A Visit to the Pecos National Historical Park

The church ruins at the Pecos National Historical Park

After several days of moderate hikes in the Santa Fe National Forest, we took a short drive to Pecos, NM to visit the Pecos National Historic Park.  Over 40 years ago when David and I were dating and taking backpacking trips into the Pecos Wilderness we visited this park.  Then it was designated as Pecos National Monument but in 1990 new lands were authorized by Congress expanding the size and mission of the park and a new visitor center was built.  We were definitely overdue for another visit. 

Outer pueblo wall ruins with the Sangre de Christo Mountains in the distance

It was a cool day so we left Maya in the car while we checked out the new visitor center.  The exhibits were very well done with many pieces of pottery painstakingly put together to tell the story of life in the pueblo. Archeologist, A.V. Kidder was largely responsible for piecing this story together.  Kidder tested his theory of dating by stratigraphy as he examined the great trash mound on the pueblo’s east side.  Kidder had no sophisticated dating technology but was able to identify the occupation of the Pecos Pueblo by the changes in pottery styles and techniques. 

David checks out a kiva while Maya stands guard

After a great time in the visitor center we returned to the car to get Maya as she was allowed on the 1.25-mile self-guiding trail that winds through the Pecos Pueblo and the Mission Church ruins.  It was windy and clear on the ridge and the 360 degree views of the surrounding valley made us understand why the pueblo was built here.

Interior of the kiva

Kivas are special places of ceremony to the Puebloan peoples. 
They are located between the underworld and the world above.

The Pecos Pueblo is no longer standing like many in New Mexico but the ruins are well preserved.   And the really cool thing about this pueblo is its story.  From about 1100 the first Puebloans were building rock and mud villages in the Pecos River Valley.  Over two dozen villages rose here over the next two centuries including the ruins of the village where the Pecos Pueblo stands today.  In the 1300’s the settlement grew larger and by 1450 the pueblo had become a fortress five stories high with over 2,000 people.

Maya is concerned that I am not coming out

There is speculation about the sudden growth.  Many think that settling on the rocky ledge freed up more land to be farmed.  But also the Plains Indians began to arrive and raid about this time and the Pecos Pueblo up on the ridge offered views in every direction and an excellent defensive position.  The abundant water, rich farmland and variety of plants and animals in the valley made the Pecos Pueblo a trading force both economically powerful and adept in the arts and customs of the Plains and Pueblo tribes.  And then the Spaniards arrived…

Ruins of another kiva and the pueblo wall

We spent about an hour wandering the ruins and exploring the mission church.  The first mission church was completed around 1625 but was destroyed by the Pueblo Revolt in 1680.  The Spaniards were driven back to Mexico but returned 12 years later and in the Pecos Pueblo, they were actually welcomed back. (Not so everywhere in New Mexico.) The second smaller church was finished in 1717 and those are the ruins that are seen today.

Outer church wall and viga

This is the second National Park Service administered site that we have visited this year and the first on our summer adventure.  (We visited the Big Thicket just a few weeks before leaving Nacogdoches.) We will see how many NPS locations we visit on this 100^th anniversary of the National Park Service.

Interior of church looking through portal

On Memorial Day we had a fantastic hike into the Pecos Wilderness from the Santa Fe Ski area.  We hiked the Windsor Trail to La Vega and ran into snow at about 10,500 feet!  Over 8 ½ miles and we are all moving slow this morning but we all survived and Maya even frolicked in the snow.  But we may pay today!  Hope you all had a nice Memorial Day with family and friends. 

Maya and David hit snow on the Windsor Trail in the Pecos Wilderness

We are leaving Santa Fe this morning to spend about 5 days up in the Santa Fe National Forest in a campground near the south central border of the Pecos Wilderness.  There will be no electricity, no water, no phone or Internet so we will be roughing it and doing some ‘real camping.’  We will be back in Santa Fe next weekend and back ‘on the grid.’  More later…

David’s Stats:

Days Hiked  6  
Total Miles Hiked    30.89
Ave. Miles per Day   5.15  
Total Elevation Gain     4,888
Ave. Elevation Gain per day   815

We're in Santa Fe!

Mountains and pine trees are the best!

Yay!  It seems it took long enough for us to get ‘on the road’ but we are finally traveling again.  It was a crazy few days taking exams, packing up Silver and doing everything (I hope we remembered everything) one has to do to be gone for about 3 months.

Cactus and Indian paintbrush are cool too...

When we arrived in Odessa, my dad was not well enough to travel so we didn’t make it to Ruidoso with my parents.  Still, we had a nice time hanging out with the family and eating a lot of good meals together.  Hopefully, we will get everybody to Ruidoso in August on our way back.

With dad doing a little better, we bid everyone good-bye and were officially on our way. It felt so good to be traveling again in Silver with David and Maya and the whole summer stretching ahead of us.  We arrived in Santa Fe on Tuesday and have been taking some short hikes to get our lungs used to the altitude and our legs back in hiking shape – not to mention a few trips to some of our favorite New Mexican restaurants.  After all, stomachs have to be kept in shape too!  (And we are in Santa Fe so all the food is healthy, right?)

We spent our first night 'On the Road with Maya'

at Bottomless Lakes State Park near Roswell, NM

We are all getting used to the RV ‘routine’ again.  Maya turned 12 in December and she is having a harder time getting in and out of the RV but with a little help she does fine.  I have been concerned about how the hiking will go this summer.  She has been slowing down on her walks for the past 6 months but so far on our 3 – 5 mile hikes things are going well, just a little slower than past years.  And right now David and I are not moving all that fast either although that should get better once we are more used to the altitude.

Salt cedar is quite invasive in the marshes at Bottomless Lakes SP

This plant can use up to 10 gallons of water a day!

Anyway we may not log as many miles on our feet (or our RV for that matter) on this fifth summer on the road as previous years.  For one thing we are only traveling for three months instead of the usual 6 to 8 months outside of Texas.  That being said, it is probably a good time to do our usual recap of our past year’s statistics.

The shores of Lake Superior

In 2015, we traveled from May 2 until August 30 in the Midwest – Texas to Arkansas then Missouri, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri (again) and Oklahoma before returning to Texas.  Throughout our travels we suffered many plagues of rain, poison ivy, ticks, mosquitoes, biting flies and various other ‘bite-mes’ so our hiking mileage was down compared to previous years.  Still we had a fabulous time, especially once we arrived in Michigan and we absolutely loved our time traveling the shores of Lake Superior.

David’s Stats for 2015 (out of Texas miles and hikes):

Days Hiked     67
Total Miles Hiked    266
Total Elevation Gain     32,394
Number of Wildernesses Hiked   5
Days hiked on the North Country Trail   10                                       
Days hiked on the Superior Hiking Trail   10

Miles driven on the RV   5,680
Miles driven on the Honda   6,830

Our first year out in 2012 we didn’t start until June 12 and because it was hot we headed quickly up to the Pacific Northwest and Canada.  We didn’t have our GPS so we don’t have statistics except car and RV mileage. (I do seem to remember hiking my butt off that year in the Canadian Rockies!)  In 2013 we went East and hiked many miles along the Appalachian Trail and other trails racking up over 635 miles.  In 2014 we were in the West again but started in early April and explored more of the southwest before heading to Oregon and Washington then coming back through Montana and Idaho.  Our mileage for 2014 was 610 miles. 

Gooseberry Falls in Minnesota

So 2015’s 266 miles seems pretty pathetic.  But as I mentioned it was a season of many plagues and we came back about 3 months earlier because of starting school in Nacogdoches.  Though we will only be traveling the summer months and we are all a bit slower these days I am hoping that we will at least match last year’s mileage. And being in the West we will easily top last year’s elevation.  Stay tuned and we will see!

One of our Midwest 'plagues,' biting flies...

Hopefully the West will be much kinder where flies are concerned!

A Hike Along Big Sandy Creek

Our hike in the Big Thicket National Preserve, Big Sandy Creek Unit.

The Woodlands Trail begins at a pine plantation and skirts around

Collins pond before winding its way towards Big Sandy Creek.

Looking forward to being back on the road and our upcoming summer adventures, David and I took a short trip a few weeks ago to the Big Thicket.  Back in January during our Christmas travels, we spent a day hiking in the Big Thicket.  We decided then that we should return as soon as possible and explore a little more.

David signs us in at the trailhead.

The Woodlands trail is 5.4 miles long, much of it following along Big Sandy Creek.

We got up early on a Friday morning with Maya, packs and lunches in the car and drove about two hours south from Nacogdoches to the Woodlands Trail trailhead in the Big Sandy Creek Unit of the Big Thicket.  We had a fine day for hiking and thoroughly enjoyed our 4-hour hike into the deep, dark thickets of East Texas.  

Much of this part of the Big Thicket was logged and then replanted

around 1963  before the preserve was established.

The Big Thicket is considered a National Preserve, so it is designated by the United States Congress and protected just like a National Park.  The biggest difference is that a National Preserve permits the extraction of natural resources so activities such as hunting, fishing, mining and oil/gas extraction could be allowed depending on the designating legislation for the particular preserve.

Fishing is allowed in the Big Thicket along Big Sandy Creek.

We did not know that the Big Thicket was the very first national preserve in the United States.  How cool is that?  It is not difficult to see why this area was designated as a preserve rather than a park.  Once upon a time much of East Texas was thickly forested.  But once people began to settle here most of the forest was cut.  Sawmills, railroads, farming and oil strikes brought more people and as they say, the rest is history.  No ‘big chunk’ of forest without human settlement or industry was left.  So 12 ‘little chunks’ or units surrounded by private lands and towns have been protected to preserve some of the remaining forests, bogs and 'thickets' and also the complex biological diversity of this area. 

David and I weren't sure what these strange structures were at first

as we didn't have these guys in West Texas where we grew up.

It's a crayfish burrow or home!

We never found the 'crawdads' but we sure saw a lot of 'adobe' homes along the trail.

And what an amazing diversity of plants and animals live here!  The reason is that the Big Thicket is at the ‘crossroads’ of many ecosystems – southeastern swamps, eastern forests, central plains and southwest deserts all kind of bump together here.  It is the variety of species that are found rather than the rarity or abundance of them that is so extraordinary.  Eighty-five different tree species, nearly 1,000 flowering plants and 186 kinds of birds can be found in the Big Thicket to name only a few of the plants and animals in this rather small region of Texas (at least compared to the rest of the great state).

Violets are one of the 1,000 flowering plants found in the Big Thicket.

As I am sure many of you know, this year marks the 100^th anniversary of the National Park Service.  David and I have been considering our travels this summer and we are thinking that with so many people looking to visit a park this year, well, it might be a good time to avoid the National Parks at least the popular ones.  But having just visited the Big Thicket and finding out that it was the very first national preserve established, we thought of making our goal this summer, "to seek out the lesser known and least visited of the National Park Service administered sites."  (Sounds similar to the ‘Star Trek’ mission, doesn’t it?  Although we won’t be going where no man has gone before, just where not so many of them are going.)

Maya checks out Big Sandy Creek

That still leaves a lot of territory to cover and we only have about 3 months for our ‘mission’ so it makes sense to limit our travels a bit.  The thought process at this point is that we will leave Nacogdoches next weekend and head to Odessa to spend a little time with my parents.  Our hope is that they will be well enough for us to take them to Ruidoso to spend a little family time at their cabin.  Then it will be time for our real journey to begin.  Since we will already be in New Mexico, we will most likely head to Santa Fe for our first ‘stop.’  That will be fitting as Santa Fe was our first stop ‘On the Road with Maya’ when we began our travels in Silver a mere four years ago.  I can’t believe how many places we’ve been and how fast those four years went by.  Though our full-time traveling days are temporarily on hold, we are so excited to be heading back out this summer.  There is still so much out there to see.

Our first visit to a 'Lesser known National Park Service site' 

Maya inspecting a very thorny plant.

There were no leaves yet making it hard to be sure what this plant is

but swamp locust or all-thorn could be considerations?