Big Bend Made Easy
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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The Mariscal Mountain Trails can be equally confusing and intimidating in hot weather but offer similarly rewarding perspectives of the least explored and the most remote canyon in the park. At the northern extreme of the mountain, eighteen miles from the eastern end of the River Road, is the Mariscal Mine, an abandoned quicksilver operation spread over two dozen structures, as well as the ruins of several houses. Watch your step here. The area is pocked with mineshafts, and construction materials may be contaminated with mercury.
Telephone Canyon, Strawhorse, and Marufo Vega Trails in the eastern extreme of the park are the roughest, toughest most primitive, and most hard-to-follow hiking routes in the park. They wind through canyons, washes, and scrub brush in the moonscape tableau of the Deadhorse Mountains. For experts only.
The South Rim, Juniper Canyon, Dodson Trail, and Blue Creek Ranch Grand Tour is a three-day minimum, thirty-mile march dropping out of the Chisos onto the desert. The route follows poorly marked trails traversing rugged terrain with rapid variations in elevation and no water or shade.
River Route: Every year, a few hardy long-distance trekkers walk along the river from Brushy Canyon at the park’s eastern extreme all the way to Santa Elena Canyon on the west. This requires several ascents and descents of up to two thousand feet. Allow ten days.
Other Transportation: Mountain bicycles, all-terrain vehicles, and motorbikes must be street legal and are required to stay on roads and not venture onto trails. As is the case with four-wheel-drive vehicles, the most popular routes are River Road and the Old Ore Road. Desert Sports in Lajitas (424-3366, 800-523-8170) has rentals, guide services, tours, and repairs. The Chisos Remuda in the basin (477-2374) schedules daily horseback tours to the Window, a pleasant two-and-one-half-hour round trip ($20) and an all-day ride to the South Rim ($40). The horses are gentle, and the cowboy guides are informative. Riders must be at least six years old and weigh no more than 210 pounds. Turquoise Trailrides in Study Butte (371-2212) and the Lajitas Stables (424-3238) also book trail rides outside the park lasting from one hour to several days.
River Floats: A raft trip through one of the canyons is an experience wholly separate from the mountains and the desert. Most trips are run by the three large outfitters west of the park: Far Flung Adventures in Terlingua (371-2489, 800-359-4138), Big Bend River Tours in Lajitas (424-3219, 800-545-4240), and Outback Expeditions in Study Butte (371-2490, 800-343-1640). All offer guided trips that average $90 per person per day; half-day trips are offered by Big Bend River Tours ($48) and Outback Expeditions ($40). Far Flung Adventures and Big Bend River Tours are especially creative at putting together special trips that emphasize food, photography, survival training, and music, such as Far Flung’s floats with troubadours Steve Fromholz, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, and Butch Hancock.
Santa Elena, the most popular canyon passage, can be done in a full day or overnight. The Rockslide is the most difficult rapid on this stretch of the river. The narrow, vertical-walled Mariscal, at the southern extreme of the river’s big bend, can be done in a day via Outback Expeditions but requires several hours of driving on unimproved dirt roads; it is best attempted as an overnighter. Boquillas, the most visually spectacular canyon, as well as the easiest to float and to get to, takes a minimum of two days by canoe and three days by raft. Not surprisingly, it is also the most congested canyon during spring break. The remote Lower Canyons trip, downstream from the park, takes a week minimum. All river runners not traveling with an outfitter must have a permit (no reservation is necessary), obtained at Panther Junction, Rio Grande Village, the Stillwell Store, or the Barton Warnock center. If you want to go on your own, Rio Grande Outfitters rents rafts (371-2424) and Desert Sports (424-3366) leases canoes for trips to all canyons except Santa Elena.
Going to Mexico: There is nothing like a trip to a foreign country to add some spice to a vacation. At Big Bend you can pay someone a dollar or two to give you a ride in a rowboat to the villages of Boquillas and Santa Elena across from the park and to Paso Lajitas across from Lajitas. This is literally free trade, since no barriers exist between the two sides other than the river. Although Santa Elena and Paso Lajitas have electricity, I prefer Boquillas, near Rio Grande Village. The parking lot on the Texas side is watched by a solicitous Mexican attendant (he appreciates dollar tips or extra food or drinks). From there, walk down a shady path to the river, then take the rowboat shuttle ($2 a person) across. On the other side, donkeys may be hired for $3 for the mile ride into the village, a small cluster of adobe buildings above the floodplain. There’s not a whole lot to see and do, other than have a snack at Don José Falcon’s cafe and souvenir shop (three-bean-and-cheese tacos or burritos are $1) or enjoy a game of pool at the cantina down the street. Every other child in town, it seems, hawks fluorite, quartz, agate, and other gemstones as well as macramé wristbands. The Santa Elena crossing is down a dirt road that the park service blocks at five-thirty each evening, about a mile east of the Cottonwood campground turnoff. It too has a rowboat shuttle but no donkey rides, since it is only a short stroll from the riverbank to town. There are three restaurants with simple fare. Maria Elena’s is the most frequently recommended.
Finding a Guide: There is no better way to find out the meaning of a pile of rocks than to hire a good guide. The biggest bargain of all are the free interpretive activities staged by rangers throughout the park, from thirty-minute presentations on flora and fauna to the irregularly scheduled fifty-mile, five-hour Drive Through Time motor caravan. Weekly activity schedules are posted around the park and at the Panther Junction visitors’ center. The Big Bend Natural History Association hosts half-day, full-day, and multiday group seminars in and out of the park, led by experts like photographer Jim Bones and botanist Barton Warnock. Write Big Bend Natural History Association, P.O. Box 68, Big Bend National Park, Texas 79834, or call 477-2236 for a schedule and prices. Jim Hines’s Big Bend Birding Expedition (371-2356) conducts half-day, full-day, and overnight tours by van and boat in and around the park, starting at $70 (two-person minimum).
Otherwise, if you want an informed companion to accompany you, hire someone outside the park. Big Bend River Tours in Lajitas and Outback Expeditions in Study Butte run half-day and full-day four-wheel-drive backcountry tours, starting at $50 (four-person minimum).
I found Bill Bourbon, a geologist, birder, and former ranger who leads group seminars for the Big Bend Natural History Association and occasionally takes individuals and small groups on excursions by appointment only for $150 a day (371-2202). His vast knowledge and interpretive skills turned what might have been an uneventful six-hour backcountry drive along the Old Ore Road into a fascinating field trip. Among other things, Bourbon explained why some prickly pear cacti are purple (a defensive measure to save chlorophyll during dry periods); pointed out the difference between a lechuguilla and a hechtia, or false agave—lechuguilla claws curve down, hechtia claws curve up; extolled the culinary delights of strawberry cactus and the flower petals of giant dagger yucca; and recommended the medicinal value of leatherstem (or sangre de drago, “dragon’s blood,” as it is known in Mexico), whose red sap soothes a toothache. He identified shrikes, rock wrens, Say’s phoebes, scaled quail, ladder-backed woodpeckers, and curve-billed thrashers flitting among the creosote bushes, and two red-tailed hawks playing in the breeze. At one stop he pointed out evidence of a cataclysmic event from 65 to 70 million years ago that had petrified a forest of giant ash tree stumps; later, he showed me a rockslide on a mountain range that occurred in 1987 (“Everything here wants to be in the Gulf of Mexico. Soon or later, gravity always wins,” he said.)
With Bourbon’s help, I learned to identify fresh mountain lion droppings and recognize invader plants like tamarisk (also known as salt cedar), which chokes out other vegetation around springs. He pointed out that Russian thistle, commonly known as tumbleweed, and the ubiquitous creosote bush did not become dominant desert plants until the grasslands were overgrazed by ranchers in the years before the park was established. Before the day was done, I knew my igneous intrusions from my continental terrestrial deposits.
Staying in Touch: The only cable TV set in the park for public viewing is in the lobby of the Chisos Mountain Lodge. The souvenir shop sells magazines and copies of the San Angelo Standard-Times and the Odessa American. Pay phones are only a dime for a local call, but most calls are long distance, including those from the basin to Study Butte. Connections are such that conversations often fade in and out. You realize how far removed Big Bend is from civilization by the dearth of radio. By day, you can sometimes tune in KVLF 1240-AM in Alpine, a syndicated big band format with state and local news at 12:30 p.m., and the country-formatted KCKN 1020-AM in Roswell, New Mexico. If a cold front is blowing into Roswell, it can be expected to hit the park about twelve hours later. At night, news-talk stations WOAI 1200-AM from San Antonio and KRLD 1080-AM from Dallas are relatively easy to tune in. The liveliest source of local news is a newsletter called the Terlingua Moon, which is posted on bulletin boards at most stores and outside the Terlingua Post Office. But why bother about the outside world? People come to Big Bend to get away. There will be plenty of time for cable TV back home.
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