Seminole Canyon State Park

Leaving Ozona we took highway 163 south, heading for Seminole Canyon State Park.

At one time this highway was incredibly dangerous, one of the narrow passes was named Deadmans Pass, and travellers would’ve needed to watch out for attack by wild animals and ambush by highwaymen, Comanche and Apache!

The Ozona – Comstock Stage followed this route, connecting Ozona with the Southern Pacific Railroad 80 miles away.

These are the remains of the first stage stand along the highway.   The stage left Ozona at 5.00 a.m. and reached the stage stand at 8.30 a.m. where fresh horses were harnessed for the next 20 miles.   Wagon ruts are still visible in the grass, although we couldn't find them, but they might've been on the other side of the fence.

 

At Seminole Canyon we planned to join a ranger guided tour to see some of pictographs in the canyon.   The canyon is subject to flash floods, the pictographs are thought to be about 3,500 years old, some of the oldest in the US.   In order to protect the pictographs the only way to enter the canyon is on a ranger guided tour.

It was incredibly hot by now and DB decided that as he'd seen enough pictographs in other places he'd have a snooze in the car, so I went off to join the tour.

On the edge of the canyon is the amazing statue.

Looking down into Seminole Canyon.

The bottom of the canyon.

Our guide was really interesting and there were designs and a yellow colour I'd never seen used in pictographs anywhere else.

While we were in the canyon the temperature alternated between lovely and cool and pretty darn hot!  Climbing out it was incredibly hot.

We stayed overnight in Del Rio and the storms that seemed to have been following us since we left New Orleans finally caught up with us.   In the middle of the night weather alerts came fast and furious, severe thunderstorms, torrential rain, dangerous cloud to ground lightening, dangerous hail, tornado watch, and finally, a flood warning. 

We’ve been in storms before but nothing quite like this and I certainly hope we’re never in another one; it turned out to be a very dramatic end to our day in Seminole Canyon.

Have fun, we are!