Texas - Day 10 - in the Alpine campground

KC's Quick Mart & RV Park, Alpine
Thursday, 12 November 2020

This campground really is as quirky as the name sounds.  It's a gas station with a convenience store, and the owner has used the land behind it for a small RV park.  It's actually down a little hill from the store/station, so I noticed the exhaust fumes can filter down and get caught in the little valley when semis park out front and leave their engines running overnight (which happened). 

It's one of those places you've seen but may not have really noticed that's really an RV park but acts and looks a little like a trailer park.  I've been noticing them tucked in in very unlikely places.  There aren't any mobile homes, only RVs here, but some of them seem semi-permanent with fences built to keep their dogs in.  But the space I stayed in had recently been vacated by one of those long-termers, so they do come and go.  I'm guessing most of these folks work somewhere in this area, and at only $20/night for full hookups, I can see why they'd stay here, despite the total lack of ambiance.

It's just a short walk away from the Sul Ross campus, with a sidewalk along the busy roadway, so the dogs and I walked down there a few times. 

It's also right next to a dirt road with a cattle guard that has its own street sign saying it's Church Road.  A sheet of plywood had been laid over one end of the cattle guard, obviously to let pedestrians walk over it, so the dogs and I did one day.  And the road does lead to a church up at the top of a steep hill.  Surprisingly, it continues past the church to a house that, from the distance I saw it, looked very fancy.  That can't possibly be the only access to that house - I mean, who would build such an expensive house and be able to reach it only by a one-lane unpaved road?  What about access for a fire truck?  Or ambulance?

Anyway, the real surprise for me was that inside a field we walked past were 5 Mule Deer.  At least I think that's the kind of deer they were.  They had ears so large a rabbit would have envied them.  They were all resting in the shade of a grove of trees, and I tried hard to keep from disturbing them.  I made noise as we approached so they'd know we were there, I tried to distract the dogs and focus them on the other side of the road, and it all worked, I guess, because the deer stayed where they were.  I wondered if the cattle guard had been meant for them because I didn't see any signs of actual cattle.  But I could see it was good deer habitat.

I'd heard the day before from an employee at that gas station that was getting disinfected that Sul Ross has some dinosaur bones.  This employee said for many years he'd been a surveyor or geologist or something working out at Big Bend.  He said wind erosion continued to uncover fossils out there and their biggest find was a pterosaur bone.

I picked up a flyer for the Museum of the Big Bend, part of Sul Ross, and it talked about this discovery, confirming what the gas station employee had told me.  What they found was a wing bone that allowed them to estimate the wingspan of this critter at 36' - 39'.  The flyer said that makes it the largest known flying creature of all time.  Which is pretty amazing when you think about it.

The flyer said they believe this creature walked on "all fours" - and their drawing looks like they're counting 2 legs and 2 wings as being 4 supports.  And if its wings were as big as they say, this dinosaur would have been huge.  I'm used to thinking of large birds as having wingspans of 36", so I'm having some trouble comprehending 36'.

And all this right here in Texas's Big Bend country.

If I'd planned to stay longer and if we hadn't been in the midst of a pandemic, I'd have visited the museum.  Well, there's always the next time.