Category: Excursions

Big Bend National Park

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On our return trip from watching the eclipse in Central Texas, Darlene and I first headed to the southwest edge of Texas to spend a few days exploring Big Bend National Park along the Mexico border.


We didn’t have campground reservations and of course everything in the park was booked out for weeks but we were able to snag backcountry sites which you can only reserve in-person 24 hours in advance.  These are a handful of very dispersed but specifically designated sites along some of the unpaved back roads.  Know that some of these roads require high clearance 4×4 vehicles and some of the sites are very remote, requiring hours to reach.  We actually chose not to take one of these sites because we didn’t want to have to spend so much time to get to it and from it.  As it turned out though, we spent over an hour trying to get to a camp area outside the north end of the park.  In hindsight, we should have looked to find a campground out the more built-up west entrance of the park.

Anyway, we spent three full days hiking, biking and touring very different areas of the park, from desert to mountains and along the Rio Grande.  If you go, make sure you don’t skip out on the really well done Fossil Discovery Exhibit.

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In the Path of Totality

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Darlene and I drove the camper van out to Texas to try to see the total solar eclipse as it traced out a path across North America on April 8th.  Darlene’s friend and coworker Rhonda and her husband Jim have a home in the country in central Texas, northwest of Austin, which happened to lie near the center line of the path of totality.  They invited us as well as many other friends and neighbors to experience the eclipse together on their property.

The weather forecast was looking pretty grim a week before the big day – a multi-day storm for central Texas and heavy cloud cover for much of the entire path across the central states.  We made the long trip anyway in the hope of seeing something though.  It started looking more hopeful as we got closer.  On the morning of, the clouds were pretty heavy but patches of blue sky started to appear mid-morning, a few hours before the moon’s shadow was to reach us.  It never completely cleared but we were all excited and grateful to be able to see and enjoy the eclipse through the passing clouds – and even still see totality through the veil of clouds right up until the end of it.  The clouds did obscure much of the outward radiance of the corona during totality but it was still spectacular and we were able to clearly see several prominences extending beyond the edge of the moon – even with the naked eye!

I had set up a bunch of cameras and my two telescopes to capture the scene and share magnified views of the sun as it happened.  I had a few things go wrong though, including inadvertently moving my telephoto camera’s lens out of focus (ruining the wider view I wanted to capture) and discovering a series of tiny blotches across the images and video from my 8″ SCT telescope setup that I had to touch up afterwards.

I was still able to put together a short video of the experience:

Many thanks to Jim and Rhonda for their hospitality and inviting us to join them – and nice job guys on fixing the weather just in time!

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Here’s the galleries (and videos) from several previous solar eclipse experiences:
Eclipse from the Ruby Mountains (annular eclipse in Nevada on 10/14/2023)
A Total Eclipse of the Sun (total eclipse in Oregon on 8/21/2017)
Eclipse Watch (annular eclipse in California on 5/20/2012)

Petrified Forest National Park

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On our way to Texas to see the eclipse, we enjoyed an afternoon checking out the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona: lots of wide vistas and pretty landscapes, some pueblo ruins and petroglyphs, Triassic era fossils and of course lots of colorful “rockified” (okay, petrified) tree remains everywhere.

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Red Rock Canyon

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We reached the final destination of our road trip down SR95 on New Year’s Eve: Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area. The area is full of scenic trails, grand vistas, gorgeous rock formations and lots of bouldering and rock climbing opportunities. As usual, we found places to camp along dirt roads on nearby BLM land.

Due to Red Rock Canyon’s popularity and close proximity to Las Vegas, you have to purchase a timed entry reservation online to access the scenic loop road and its associated trailheads but the system works well.  One thing I’d recommend to make the most of your time is to spend a day exploring the Calico Hills area from the other side – from the free-to-access Calico Basin area – so that you can have more time for other trails on the day you reserve entry to the scenic loop.

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Rhyolite Ruins, Desert Art and Wild Burros

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Continuing south on SR95 from Tonopah and Goldfield, we came through Beatty and reached the Goldwell Open Air Museum a little before sunset:

We spent the next two nights in a spot in the hills outside Beatty and ventured out on our bikes to explore and visit the remains of the mining town, Rhyolite.  We also encounter some wild burros both out in the desert and in the middle of the town of Beatty.

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International Car Forest of the Last Church

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Next stop along Nevada’s SR95: another once-booming mining town, Goldfield, and the International Car Forest of the Last Church:

There’s a few old buildings and several collections of abandoned mining gear in town.  We skipped those but did swing by the old “pioneer” graveyard in the outskirts of town to see some unusual epitaphs:

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Mirrors, Dunes, Clowns and Mines

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To continue our road trip down SR95 in Nevada, we returned from our Berlin ghost town detour and camped out near Tonopah at the base of the Crescent Sand Dunes, in sight of a solar concentrating power plant:

The following day, we visited the freaky fun Clown Motel and the neighboring graveyard from Tonopah’s early mining days:

But we spent most of the day checking out the very interesting Tonopah Historic Mining Park:

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Berlin / Ichthyosaur State Park

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The day after Christmas, Darlene and I headed out in the camper van for a road trip down the western side of Nevada. Starting from the Tahoe house, our first stop heading south along SR95 was an overnight stay at Walker Lake:

Passing through Hawthorne the next morning, we then took a major detour off SR95 to visit Berlin /Ichthyosaur State Park –both a silver mining ghost town and a significant fossil site for ichthyosaurs.  We enjoyed seeing and reading about this history of Berlin but unfortunately, the fossil site building has very limited hours in the winter so we could only peer in the window.

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