Big Bend details...

Cindy & Dana asked for details on Big Bend, so here they are…

I went camping for 5 days.  My good friend Carl Cooper and I went together.  Carl is trying to start an adventure ministry where he organizes adventure trips to serve as discipleship retreats for churches and other groups.  We ran this trip for a group of 20 people from an Austin church's young adults ministry.  We cooked all the food and organized the excursions around the park.

A few highlights of the trip: hiking into the Chisos Mountains, our entire group made the 4.8 mile hike, even one guy who was 300+ pounds with bad knees; swimming in the Rio Grande at the mouth of Boquillas Canyon for 4 hours (we would walk up the bank a ways and ride the current down the river, what a blast); skipping rocks in Santa Elena canyon; sitting in a natural hot springs, watching the sun set over the Rio Grande…Big Bend is an amazing place.

As for the horses in one of the pictures: the first night Carl and I camped in a town called Marathon, Texas, which is 70 miles north of Big Bend.  We set our tent up at a hotel that has gravel pads for that sort of thing ($10 a night, not a bad deal).  I got up early to watch the sunrise and walked down a road on the outskirts of town.  A ways down I came upon four horses on the other side of a fence.  One of them walked over to me and kept putting his head down to the ground.  It took me awhile to figure out that he wanted me to pick up the hay that was sitting on my side of the fence and feed it to him.  Before I knew it, all the horses were lined along the fence.  I got to feed them and pet them as the sun rose…though I was a little nervous that some crazy West Texas guy would come stumbling out of his house with a shotgun telling me to get away from his horses.  But that never happened, and I was able to daydream about owning my own horse.