January 27th
We haven’t painted anything in nearly 4 years. We brought all our painting supply’s with us on this trip to hopefully be able to do some paintings along the way. So we decided to brush the dust off the painting box and paint one of my favorite mountain ridges. The Chisos Mountains. This will be our first time freehanding a painting, and we’re going to attempt to make a panorama with 2 pictures. Took us about 1-2 hours and it came out pretty decent despite we have different styles of painting. You be the judge. Photo is down below👇🏼.
Out side of the park there’s a town called Terlingua which is now a ghost town. Starting in the mid 1880s, it was a mining town where the used to mine for cinnabar, where the metal mercury is extracted. Some of the remains still stand as old structures made of stone and sand. You can find old vehicles, farm equipment, and even and old mine with a mine elevator cart. Pretty neat and I would definitely check it out. Last time I came here I did some astrophotography of the Milky Way with some of the remains. The previous night when we went to go meet up with some people we meet on Instagram, this older gentleman invited us to attend their chili cook off. Which is huge for this small town. He said 60+ chefs from around the world showed up last year to complete. It was just down the street from the ghost town so we decided to pass by. It looked like it was just about finished when we got there. The gentleman told us it would be running till around 8pm and it was maybe 5pm when we got there. There was just a bunch of Texans drinking and hanging around talking with friends. So yup. Looks like we missed it. We made it to this spot below to spend the night. There was nobody around. NOBODY! Until I started grilling and after the sunset I see 3 four wheelers approaching. I met an eye on them. They stopped no more then 100 yards away. They were in site when their headlight were in but the shit them off and all I was able to see was a dark spot. I thought it was a bit strange because they just sat there talking. I was able to pick up that they were speaking Spanish with a Mexican accent. After 15 minuets or so they yelled our “Aye” a few times. The whistled a few times. I remained silent and just kept my eye on them while grilling. They started their quads up and left. Mind you we are in the middle of no where like 4 miles off the paved road. I kept a watch out to make sure they weren’t going to come back to try something. It was silent for the rest of the night and we were able to relax.
