|
If you've received the 2005 ACA calendar, and thumbed through looking at the pictures, you came to November and Burro Bluff. The picture is taken from the Texas side looking upstream and maybe 1/4 of the way up to the top of Burro Bluff, which is out of the photo to the extreme right. Burro Bluff is probably 1700' high. The canoes would look really small from the top of the bluff. Top center of the photo on the Mexico side is the entrance to Tule Canyon. This canyon extends many miles into Mexico. On the Texas side is an old smugglers trail to the top of Burro Bluff marked with small rock cairns. Not a stroll through the park as you might imagine.
Some of you may have known Leonard Hulsebosch who died a number of years ago and Winston Padgett who died Christmas day last year at age 65 of Lou Gehrigs disease. Both came to mind when I saw this photo. Both were characters and as long as Leonard lived, he and Padgett pulled practical jokes on each other. Almost in the center of the photo, is a large pile of rocks. These are large automobile size rocks. On top of one of the rocks is affixed a metal plaque, about 12" square with these letters......"IGTLWL". Padgett had the plaque made and he installed it in memory of Leonard. You'll have to figure out what the letters mean.....a riddle as it were.
I first went through there in 1982 with a group from Houston. Joe & Betsey Butler, now of Albuquerque, Ralph & Tess Julian who were NOC instructors from TX at the time and now living in Asheville, NC, Larry Wild, Winston Padgett and others, including JC Foster whom some of you may have met at the first Rendezvous in 1989. He had on overalls for most of that weekend.
We laid over a day there and camped on the Mexico side on the rock slab, visible in the photo across from where the canoes are beached. The evening we arrived it began to rain and the river came up about 11' to the very edge of that rock slab. A scary situation. One never knows just how high the river will rise or where its actually raining hardest. There is a story about the river running backwards in the San Francisco Canyon area because of heavy rains far to the North of the river and the resulting flash floods.
A thousand memories......we experimented with the very first Thermorest sleeping pad that I had ever seen, by laying pebbles under it to see if we could feel them through the pad, and couldn't. I had bought a sling light camping chair (which I still have) and Winston (6'6" & 250 Lbs) tried it and later bought two for himself. Those chairs were $55 in 1982 dollars. That and much more happened on that rock slab including experiences spirits made from a century plant.
The rapid is called Upper Madison for some reason and I've never run it on my three trips down there. Generally the boats are so heavily loaded that it doesn't make sense to run it, so it's lined on the Mexico side and then no one wants to pull boats back up after they are unloaded.
Padgett made that trip many times over the years, sometimes two or three times a year. On his last one, the story goes, he was climbing up some canyon, reached up on a rock ledge to pull himself up and a rattlesnake bit one of his fingers. The fangs went on each side of the finger, so actually, he was gummed by a rattler. True story.
So a thousand words won't quite cover everything about that photo. If I ever had a spiritual experience it was on a lower canyons trip. Three trips over the years and not enough.
|