4/12 Our plans this day are to head for the highest part of the park, the Chisos Mountains Lodge. When we heard Lodge, we were thinking of the great lodges we had seen at Yellowstone and at Yosemite. If you go, be prepared to be a little disappointed, no great lodge, just a great view. This was taken from an overlook above the Lodge and I think our elevation was 5,600 ft.
Back to the main road and making a left heading for the Terlingua Ghost Town which is located just outside of the park. One thing you must get used to in Texas is that everything is a far way away. The drive to the lodge was 30 miles and then to the ghost town it was another 30 miles. Well the biggest disappointment about the ghost town was that the ghosts were alive! Yup, there were lots of folks livin’ in the “ghost” town, and lots of businesses too. There are some abandoned buildings from the old mercury mining town which is no longer active.
Anyway, we stopped in the town of Terlingua, gassed the truck, filled the tummy’s and headed back into the park taking the old Maverick Road (dirt) down to the Santa Elena Canyon (another 20 miles) where the Mexican state of Chihuahua forms the left-hand wall and Texas the right. This area was the site for many farms that supplied produce to the town of Terlingua, and we wondered how difficult it would have been to get that produce to the town.
Back on Paved road, we continue on the Ross Maxwell Scenic Drive to more spectacular views of the mountains with many stops along the way for some pictures of flowers, mountains, old ranches, etc. It’s just amazing what people went through to live out here in those pioneering days. It was a good thing we started early, because we got back late in the afternoon exhausted after covering 144 miles. While only a little over 20 of that was dirt, it was still a long day. The only bad thing was that when we got back we found that the refrigerator in our rig had stopped working, oh bother.
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