Big Bend National Park - Almost Slickrock Canyon

This is a rare story of a destination we never reached.  Slickrock Canyon is accessible from the main park road in Big Bend National Park by an unmarked route up Oak Creek Wash, and then a side wash to Slickrock Mountain.  The entire hike is about 10 miles round trip.  We had a great time seeking the canyon, but never made it.

Our hike started out easily enough through the very wide Oak Creek Wash.  Here we are at the start with a distinctive little peak off in the distance:

The wash branched in several places, and we made sure that the correct branch was marked with a cairn so that we wouldn't get lost on our way back to the Jeep:

There is very little manmade to be found in the backcountry of Big Bend National Park, other than some old mining sites and ruins of homesteads.  The only manmade object we found on this hike was a brown, ceramic powerline insulator.  We imagined that it had fallen from some power pole miles upstream and been washed down to this spot, because no power lines were to be seen:

This yucca was one of the few landmarks along our way:

Eventually, the wash opened out into a rocky avenue that shot straight toward Christmas Mountain, in the center background in this photo, and Slickrock Mountain, nearer and to the right:

About 2 miles in, we caught our first glimpse of slickrock, poking through as the bedrock under Oak Creek Wash:

Just about at our turn, 2.5 miles, in, the entire wash bed became slickrock -- sandstone that is soft enough to be worn smooth:

Some of the sections of the bed were carved in unusual designs:

We spotted this print, just at the junction with the first big tributary wash we encountered.  It seemed too square to be human, but it seemed unnatural for a black bear to frequent this hot, dry desert section of the park, even though black bears are common up in the Chisos Mountains section of the park which lay about 10-15 miles from where we were hiking.

Even though that first wash was marked by a cairn, suggesting strongly that it was our turn, that tributary wash came just a little earlier in the hike than we had estimated it should.  The guidebooks said that we should not turn up a tributary until we felt as if we had just passed Slickrock Mountain, and the mountain was still just ahead of us on the right.  We labored on in the gravel and rocks of the main Oak Creek Wash until we hit 3.5 miles, when another tributary came in and what was closer to our estimate of the correct spot.  We turned up the side wash, but it quickly narrowed and -- while it seemed to be heading in the right direction -- seemed to snaggy and cramped and difficult to hike.  Finally, after 5 hard miles of hiking, we decided to give up, without ever finding Slickrock Canyon.  We climbed to a nearby height of land, where we spotted the canyon -- still at least another mile away from us -- but decided this should be where we turned around.  We set down our packs and had our lunch:

While Kathy rested, David snapped this photo of a colorful prickly pear cactus in front of Slickrock Mountain:

We decided to bushwhack back across the desert, using our GPS as a guide, rather than labor back through the washes.  It would be a shorter walk back to the Jeep.  However, we didn't realize how thorny it would be.  The giant cholla below was just one of many spiny little friends we discovered on our hike back:

We made our way back to Oak Creek Wash, not so far from our Jeep, and spotted some slickrock we hadn't seen on the way here:

This beautiful little plant was just getting ready to flower:

This photo gives you an idea how wide and gravelly the washes were:

Just as we got back to the Jeep, we stumbled on an old cottonwood tree, dead as far as we could tell, that was giving shelter to nearly a half dozen clumbs of mistletoe.  They added some welcome green to a dusty grey-and-brown landscape:

By the time we got back to the Jeep, we had logged 7.5 miles.  It was frustrating not to have reached our goal, but we salvaged a splendid hike out of the venture, and came away with a deeper appreciation of the backcountry of Big Bend National Park.

Now, on to a river adventure!