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.