Davis Mountains Preserve :: Post #1

After a crazy two weeks at work, I'm ready for a little contemplative, creative, sketchbookish, photographic, snacky, fireplacey, mitteny, snoozesque downtime. R&R, Godwilling. This weekend we head to our third biennial Toolbox staff & family retreat at a Nature Conservancy preserve. It's a nice arrangement: as a way of saying thank you to our communications design firm for the pro bono work we do, we occasionally get invited as guests to see some of the "last great places" in Texas. In years past, our staff has been guests at Dolan Falls Preserve in the Edwards Plateau and at Independence Creek Preserve in the Chihuahuan Desert, not too far from where we're heading this time (Danny was there, too). I blogged about the Indy Creek trip both here and here and here in 2004. For the last five years, though, we've talked and dreamed about the year we'd finally be able to go to the Davis Mountains. Here we go!

My friend Mark and I planned a lot of the event with our Nature Conservancy hosts Lynn and Niki. Mark and I call ourselves the camp counselors. In-and-around our normal workweeks, we've been creating staffblog promotions, schedules, menus, shopping lists, cooking assignments, maps, and all the requisite communications needed to move twelve adults and seven kids eight hundred round trip miles over three and a half days.

"The wild and remote Davis Mountains is considered one of the most scenic areas of Texas. Indeed it is one of the most biologically diverse. Rising above the Chihuahuan desert, the range forms a unique 'sky island' surrounded by the lowland desert. Animals and plants living above 5,000 feet are isolated from other similar mountain ranges by vast distances. These are true ecological islands, preserving living remnants that occur otherwise nowhere else in Texas. [via]"

I'm looking forward to a long, unstructured weekend getaway to relax and hang with staff friends and my loving family. We're going to check out the stars at the famous McDonald Observatory (I expect we'll see with naked eyes the comet that just exploded, since we'll be a mile up and light emission restrictions allow a crystal clear view). We might also check out the Marfa Lights — unexplained "ghost lights" usually seen near U.S. Route 67 on Mitchell Flat, east of Marfa. I'm taking the artists in the group on a Saturday trip to the Chinati Foundation on the southern side of Marfa, TX — the grounds house some of the absolute best contemporary art in the U.S. including works by Donald Judd and Claes Oldenburg. Maybe we'll see the Prada shop, too.

I'll try to post photos and maybe a vlog in the next week or two.