2003-11-07 Lost Mine and The Window 2003-11-08 Pine Canyon and Ernst Tinaja 2003-11-09 Cattail Canyon 2004-11-04 The Journey 2004-11-05 Casa Grande and Lost Mine 2004-11-06 Cattail Canyon 2004-11-07 Santa Elena Canyon and Cattail Falls 2005-06-01 Chisos Mountain Lodge 2005-06-02 Emory Peak 2005-06-03 Desert Views 2005-06-04 The Window at Sunset 2005-11-03 Cattail Canyon 2005-11-04 South Rim 2005-11-05 Santa Elena Canyon by Canoe 2005-11-06 Santa Elena Canyon by Canoe 2002-11-08 Emory Peak and South Rim 2002-11-09 Cattail Falls and Santa Elena Canyon 2002-11-09 Terlingua and Lajitas 2002-11-10 Old Ore Road and Hot Springs 2002-11-10 The Window at Sunset

Day 2 (Saturday, 11/8/2003)

Saturday's original plan had been to canoe Santa Elena Canyon, but the water level in the Rio Grande was unfortunately too low (thank you, Lajitas golf fans.) My backup plan was to climb Casa Grande', as I'd tried to do the previous day, but fog rolled into the Basin yet again around mid morning and squelched the plan for the second day in a row. The day was not lost, however, as a few of us piled into Ritchie's Land Rover and hit some of the lesser-traveled areas of the park.

The first stop was Pine Canyon, a box canyon that cuts into the eastern edge of the Chisos Mountains directly below Lost Mine Peak and is accessible only by 5 miles of jeep roads and a 2-mile (one way) hike with 1000 feet of elevation gain. Like many of the more remote areas of the park, Pine Canyon exacts a toll in blood, sweat, and gears for its view, but the price is well worth it. Within a very short distance, our hike took us from arid sage desert with towering red granite obelisks up through semi-arid pine forest and into temperate hardwood forest replete with maples and oaks in full fall color. Those who have seen Cattail Falls could be forgiven for comparing Pine Canyon to it, but the latter plays out on a much grander scale.

After Pine Canyon, the next stop was Ernst Tinaja, to which Amy and Ken and I had mountain biked on a previous trip. Even though I'd seen Ernst Tinaja before, I had never seen or photographed it during the "golden hour". The waning afternoon sun and the erstwhile seafloor that juts out at dizzying angles from the canyon walls became a spectacular interplay between light and shadow as we made our way up the trail we had seen before and yet never seen at all until this moment.

On Saturday evening, we were treated to a breathtaking view of the full lunar eclipse as it flanked Casa Grande' in the eastern sky above our campsite. After the eclipse, a group of us (myself, Cheryl, Shana, Steve, and the dude from Dallas) took a moonlight jaunt down to The Window and back (4 miles round trip) while another group headed out to sample the nightlife in Terlingua.