Big Bend National Park – Intro

Wow, this seems to be a big park, yet it is only 15th largest in the national park system.

The park is more than 40 miles North to South and the same East to West, containing over 800,000 acres. Established as Texas Canyons State Park in 1933, it became a National Park in 1944. Most of the park is harsh and dry. Only 8 to 10 inches of rain falls per year with the exception of the higher elevations where enough falls to barely support trees. Browns and tans predominate, not much is green, except close to the Rio Grande River where there is a narrow band of grasses and trees and in some of the higher areas of the mountains.

The park is a desert combination of flat, rolling and mountainous landscape. The whole park is dry and high enough that there are no large cacti as you find in the Sonora Desert of Arizona, but the prickly pear abound. Much of the terrain is scarred by washes, arroyos, and canyons of all sizes. This occurs because even though there isn’t much rain, when it does come it is violent and heavy. Flash flooding during the rainy season is a guarantee.

The Rio Grande River is the most important feature of the area, generally because it carved many of the parks most distinctive features. The river has its headwaters in the San Juan Mountains of southern Colorado. It runs from there for 1865 miles into the Gulf of Mexico near Brownsville, Texas. During its first 600 miles the river is heavily used for irrigation and backed up by many dams. It retains only a portion of its once mighty flow, but fortunately is supported by Mexican tributaries.

The park is a hot bed of animal, reptile and insect life, but you don’t see much of it during the hot part of the day. There are black bear, mountain lion, coyote, javelina, jackrabbit, birds, and less popular things such as scorpions. There are also tarantulas, so many that the park should put up warning signs on the highways that read “Slow – Tarantula Crossing”. We spotted at least 10 between the entrance and the first visitor’s center, a trip of 20 miles.

Getting to the most popular landmarks is easy as there are about 120 miles of blacktop. The backcountry is also accessible as there are hundreds of miles of dirt roads. These range from just bumpy to four-wheel drive only. Hope you don’t mind, but I am sticking to the bumpy only and avoiding anything more challenging.

Okay, that should be enough editorializing………the other issues will deal with the most notable features of the park.

Big Bend NP – Boquillas Canyon

There is a lot of prickly pear cactus. This is one of the pinkish colored once, not seen as much as the greenish ones. By the way, the prickly pear is edible, if you can get all the needles off. That’s a real job and it can leave your hands full of holes.

Although the Rio Grande River is smaller than anticipated, it hasn’t always been that way. It has been mighty at points in its history as evidenced by the canyons it has carved. This is Boquillas Canyon. It is about 1,500 feet from the river to the top of the canyon.

This is Victor’s river side house. It is on the Mexican side of the river and Victor is a Mexican living in the town of Las Bouquillas. Victor has a powerful and pleasant singing voice, which he uses to entertain hikers as they approach the canyon’s mouth on the US side, while he remains on the Mexican side. But Victor has a motive…

Victor sells colorful stones, painted rocks, walking sticks, and wire wrap scorpions. He uses his small boat to come across the river and pick-up his money and restock. He operates on the honor system, but I suspect he can cross very quickly if he sees things go awry. He claims that the trinkets are made by the local school children.

It is sad that because of the border issues, you can no longer cross the river and hike to Victor’s village. Many park visitors used to be ferried across by the Mexicans to buy trinkets and eat in their café. This undoubtedly has been an extreme hardship on the village as there is no industry within 100 miles.

Big Bend NP - Santa Elena Canyon

The Santa Elena Canyon is another of the Rio Grande River’s better works. The canyon is over 1,500 feet deep and 20 miles long. Today it is a popular 2 day raft trip. A hundred years ago it was a trip from hell and many a wooden boat was converted into toothpicks.

Here we are inside the canyon, looking further in. Much of that greenery is a reed or giant grass that resembles bamboo.













Here we are still inside the canyon looking out. That vast flood plain was farmed until the 1940’s. American’s farmed this land, but many were of Mexican heritage, but born in the US.

This is a line camp that was used by the Homer Wilson ranch. He grazed over 4,000 sheep and 2,500 goats on the slopes of the mountains to escape the heat. It was abandoned in 1945, but still looks as if it is in use. Life in this area was tough. The closest rail line was at Alpine, 100 miles north. It took 10 to 14 days to make the trip with loaded, mule drawn wagons.

Big Bend NP – Chisos Basin

The Chisos Basin is exactly what its name describes, it a basin (like a bowl) surrounded by the Chisos Mountains. You stand in the middle of the basin at an elevation of 5,400 feet and look 2,000 feet up in any direction at the Chisos Mountains. I found the basin to be the most scenic spot in the park, probably because it had more green than the lower areas.

I am just going to spin around and take pictures in different directions so you can see a little of what I did.










Hope you enjoyed Big Bend National Park. Please forgive any haziness in the pictures. BBNP has become the worst for air quality, in terms of visibility impairment, of any western national park. About 50% of the haze is naturally occurring from dust, smoke from forest fires, etc. But the balance is man made with 22% coming from the eastern US (most of that from the Ohio Valley). Only 11% is caused by industry in Texas, 4% from western states, and 7% from Mexico.

Elephant Butte and Etc.

Our trip South has some built in time for stops. The first of those is Elephant Butte, New Mexico. Why you ask? Well, because it is there.

After leaving Show Low and traveling East on Highway 60, we made an unexpected find, a VLA. That is a Very Large Array. Still in the dark. The VLA is the most powerful, flexible, widely used radio telescope in the world. Completed in 1980 and operated by the National Science Foundation, the VLA has been used for more than 10,000 astronomical observation projects. You see only a handful of the 20 or more dishes on the observatory grounds.


Construction began in 1911 and at the time of its completion in 1916, Elephant Butte dam was the largest earth-filled dam in the world.




The dam backs up the Rio Grande into a 36,000 acre reservoir. It is the largest body of water in New Mexico and an extremely popular place for boaters.


I found only one golf course in the area and it has only been open one year. However, it is a really up scale course, so much so that I didn’t even bother to check on the green fees. Located in a valley and spreading out and up, the course is landscaped beautifully and has sculpture and stonework to match.

There are several ghost towns in this area. I just randomly picked one, Chloride. The town began as a tent city in 1880, with the discovery of silver “in them thar hills”. It grew to over 3,000 souls, but with the decline in the price of silver, it all but disappeared by 1900. A handful of the residents stayed on, while the village disintegrated for 80 years. Since early 1980 the village has been under restoration, primarily by a motivated ex-IBM employee that “discovered” and fell in love with the place. At the peak, the town consisted of 9 bars, stores, a hotel, black smith, an assay office, and of course a red light district (and therefore no church). Here is the restored general store, which is now the town’s museum.

Let us end with a bit of humor. I leave it to you to see what makes this shot funny. Somebody in the ghost town had a dry, but comedic sense of the world. If you need help, email me.