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 1 - Thursday, November 3, 2005

This would be my fifth trip to Big Bend and my fourth trip to the park with Hill Country Outdoors.  After so many Big Bend trips, I had hiked most of the trails in the Chisos Mountains (many of them more than once) and seen many of the more easily accessible points of interest in the desert.  But Big Bend is one of the most vast, remote, and intricate of the national parks, and to claim to have seen it all is at best a naive assertion.  So my goal for this trip was to fill in some of the gaps in my Big Bend knowledge, to focus in on parts of the park that most people never get to see ... a "behind the scenes" tour, so to speak.

The first big gap (both literally and figuratively) was Cattail Canyon, a place in which only a handful of people have ever set foot.  And there's a good reason why very few people have seen it:  it's bloody hard to get into.  We had been trying to find a way into the canyon since 2003 but, as of November of 2004, had managed only to find an overlook.  Earlier in 2005, however, Robert had finally discovered the correct route.  Respecting the wishes of the park to keep the canyon a closely guarded secret, I will not disclose the route here, but I will disclose the pictures I took on our way into and up the canyon.  Those with an intimate familiarity of the area can possibly discern the route from these pictures.  If so, then I caution that it is a very technical scramble climb with some exposure in places and many opportunities to break a leg (or worse.)  The park service has had to extract people from the canyon in the past; it's a very difficult and costly exercise, and they are more than happy to pass along that cost to the extractee.

For those just tuning in, Cattail Canyon is a hanging canyon that drains the Upper Laguna Meadows area of the Chisos Mountains.  The upper canyon, visible from the Laguna Meadows Trail or Emory Peak looking west, starts as a gentle valley but rapidly becomes more rugged before descending over a 700' pouroff into Lower Cattail Canyon.  Lower Cattail Canyon is a much less gentle gorge with sheer rock walls a quarter mile high in places and a floor that is usually no more than 25 feet across.  The lower canyon runs for a couple of miles below the pouroff, descending at a relatively brisk angle that requires some moderate bouldering techniques.  The canyon finally makes a sharp turn to the left before falling abruptly over a series of pouroffs hundreds of feet into the Western Desert below.  The last of those pouroffs is Cattail Falls.  Applying traditional canyoneering techniques to get from Upper Cattail into Lower Cattail is a lost cause unless you happen to have 1500 feet of rope on hand.  And the series of pouroffs that ends in Cattail Falls is an equally dicey proposition.  The last known expedition into Cattail Canyon had to be rescued after they rappelled down one pouroff, pulled their rope down, and realized that they didn't have enough rope to rappel down the next pouroff.  Thus our desire to find a route into the canyon that did not require the use of ropes.

I had driven in with Bill in the middle of the night on Wednesday so I'd be ready early on Thursday to explore Cattail Canyon.  But due to a problem with lost keys, the expedition got a fairly late start and didn't actually begin the climb until around 1:30 PM.  It took us a bit more than an hour to climb up and over the ridge and down into Lower Cattail Canyon.  Will, Juan, and Chris accompanied us on the climb up, but only Juan joined us on the descent.

We spent almost an hour hiking and bouldering our way up canyon at a pretty brisk pace, hoping to reach the base of the 700' pouroff before the waning daylight forced us to retreat.  We ultimately reached a point in the canyon where a more technical up climb would have been required, and we didn't have enough time to attempt it.  But correlating my GPS track with satellite imagery showed that our farthest point of advance was within a stone's throw of the pouroff.  We turned around at about 3:15 and were back at the car barely before sunset; we arrived back at camp well after dark.