Big Bend National Park
The best sights, where to stay, what to eat, how to find a guide, and everything else you could possibly want to know about the most beautiful place in Texas.
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WHERE TO STAY INDOORS
A big issue on almost every Big Bend trip is whether to stay inside or outside the park. The sole choice inside the park is the Chisos Mountains Lodge at the basin (432-477-2292). Its central location is certainly more convenient to most park activities, but if you feel the need for a telephone, a choice of restaurants, and such valuable amusements for kids as in-room TV and an on-site swimming pool, stay outside the park. The lodge has 66 rooms ($107-$143 for a double) that are somewhere between a Motel 6 and a Holiday Inn but in a much prettier location. A cluster of six rustic cottages is tucked in the pines several hundred yards from the motel units ($136 for two). Demand is so heavy that booking cottages a year in advance is a must.
There are motels to the west of the park in Study Butte (24 miles from Panther Junction) and Lajitas (41 miles) and to the north in Marathon (69 miles). In Study Butte (pronounced “Stewdy Byoot”), a haphazard settlement two miles from the western park entrance, at the intersection of Texas Highway 118 and Farm-to-Market Road 170, are the Big Bend Motor Inn and the companion Mission Lodge across the highway (432-371-2218; 877-386-4383), two plain but clean motels with Wi-Fi, basic cable TV, a gift shop, a pool, and a combination gas station, convenience store, and cafe. The area also features a 9-hole golf course with carts. A standard double is $89-$105 a night. Less than a mile west is Easter Egg Valley (432-371-2254), a.k.a. the Chisos Mining Company Motel, whose pleasantly decorated rooms are housed in a string of connected prefab buildings. A double is $76 a night. The motel at the Terlingua Ranch (432-371-2416), about 30 miles north and east of the Study Butte intersection, has a restaurant, a pool, and modern rooms that start at $66 for a double.
The erstwhile resort town of Lajitas has the widest array of lodging choices west of the park at The Ultimate Hideout Lajitas—92 rooms, a bunkhouse, cabins, and condos, most furnished with antiques and equipped with a telephone and cable TV, along with access to a pool (central reservations 432-424-5000). Doubles are $159 a night; a two bedroom condo that sleeps up to six runs up to $702 a night. Lajitas is dubbed “the Palm Springs of Texas” by its boosters and “Walley World” by its detractors, the later in honor of Houston developer Walter Mischer, who dreamed up this ersatz Dodge City twenty years ago. Complementing the lodging are convention facilities, a bar and restaurant, a nine-hole golf course, an airstrip, stables, tennis courts, mountain bike rentals, and the Barton Warnock Environmental Education Center desert museum and gardens. The covered faux Western town boardwalk is Lajitas’ commercial center, with a drugstore and soda fountain, a liquor store, the offices of Big Bend River Tours, an art gallery, a gift shop, and the Badlands Hotel, the check-in desk for all Lajitas lodging.
WHERE TO STAY OUTDOORS
Big Bend has three campgrounds in the park—the Chisos Basin, with 60 sites; Cottonwood, 35 miles from Panther Junction, near the historic Castolon store in the western part of the park, with 31 sites shaded by a huge grove of cottonwood trees; and Rio Grande Village, 20 miles from Panther Junction, on the east side of the park, with 100 sites and an overflow campground, as well as a small trailer park with hookups ($27 a night), a store (one of the two places in the park that sell beer), a gas station, a self-service laundry, and the park’s only public showers ($1.50 for five minutes).
Permits for the fifty designated primitive backcountry campsites in the Chisos Mountains can be obtained at park visitor centers up to 24 hours in advance of the trip. Primitive campsites elsewhere are divided into zones, to which hikers are assigned when they obtain their backcountry permits. During busy periods, the only openings may be the primitive campsites near Mariscal Canyon and Talley, down by the Rio Grande in the park’s southern extreme, reached only by four-wheel-drive vehicles on the extremely rough River Road, or sites around Dagger Flat and Persimmons Gap in the north. Backcountry campers must be at least a half mile from any road, a quarter mile from any spring or historic site, and one hundred years from any trail, and must possess a backcountry permit.
Individual sites at campgrounds in the park are $14 a night and are filled on a first-come, first-served basis. Primitive and backcountry sites require a $10 permit which can be acquired at one of the park's visitor centers in person. Group camps Bend Motor Inn’s RV Park (432-371-2218), which also rents bare bones eight-by ten-foot wooden sheds euphemistically called cabins; and the 101-space RV campground in Lajitas (432-424-3471), with full hookups, Wi-Fi, cable TV, and tent sites. There’s always room for campers at the Stillwell Store (432-376-2244), the sole camping option north of the park, six miles east of U.S. 385 on FM 2627. Next to the Hallie Stillwell Museum Hall of Fame, a worthwhile stop even if you aren’t camping, it has RV hookups and 25,000 acres for primitive camping. In general, private campsites are $5 per person, and RV hookups are $18.50 a night and $110 a week.
The Big Bend Travel Park (432-371-2250), on Terlingua Creek, has the only shaded campground outside the park. Other privo $10 a person, and RV hookups go as high as $15.
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