Trans-Pecos Journey

The Chihuahuan Desert at a rest area near Van Horn. The Van Horn Mountains are in the background.

We drove through the Chihuahuan Desert on our way to our next stop today in an area known as the Trans-Pecos. It’s an incredible drive. The ridges and canyons we passed by were breathtaking. If we pulled over to take pictures every time the impulse struck me, we would add several hours to our drive, so we wound up taking no picture stops. (These photos were taken the next day.) It was hard, but I know even better scenery awaits. One thing I do wish we’d turned around for was the Judge Roy Bean museum, appropriately located about 15 miles west of the Pecos. We’ll visit next year.

Living on Florida’s Space Coast, it’s easy to forget how remote some places in this vast country of ours are. I wrote previously about passing a “No Services 88 Miles” sign on the way to Seminole Canyon State Park. It didn’t get better on this leg of our trip. We knew it would be about 70 miles from our campsite to the first gas station we’d see. When we got to that gas station, we passed it thinking we’d find something better. After we made a turn, we saw it would be at least another 70 miles to the next gas station. We probably could have made it, but we weren’t interested in finding out, so we did a U-turn in the highway and returned to the station we rejected. U-turns with a 30’ camper are interesting.

After Fort Stockton, there was another long stretch (at least 40 miles) without fuel stations, so we wound up making two stops just to make sure we didn’t have to dig in the back of the truck for our emergency fuel. We carry an extra five gallons of gasoline just in case, but we keep it in an extremely inconvenient place to access from the side of the road. That last stop was seemingly in the middle of nowhere, but it did have a questionable looking bar/ honky-tonk next to it and a fairly large RV park with nothing but sand and gravel. It looks like so many a movie that shows people living in a desert RV park, except it looked well maintained an we didn’t notice any badly run-down campers that looked like they’d fall apart the moment you attempted to move them.

Rest area east of Van Horn

The point to this post is that we had a nice drive on a scenic route, even though it was through terrain that was barely hospitable to survival. It’s really a different world out here.