Sunday February 3, 2008

Slept a little better last night, but the mattress is still not blown up as it should be. Our next door neighbors, Rob and Karen from Ontario had a compressor which we thought might work. We dragged the mattress back to the rest room and hooked up the compressor to the mattress using duct tape to hold the hose onto the intake valve . . . and it worked! The mattress blew up completely! Thank you, Rob and Karen! Rob is a physics teacher and Karen is a meditation instructor - we exchanged email addresses and hope that they will come to visit Mystic some time. We called called Beans and they are sending a replacement pump, but for now we are okay. We took the Ross Maxwell Scenic Drive today and stopped to hike a few of the walks along the way. We stopped at the Sam Nail Ranch - built in 1916 - which was an adobe house. The people were self-sufficient with milk cows, chickens, hogs, a vegetable garden and fruit orchard, windmills to carry water from the dug wells for ranch use and irrigation. We stopped at Blue Creek Ranch where the house still stands - built of natural stone - plastered walls - located in the bottom of a wide canyon. There was even a circular corral left made of upright sticks and small trees. Our next hike was the Burro Mesa Pouroff - this trail led to a lovely box canyon. Along the way there were several pouroffs or dry waterfalls which have carved smooth troughs into the stone. During the rainy season, this must be an awesome sight. We drove on to Castelon where a few old houses and a store remain. The store is still in business and is run by the park service. Until the border closed in 2002, Mexicans came across to purchase items here. Now they have to travel 160 miles on bad roads to get to the nearest town from their small village across the river. We finished our drive at the Santa Elena Canyon - lovely views. Drove back and stopped at Chisos Basin. They have wifi on their patio so we blogged Friday and Saturday there. They also have an outdoor TV. Because it was Super Bowl Sunday, there was quite a crowd - we finally left without finishing the blog for today as we felt people were looking for seats for the game and it was getting quite chilly. We have been having true desert temps - 20's and 30's at night and quite hot during the day (got to 92 today!). We saw three mule deer on our way back to the parking lot and then when we got on the road and were headed back to camp we saw four javelinas next to the road - they look like wild pigs, but they are really peccaries. Back at camp we walked to the ampitheater to see a program on snakes of the Big Bend.