Learning to make camping arrangements in the Covid World

I had a great time traveling and camping in Enzo on my last trip. I also wanted to get to the Big Bend area of Texas this winter. Big Bend Ranch State Park in February 2018 was our last real camping trip before Nancy was told she had MDS. 

The Big Bend area as well as so many other wilderness areas have become very popular during the pandemic, combine that with limited campsite availability and it’s a nightmare trying to get a campsite. 

Big Bend National Park is camping by reservation only. Normally, a large number of campsites are also available on a first come, first serve basis, not so now. To make matters worse, many of the first come, first serve sites were not put into the reservation system and remain unavailable.

I spent quite a few hours, on a couple of different days, online, as well as on the phone, but finally I was able to put together an itinerary combining both primitive campground sites and primitive backcountry drive-in sites, in both the national park and the state park beginning mid January.

I’m psyched. If the weather is nice in the Guadalupe Mts, then I start my trip there, then head to Big Bend National Park (BBNP). I have 7 nights at BBNP Cottonwood Campground in the desert along the Rio Grande, then 2 nights in the Chisos Basin, then 2 nights each at two drive-in backcountry sites. The different camping sites will put me within short drives of many of the best hikes in the park. It took 3 visits to the reservation website plus a phone call on two different days to make that all happen. Evidently, people are constantly canceling reservations and then they instantly become available. So its worth checking the website multiple times a day and then jumping on a available site. The site has a timer, which counts down and kicks you off after a certain amount of time.

Once I locked in my days at BBNP, I then looked at Big Bend Ranch State Park (BBRSP) and scored 3 different 4WD backcountry sites for a total of 6 nights in the interior of BBRSP and then another 2 nights in the river section of BBRSP. If the weather holds in the Guadalupe Mts, I’ll stop there before heading back to my motorhome at the Ranch in NM. All in all, I’m looking at about a month on the road in Enzo.

West Texas is leading the state of Texas in new Covid cases, but NM is pretty much leading the country. So I’ll bring food and supplies for the entire trip with me, as well as 3 months of meds, just to be safe. Then except for passing people socially distant on the hiking trails I won’t have any contact with another human, and hopefully no contact with any Javelinas as well. LOL.

In anticipation of the trip, I made a few modifications to Enzo. I added Polyisocyanurate rigid foam panels to cover the two glass windows in Enzo for those cold nights in the mountains and added another storage area for food. The wanderthewest.com forum was very helpful. The rigid foam panels are covered in foil on both sides but the edges are exposed. One suggestion on the forum was to wrap the edges with tape, which I did. I used black gorilla tape. The tape not only prevents pieces of foam from cracking off the edges, but looks good as well.

My two week quarantine ended on Sunday, so once this cold snap is done, I get out and do some hiking in the Lincoln National Park and Carlsbad National Park, both of which are in NM and therefore won’t require me to quarantine.

Tight lines and safe travels