Hiking out of the Chisos: the Window, Oak Spring Trail, and Cattail Falls
On our last day in Big Bend, we packed up our site at Juniper Flats and headed down for one more breakfast at the Chisos Mountains Lodge. Then we set about getting back to our bikes. The plan was to hike down to "The Window", a steep drop-off at the end of a narrow canyon that drains the Chisos Basin, on a short, rather popular trail and then take that trail's less popular continuation, the Oak Spring Trail. From there, we'd follow take a dirt road back to Ross Maxwell Scenic Drive and hitchhike a few miles back to our bikes. Then we'd re-cover those same miles on our bikes before heading out of park and on to Terlingua, or maybe Lajitas if we made good time. (Spoiler: we did not.)
Fun to see water in the creek. That little stream, just inches wide in places, is draining the whole Chisos Basin.
The Oak Spring Trail climbs above the Window's canyon, before climbing back down to the desert floor. Here's Paige near the trail's highest point.
The Window is that thin slot in the bottom foreground. Oak Spring is near the yellow-green tank in the distance.
Our first delay came at Oak Spring. We'd packed just enough water and were considering a top-off there, and regardless I wanted too see the spring. But the trail doesn't really take you to the spring; it stops at the top of steep bank, from which you can see, down in the mostly dry wash, a patch of dense vegetation (including the eponymous oaks) indicating the presence of a spring, plus a storage tank indicating that the park takes some (most?) of the spring's production. Paige was patient while I insisted on snaking my way through the thorny plants to check out the vegetated area, but I didn't find anything more then some wet patches of grass. You could likely recover water from in an emergency (dig a hole), but it was no place for a discretionary top-off. So we moved on.
But, just a little ways downstream, the gravel road crossed the same wash, and here there was water — enough to easily fill up our bottles. There was also a trail sign for another water feature: Cattail Falls. We'd heard of it once before — a somewhat reliable waterfall in the middle of the desert. But I was never quite sure where it was and assumed it wasn't very accessible from any of the Chisos trails. If it was, it'd be on the map, right?
I'm now convinced that this fairly short spur — definitely accessible on a round-trip day hike from the Basin and even more convenient to the Ross Maxwell Drive — is intentionally omitted from the main Chisos trail maps to protect the falls from over-visitation... and it seems to be working. On a day when we say a ton of people (granted, many were in the same large group) at the Window, we only saw one other couple at Cattail Falls.
We were glad to see one more site in the park, but it meant there was no way we'd make it to Lajitas or even to the Terlingua ghost town without pushing sunset. We set our sights on one of the first campgrounds we'd come to in Study Butte. Luckily we got a hitch quickly and were able to make it to the campground before dark.
