire to stick around for a 90-minute tour. We’re going to a place called Hueco Tanks in a couple of weeks and will be taking a private tour there to see pictographs (or petroglyphs as some call them). We know the ones there aren’t as old, but between the museum and the video we watched here at Seminole, we felt like we’d seen enough.
It was a great hike today, and the canyon was remarkable!
See the rocks set to hold up the teepee?
Guess you have to have a better imagination than we do. . . .
but compared to all the flat land we’ve been in lately, it seems huge!
Blaine’s on one side . . . .
The dividing line between Texas and Mexico.
But we’ve still got a bit of a ways to go to get there.
but therer’s not much shade here right now.
Turned out to be a blessing for us,
as we walked further down (just like Jerri had told us) and found a great spot for lunch!
Remember. That cat is 9′ long!
It’s not a very good picture, but you can see the panther kinda in the middle.
See his tail curled up over his back?
Our hike took us right to the edge of the Mexican border, with only the Rio Grande River separating the two nations. Seemed to us like anyone could cross over either way here. But evidently, it’s not that simple. And it provided us with a great place to sit and eat our lunch! And not only did we rest and eat, but we got a show as well.
Now they’ve allowed trees to grow up and cover most of the pictographs. : (
The cave is behind the trees on the right.
Actually, Blaine’s looking at Mexico across the river.
I’m looking at the pictographs in Panther Cave.
A small motorboat with three men and two dogs came tooling up the river and then got stuck. For our entire lunch they worked, sort of, at getting unstuck by revving their engine and stirring up whatever’s in the bottom of the river. Evidently, none of them wanted to get out of the boat and push, even though one of them took off all his clothes except his boxers.
The other, closer thing in the water is part of a tree.
We wondered if their original plan was to go up into the canyon,
either to look at the pictograhs or fish.
They had to change their plans. : )
Moving on after lunch, we were able to still do some exploring, but most of the way back was just through scrub. There’s way more prickly bushes than we ever knew about. And I could write a book on all the different types of scat we saw today, but there were no critter sightings for us today. Darn!
Guess they got unstuck.
Good thing because I don’t know where they would’ve gotten help from.
It was full of ice cold water!
We’re going in search of a sculpture.
A really big one, that we didn’t see this morning.
where the majority of the pictographs can be seen in their
private 90-minute tour.
I prefer to look at the statue and think of it as a picture of someone worshiping our Heavenly Father. : )
A wondrous day today, brought to you by our Father God, Creator of the world we live in!