Driving through west Texas is an experience. There are not too many folks so you pass cars only occasionally on the roads. Most everybody waves a friendly hello and you are soon doing it too. After gassing up the truck at Alpine and picking up some scrub oak firewood we headed in to Big Bend National Park. Scrub oak wood turns out to be nearly impossible to split, but makes some of the finest firewood for cooking that I have every seen — the coals will burn for about 4 hours.

We had a mind to camp by the Rio Grande at the extreme south tip of the park, but there were fantastic numbers of zeppelin sized mosquitoes in the 90-100 degree heat so we headed into the Chisos Mountains to camp there instead. In the centre of the park, the mountain weather was cooler (this was good) and no bugs! Also the scenery was more interesting.

We took a day tour from our camp at the Chisos mountains over to the western part of the park.