From the Visitor’s Center at Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge (LANWR), I pedal my Surly bicycle west for a mile and a half on Lake Side Drive and then turn north on County Road. Both roads are compacted caliche with loose gravel on the surface. County Road follows a border line of LANWR. On the east side is a private ranch, and on the west side is the refuge. I plan to ride around Cayo Atascoso and the west side of Laguna Atascosa.
This is my first ride since school started, and I needed it after the first week in class.
At 6:45 am, as I turn north and go around a gate to get on County Road, beads of sweat begin to form on my face and back in the “feels like” 96 degrees. Two young bucks with antlers in velvet step from the mesquite on the ranch side, look at me and slip into the thornscrub between the road and the Laguna Atascosa, its water a hundred yards from its bank in better times.
Ahead of me I see a vertical tail moving erratically through grass on the shoulder. I stop to avoid spooking the skunk and watch it for five minutes before it vanishes into the thornscrub. I continue pedaling. The road skirts the shore of Laguna Atascosa for a mile. There the shoreline turns west. The road continues north.
Two miles along County Road I spot fifteen nilgai antelope feeding in an open field on the ranch side of the road. They see me pedaling my bike and they run towards the refuge. I stop and watch as the massive gray and brown nilgai lope across the road one at a time fifty feet in front of me.
I continue pedaling, now dripping sweat. I stop and snap a photograph of a group of turkey vultures, each perched upon a fence post on the ranch side of the road.
Just over seven miles from the Visitor Center, after riding past miles of dense thornscrub on the refuge side and cultivated fields on the ranch side (east) I cross a cattle guard and turn west, left, on the gravel road to Cayo Atascoso.
The road is rougher, the gravel bigger, but still a good road that runs another three miles to Cayo Atascoso. Like many other roads on the refuge, it passes through thornscrub and coastal prairie. At Cayo is a gate to control flow between waters from the Arroyo Colorado and Cayo Atascoso. On many days, plenty of water on both sides of the gate hosts hundreds and sometimes thousands of herons, egrets, avocets, ducks and other birds.
Not today. It hasn’t rained all summer and the temperature reaches 100 degrees almost every day. The water level in Laguna Atascosa is very low, as is Cayo Atascoso and all other bodies of water on the refuge. The lack of water, severe heat, and the reek of mud and silt with rotting remains of water-borne organisms leaves a bleak atmosphere.
The caliche-topped road ends at the water control gate and continues as a dirt road (26.328505; -97.389621). It runs about three and a half miles to North Point, the northernmost point on this part of the refuge and on the Arroyo Colorado. Another road runs west and then south following the shoreline of Cayo Atascosa about six miles to Laguna Atascosa. This is one of my favorite roads when there is water. I took this road.
I ride in the ruts where trucks had gone, tall grasses brush my legs. Every so often I bog in sand for a few feet and then grab solid ground again. This segment might be challenging to some. I once rode through here when there was plenty of water. And mud. After the six-mile run to the caliche road, mud coated me and my bike and my legs became rubber.
Today I stop to watch various species of birds crowded into the large, shallow puddles that are left of ponds. I watch roseate spoonbills, white ibises, various herons and egrets, willets, sandpipers, black-necked stilts and more species feeding side by side in the same evaporating pools.
The road enters thornscrub. The tire rut is dry with an inch of dust. I see where a large snake entered the rut and I follow its trail for more than a quarter of a mile. I lose the trail where the snake leaves the rut. I don’t find the snake, but I spook a Texas Indigo snake as long as my bike on the side of the road.
A female javelina with her two offspring leave the brush on my left and stop on the road. I stop to watch. The mother licks one of the young. Soon a male arrives and the four walk along the road. They don’t see me. The male turns to enter the brush on my right and sees me. The four dart into the thick thornscrub.
I continue along the hardpacked, grassy road to the caliche road that runs along the west side of Laguna Atascosa. I’m drenched with sweat and road dust coats my bare legs. Sunblock drips into my eyes and burns.
The Visitor’s Center is about ten miles. I don’t stop. I pedal through thornscrub, across coastal prairie and past dry ponds until I return to the Visitor’s Center to end a twenty-nine-mile ride.
