West Texas Hikes That Will Take You to Another World
These mountain hikes will take you to new heights—and new extremes.
These mountain hikes will take you to new heights—and new extremes.
What to do, where to eat, and more if you’re heading to Fort Davis, Marfa, Marathon, and/or Big Bend this season.
Despite its rich Texas history, sotol is a little-known spirit. The men behind new Driftwood distillery Desert Door want to change that.
Over three installments, we follow a film team as they—by bike, horse, and canoe—document how a physical wall would affect the area, water, and its people.
Can a 1960s novel with a cult following finally become the blockbuster film its fans believe it should be?
Marfa Public Radio reports on the down side of the boom.
We found fast cars, big skies, and a whole bunch of daredevils at this annual high-speed race weekend out west.
Looking back on last year's best stories to plan this year's wanderings.
The skies of West Texas are so grand that it’s easy to forget how much is going on under our feet.
Selections from my personal wanderlist.
My grandfather’s work as a paleontologist took him to West Texas over and over again. Fifty years later, I found myself retracing his steps.
An Insta-dispatch from the flourishing West Texas frontier town.
The risks a West Texan will take for a quick dip.
West Texas’s claim on this fizzy, lemony cocktail is unprovable? We’ll drink to that.
For a few months every year, life in West Texas is defined by the wind.
What's changed and what hasn't.
The only thing that’s smaller about six-man football is the field.
As the oil industry tries to make inroads in far West Texas, it’s learning that Alpine is no Midland.
A taxonomy of West Texas waves.
This year’s heavy rains have brought countless blessings to West Texas—and one very nasty weed.
A small high school in Crane, Texas, just confirmed that 20 of its 300 students have been diagnosed with Chlamydia, spurring a revisitation of the district’s abstinence-only sex education curriculum.
In drought-ravaged West Texas, cotton farmers find good omens in unlikely places.
Or a 9MM or a Ruger deer rifle. No, this is not a fake ad.
A funny thing happened on the way to the San Angelo fracking sand transloading facility.
Growing up in the Permian Basin, I thought I had a sense of what it was like working the oilfields. Turns out I didn’t know a damn thing.
The competition at the Big Bend Livestock Show is fierce. But treat your animal right and you might get to be number four with a pullet.
It’s the favorable acreage-to-other-humans ratio that draws most visitors, who come for the space that this Chihuahuan Desert outpost has in spades.
Stunning vistas, snorting buffalo, and dashed hopes at Cibolo Creek Ranch.
The photographer from Big Bend known for stunning landscapes gets out of his comfort zone. Here, a first look at several images from his latest collection.
The family provided documentation proving that keeping his hair long was part of their religion. But should they have had to?
When you live in the desert, waiting for rain requires almost irrational optimism. And maybe a curse word or two.
How one feline (and then a couple more, and then another) conquered both our hearts and our mice.
A new start-up in the impoverished city only needs $20 million to complete a study to find out.
The McDonald Observatory, celebrating its seventy-fifth anniversary this year, forges ahead with groundbreaking research and crusades to keep the night skies of West Texas pristine and unadulterated.
My life with horses.
When Playboy Enterprises—yes, that Playboy Enterprises—erected a forty-foot-tall sculpture near Marfa, it was convinced the town would appreciate its take on the local art scene. Instead it started a revealing debate.
How do a husband and wife resolve backyard barbecuing duties? Illustration by Jack UnruhQ: My wife has recently taken a keen interest in my backyard barbecuing duties. In fact, last weekend she asked me if I wanted her to start cooking the beans from now
Beyoncé swung through Marfa in early July and just posted pictures from her trip on her Tumblr.
The oil industry cheered news Wednesday that the tiny lizard will not be added to the endangered species list.
Bad as the current drought is, it has yet to match the most arid spell in Texas history. Nearly two dozen survivors of the fifties drought remember the time it never rained.
The Lower Pecos River rock paintings were created four thousand years ago by a long-forgotten people. But their apparent message may be as useful today as it was then: Follow the water.
Texas Parks and Wildlife has embarked on an ambitious plan to restore the desert bighorn sheep population in Big Bend Ranch State Park. To accomplish this goal, the department has had to make hard choices about which animals live, which animals die, and what truly belongs in the Trans-Pecos.
South from Alpine to Study Butte, west to Presidio, north to Marfa, and east to Alpine.
Why are there so few Texan philosophers?
The first column I wrote for Texas Monthly appeared in the March 2000 issue. The article was titled “Voting Rites,” and I argued that the Voting Rights Act, which Lyndon Johnson had proposed to a joint session of Congress 35 years earlier, was the greatest accomplishment of his
For many travelers, this far West Texas town is a last-chance pit stop before heading south to brave the wilds of Big Bend National Park. But, this past spring, after driving 407 miles (that’s roughly 7 hours and 143 country songs) from Austin to
In one of my favorite descriptions of Marfa, writer David McDannald points out that sometimes it’s “a shadow of a town” and sometimes it’s “a desert Mardi Gras.” At the end of this month, West Texas’s buzziest destination will be lit up like Bourbon Street on
The feds have postponed their decision on whether to add the dunes sagebrush lizard to the endangered species list until mid-2012.
The word probably makes you think of rhinestone-studded jeans, floppy-brimmed hats, and Nashville queens, but “cowgirl” ought to stand for the tough pioneer women who built ranches and went on cattle drives and the hardy rural women who are out there today doing their fair share of the work, usually invisibly,
In January, the Gage Hotel, which is one of my all-time favorite romantic destinations in West Texas (well, the rooms in the Los Portales section are, not the ones with the bathrooms down the hall in the historic building–not so romantic running into some unknown dude in his