Down By The River

Upriver the sun has peeked over the bluffs.

Downriver the shadows are quickly giving way to golden rays.

And over there, the far side of the river, is where I want to be.

Low rainfall since the first of the year means the looming threat of drought, burn-bans, and a so-so showing of wildflowers, but it also means low water levels. I’ve crossed this river, the Pedernales, thigh-deep with the current threatening to rip my leg off and drag it downstream every time I lift it for one more short, slippery shuffle far-bank-wards, I’ve also seen it tearing at the bank 20 feet above my head’s current position, but today the water is ankle-deep most the way across with one short section, the main channel on the far side, reaching mid-calf.

I’ve got a lot more hiking to do today and wet feet are to hiking like – well – wet feet. My boots are waterproof but only ankle high, so a more inexperienced me would go through the hassle of finding a dry spot to sit, removing boots and socks, fighting my way into snug-fitting and grippy water-shoes, doing the crossing, finding yet another dry spot to sit,  fighting once again with the water-shoes, made worse now because they and feet are wet, drying feet with the scrap of towel I carry, dragging socks back over slightly damp toes, pulling on boots, and finally going through the elaborate process of doing up the laces. But I’ve done enough hiking to have found out, by accident verified with follow-up experimentation, that as long as I don’t stand and soak, I can completely submerge my tightly laced boots and still have dry feet. Of course the exposed part of my socks get wet and a little of that will eventually wick down past the collar of my boots, but a quick pat-down with the towel minimizes that to just a temporary coolness around my ankles.

Over here on the east side of the river, ankles damp, feet dry, I’m back in the shadow of the bluff,

but shadow doesn’t mean gloom, just a little extra chill.

The air is cold enough this morning that the river-water felt warm, and, unlike me, this guy is having none of that, preferring to hang tight right where he is, despite my nosiness, until the rays reach in here and get those juices flowing again.

When I’m done peeping into insect bedrooms I have to face the fact that as far as I climbed down to the river on the other side, I now have to climb back up on this side. The yin and yang of life.

But there’s usually little rewards for those that look for them, such as this solitary globular flower-cluster just there at the top of the bluff being pollinated by tiny little moth-like creatures feeding on the nectar.

One of the dark-winged, white-banded insects is near the top center of the photo with a butt-side view of another  just left and slightly down from him, and if you look hard enough (As if you’ve got nothing better to do)  there are at least two more feeding at this buffet.

I throw this photo in for a sense of scale.

But I have a goal this morning that has nothing to do with entomology. In fact it’s a goal I’ve had for a long time, ever since I first stood on the southern bluff, there in the red circle, years ago and looked across at the gentler slope on the north side of the river. On-site observation and examination of topo-maps has convinced me that, though there is no trail there, it should be a bit of simple bushwacking to get down to the river in this quiet corner of the park without having to resort to any rock-climbing, or falling off of cliffing. . . (Which, as a sport has it's limitations, namely you only get to do it once!)

And to make my goal even easier to obtain, the park added the Spur Trail to the official trail system several years ago, which actually isn’t a spur at all but rather an extension of the original Loop Trail.

But I still manage to get distracted along the way by this tightly knit web of a Funnel-Spider,

but whoever is in there is smarter than me. I tickle the web, which is slick rather than sticky so prey will slide down into the hole, with a blade of grass but can’t entice the architect to show herself.

But eventually I make my way along the Spur Trail to its southernmost point, down there at the top end of that short out-and-back spur of my track.

From here I’m only a quarter mile from my objective, but it isn’t exactly going to be a stroll in the park.

With compass in hand I pick a likely looking spot and leave the groomed trail.

Ideally I want to maintain a bearing of 180 degrees but, as is normal when going off-trail, there are a few necessary detours along the way.

But there is also a wide band of this cousin to the Sawtooth Agave between me and my objective that there is no detouring around.

Now any normal idiot would retreat at this point, but I’ve never claimed to be a normal idiot, so I tuck the compass away, because I've gone far enough that now all I have to do is keep moving downhill, and bull my way through, very gingerly.

My clothes take the worst of it, (I always hike in long pants and long sleeves) but my person doesn’t come out unscathed.

This might not look like much here but I've already washed the blood off a couple times and those little needle-darts don’t always leave marks. But I knew all about each one of those little pricks when washing veggies for dinner that night! When I sprayed the veggies, and of course, the hand that was holding them, down with vinegar I promptly started dancing and cussing because that shit stung!!

But I do manage to make it down to the river!

A nicely isolated, quietly pristine river with water so crystalline it looks shallower than it really is.

Which is no big deal because I wasn’t going to cross the river here anyway.

Texas laws regarding waterways, private property, and trespassing are very specific. Generally property lines run down the middle of the main channel. As long as you're floating on the water you are fine, but once you put your feet on the bottom you are trespassing, so despite how inviting that barely visible little shaded inlet on the other side of the river, up there in the top-right, looks

the park boundary on the south side of the river is right there and anything left of the sign, which includes that little inlet, is trespassing on private property.

I certainly don’t like people trespassing on my property so I’m not about to do the same to someone else’s. (I’m the same way about speeding. I don’t like people speeding on my street so I have the courtesy not to speed on theirs.)

Once more into the breach!

After an extended break there beside the river, which I have all to myself, it’s time to make my way back uphill to continue my hike.

I survive my detour, smugly satisfied with myself, regain the official trail, and eventually make my way up to the northernmost point of the hike, which is at the designated Scenic Overlook.

I find the single, rustic bench that constitutes the overlook sunning itself without the least bit of shade

so I make my own little nest and hang out there, nearly alone, (One solitary hiker made it to the overlook bench, spent all of 15 seconds looking, then left again.) until the westering sun eventually starts encroaching on me.

All in all, a very satisfying day out on the trail alone with my own thoughts (We’ll get to the voices in my head another time. . .) with the bonus, the extra chocolate-chip cookie in the bag, of achieving a long-time goal.

Tricky Nature Trail

Being mid-afternoon, I chose the worst possible time of day for photography short of straight up noon,

but I had arrived at my campsite at 1400, it takes all of 3 minutes to convert The Van from road to camp mode, (5 if I also set out the folding chair and table) and the half-mile Twin Falls Nature trail hanging off the southern side of the Pedernales Falls State Park campground was calling my name.

It’s a big campground and by the time I added in getting to and from my campsite on the northern edge, it turned into a mile and a half trip, but if I couldn’t handle that in the afternoon sun tomorrow was going to be a killer!

This trail, short as it is, can be deceiving.

First there’s the whole “Nature Trail” thing. Right or wrong, whenever I see Nature tacked onto a trail it conjures up visions of a short, graveled, or even paved, stroll, and the beginning of this trail does nothing to contradict that vision.

But it’s not long before this baby-stroller-ready path is dropping over the limestone cliffs forming a bluff above the river and ducking under low-hanging trees. (if you follow the trail on the right edge of the photo you can see it heads towards an ‘arch’ which is a toppled tree that has been there for at least a decade. It’s just low enough to make it painful on old knees to maneuver self and pack under it but the tetrain precludes going around.)

The second trick this trail has under its sleeve is actually managing to stay on it.

This isn’t an out-and-back trail but rather an open loop that very discreetly comes back out on the campground road between a couple of the well-spaced campsite. Unless you know where it is, this end of the trail is difficult to find so naturally most people start at the signed trailhead and walk it clockwise.

After dropping down the bluff then traversing along it for a bit you come to the overlook, which is a set of steps dropping down to a wooden observation platform. The problem is that when people climb back up, rather than strike out up-bluff they have a tendency to look for the easier route and continue traversing westward along the bluff. So many boots have gone this way that it has created a fake trail.

Right now it’s not so bad because someone has drug some cut brush across the fake trail but more than once over the years I’ve re-directed people from the fake trail back to the actual trail, which at this point is soon climbing up through a steep crack in the limestone. If you stay on the fake trail long enough it peters out and dumps you off in an area of thick brush that is difficult to get through.

At the best of times the overlook is a long ways above the featured falls themselves. In this photo one of the twins is below the arrow and the other is behind the vegetation to the right.

And right now, with low water-levels all over the area, the “falls” might be slightly disappointing.

3016

But it’s still a pleasant little hike-et.

And at one spot I catch sight of Wolf Mountain, where I’ll be messing around on a longer bike/hike in a few days.

No Room At The Inn; Now I Know Why

I was wondering why I had so much trouble snagging a reservation at Pedernales State Park. At first I put it down to spring break, then Easter, but the two weeks following Easter??

I finally settled for a long-range Sunday-through-Thursday reservation and once I got there understood the issue.

At least half, though it seems like more than half, of the campsites are closed down, but not because of any work on the sites themselves,

rather the issue is lack of shitters!

One of the two bathroom buildings in the campground, probably dating from the early 70’s when the park opened, is gone and in the process of being replaced by this upgraded version.

The new building sure is purty,

but the original still functioned and I didn’t think it was all that bad.

Then again, they didn’t ask me. . .

By The Numbers

In The Van I live on solar power, and since my 12-volt compressor fridge is by far the single largest user of that power, squeezing the best possible ‘mileage’ out of it has a big impact on the overall livability.

But, like most fridges, RV or not, the so-called thermostat control is just a knob with meaningless numbers around it. (I’ve yet to see food safety guidelines that say “Keep Refrigerated To At Least Setting 3”!) I suppose by now there are some high-end fridges out there with app-controls that can be used to set specific temperatures, and one-day those might migrate to RV’s, but in the meantime it’s pretty much a guessing game.

I suppose I can stick my hand inside and fondle the shredded cheese to check the temperature but that’s highly prone to miss-interpretation. On a hot day the cheese might feel nicely chilled, even if it’s not. And on a cold day it may feel too warm, even if it’s not.  In this case about the only sure fired indicators are those too-late warnings such as frozen lettuce or slimy sliced turkey.

And besides ruined food, a too-cold fridge is sucking down power like a kid that’s found an unguarded jug of Kool-Aid!

OK an aside here: Notice that I keep saying fridge and don’t refer to the freezer at all. That’s because, though my fridge technically has a freezer section it’s a bit of a joke since there is no thermal separation between freezer section and fridge. This means that, in practice, if I get the freezer section down to around 30 degrees, the delicates such as lettuce and other vegetables down there in the fridge section are frozen, and it’s no fun eating frozen lettuce! And if I get the freezer cold enough to be a real freezer, down to 10 degrees or less, you know, ice-cream and ice-cubes ready, then everything in the fridge, except maybe the vodka, is frozen too. So I use my unit as a two-compartment fridge. Things I want extra cold, such as meats and fruit-cups (mummm, nothing like a frosty fruit-cup after a long hike!) go in the upper (freezer) section and everything else in the lower (fridge) section.

Of course the only way this works out consistently is if I know the actual temperature inside there, and in my case I use these wireless sending units. One in the upper section and one in the lower.

By the way, my fridge is not a frost-free unit and I learned the hard way that these sending units need to be protected from the condensation coming off the refrigerant coils if they are going to survive long-term.

The receiver sits outside the fridge and though it’s still a manual process of checking the receiver unit and tweaking the fridge-knob, it’s much more accurate than the ol’ hand-in-the-fridge method.

And by the way, there is no single setting of the knob that corresponds to the proper temperature so this is not a set-once-and-forget prospect, because the temp maintained by any one setting is affected by ambient temperatures. The warmer the days the higher I need to turn the knob to maintain my target temp.

In the interests of conserving power (Which is kind of where this post started) I shoot for keeping the lower section between 45 and 50 degrees which, as you can see, keeps the temperature in upper section cold enough to safely refrigerate things like meat and fish.

And proper temperature control has a big effect on my power consumption. If I try to keep the lower section in the 35 to 40 degree range, during the overnight hours (No incoming power from the solar panel) the fridge will suck 22 to 25 amp-hours of power out of the batteries. By keeping just the upper section that cold and letting the lower section run warmer, but still within food-safety guidelines for many products, I average more like 13 amp-hours consumed overnight.

Big difference!

Which means that the holy-grail for everybody that lives off solar, full batteries, is achieved well before noon on sunny days and usually by late afternoon on less than sunny days. 

I’ve tried out several wireless thermometers over the years and have found this Acurite model to be the most rugged and reliable. 

Though designed as a fridge-freezer thermometer I use a second one in The Van as an indoor/outdoor thermometer. One of the sending units is inside The Van and the other is wrapped in a heavy-duty sandwich bag and zip-tied to a wire-harness under the left-rear corner of The Van where it’s as far as I can get it from drive-train and exhaust components but still in the shade.

Fun fact, at least I thought it was interesting, that low temp of 44 occurred the morning of my Spicewood Springs hike and the high that day was 77 for a temperature gain of 33. A day of matched  pairs.

Fall or Slide?

Time for one last short hike this morning before the Friday glut kicks me out of Colorado Bend State Park. Being a mere two and half hours from that overblown ego that is Austin on most spring weekends the rangers have to close the park in the afternoon because there’s nowhere else to cram even one more car.

Any time a city makes one of those ‘best places’ lists it’s all over, the city is ruined, and Austin has been making ‘best places’ lists for at least a decade now, which explains the horrendous traffic and severe housing shortage.

But’s that’s later, right now, on this Friday morning, the question is Gorman Falls or Tie Slide?

At three miles round trip the trails are roughly the same length, and they are both down-then-back-up trails, but I’ve done Gorman Falls, there in the bottom right, before (It’s kind of the obligatory hike in these parts.) so I’m going to hang a left here just out of the trailhead parking and do Tie Slide this morning.

And just in case I’ve forgotten, here’s another of the Mountain Lion warning.

And apparently there’s no hope for me.

While the last two ‘general safety tips’ don’t apply to me, I’m often breaking the second tip, after all, dawn and dusk are when the best hiking is to be found. And, of course, I’m always breaking the #1 safety tip, the one that’s first on any list of hiking safety tips. So if this blog stops short one day it just might be that my rebel and reckless disregard of this tip has finally caught up with me!

Initially the trail wanders easily across flats populated with the remnants, or more correctly, replacements, of the resource that first brought Europeans to the area to log, first for lumber and then when the big trees ran out, for wood to be turned into charcoal.

Coming down off the flats the trail flirts with Tie Slide Creek for a while. The name hints at the recent history of this place but unfortunately the nearest, and only, interpretive signs that goes into a little of that history are at the other end of the park, just outside the visitor center, (In this park the visitor center is at the far end of the park and not up by the entrance.) and my highly un-scientific observations indicate that very few even know they are there let alone read them. . .

Tie Slide Creek soon slips under the northern boundary fence and the trail turns east towards the Colorado River.

And just in case you are having trouble following the trail, here’s a few cairns to help. . .

I have no idea who Rusty is, but at the easternmost end of the trail he has a roost.  A roost he’s apparently willing to share. At least he didn’t show up to run me off while I was there.

In addition to a distant view of Messenger Mountain off to the northeast, (I can speculate but sure would like to know for sure the story behind that name) and of  a bit of closed-to-the-public State Park land there directly across the river,

the Roost offers great views up

and down the river. It's a nice place to just lean (against the Roost's railing) and be for a while.

But eventually I hear people on the trail behind me and know it’s time to go.

This isn't the best hike in the park, but then again, to paraphrase a saying from my youth (Yep, waayyyy back then.) any hike, great or mediocre, is better than a stick in the eye.