This week's training activity

Hello, everyone.

We did two training walks this week--the 7 mile loop at Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge, with included spiral staircases, and a stitched-together 5 miles at Bentsen State Park.



The canopy walk (AKA rope bridge) at Santa Ana. This feature is about two stories tall and has spiral stairs at each end of the bridge. Very popular with the elementary school field trips!

There is also, not in this picture, a three story hawk viewing tower there, also accessed by spiral stairs, with a flat viewing platform that goes part of the way around on the top. There is an excellent view of the area from there.

We use these as incline-walking practice, since we are not aware of any stadiums in the area that will allow the public to walk the steps.

We did see some wildlife while walking on Tuesday morning--here is the coyote who walked out into the road to look at us.

We were fortunate enough to choose Tuesday for the Santa Ana walk--on Wednesday the refuge had a brush fire and was closed down until the trails can be assessed. (A grass fire on the Mexican side of the border threw off some wind-blown brands. The evening news said that about 300 acres had burned.) We had noticed that there was a LOT of dry vegetation alongside the path. It's been a dry winter and spring so far, even though there have been rains. The refuge staff  need to do a flood irrigation there IMHO--they do this from time to time to replace the former riparian floods that watered the trees. The advent of flood control on the Rio Grande pretty much put an end to natural spring flooding.

On Thursday we stitched together the main loop at Bentsen with a side loop called the Rio Grande Trail. Together they totalled 5 miles. (No stairs, sadly, nor of course any hills.) The side loop is located close to the hawk observation tower there, which is about two stories tall and has a gentle ramp going up to the top. It also has a couple of benches for sitting on while waiting for a bird to fly over. 


This little fellow, who was very camera-shy, was at one of the observation blinds along the main loop at Bentsen. He had a friend with him, too. Both of them were very nervous about being seen. Given the time of year, they might have been migrating through and stopped off for a rest and a snack.