Big Bend Summer 2009 – Day 4. Cattail Falls
After the hike to Tule LGK and I shot down to Study Butte and had showers. After we returned to the Chisos Basin to grab some dinner. The weather was clearing and we decided to try our luck at Dugout Wells again. It was pretty quiet, but we did see a lot of White Winged doves coming into the well and one Western Tanager. As my luck goes I didn’t have the right lens on the camera and only got mediocre photos. This guy was drinking and bathing at the pipe.
The drive back up to the Basin was pleasant as the sun dropped and we ran into this beast near our campsite in the Basin. Harmless or not, Vinegaroons are pretty creepy. One great reason to have a tent in the back country during this time of year. Don’t want that baby crawling into my snoring mouth in the middle of the night.
Cattail Falls
A good night sleeping with temps about 65 F and we were up again and headed to Cattail Falls. Although I really like Cattail, I tend to avoid it as I prefer to not to impact the area and also hate it when some goobers show up and ruin my experience. Today was different as we hoped the recent rains would present us with the opportunity to see the falls with more than just the usual trickle. The road into Oak Spring was dry and in good shape as we arrived at the parking area. After the short walk to the tie-down tree, we headed up the trail to the falls. The day was quickly warming and we were starting to sweat a bit as we rounded the final turn and approached the canyon. With about 1/4 of a mile to go we could start to hear the water at the falls and when the view opened up we could see water coming over the lip.
As we entered the narrowing canyon, the air turned noticeably cooler and there were pools and small waterfalls from this point onwards.
When we finally clambered over the last obstacles that separated us from the falls, a steady rush of cool air was being pushed at us from the force of the falling water. It felt like air conditioning and LGK actually got cold after a while.
Images of Cattail Falls
A full sized pano (Didn’t blend real well, I’ll try to fix it) It’s fixed now…much better. (Click to enlarge)
We hiked back from the falls and stopped at the Oak Creek crossing for a while and listened to the birds and watched the red dragonflies buzz the creek, before heading back to my truck. While in area we wanted to check out the validity of the location of Gano Spring and determine whether or not it pushed any water. Did it even exist?
Gano Spring
We parked at a pulloff on the RMSD as close as possible to our jumping of point and worked our way down a steep hillside into a narrow wash and followed it ESE for about 1/2 mile before exiting and heading through some thick brush toward the east….the direction of the map location of Gano Spring. It was difficult to head directly towards our goal with a lot of zig-zagging in thorny thickets before we finally came into an area that was a bit more open and grassy.
According to the topo we were still about 2/10 of a mile west of Gano when we came across a narrow arroyo with steep dirt sides about 10 ft deep. At the bottom of the arroyo was a small clear flowing spring!
I don’t know if this spring was another seep along the same geological structure or was Gano Spring incorrectly marked on the map. Because it was getting pretty hot we decided not to continue on to the “Map location” of Gano and headed back to the truck.
Total mileage for the day ~ 5.5
Back to the Basin for a quiet night. The moon was so bright the stars were almost non existent, but there was moon shadow that was almost startling.