Outside Magazine

Big Bend National Park is dangerous as hell. Seriously. We’re talking about more than 800,000 acres of desert and mountains, where most of the flora you see is sharp and spiny, and the animals you encounter are likely venomous. It’s a place where the sun is hot enough to kill you. Where sandstorms are an occasional concern. Where it doesn’t just rain, it pours, and to such a degree that you have to worry about flash floods. You have to be a special kind of resilient to thrive here. Like Wile E. Coyote resilient. 

This sense of peril only adds to Big Bend’s charisma. The park protects a particularly gorgeous swath of the Chihuahuan Desert, full of deep canyons, yucca plants, and the occasional oasis, plus all of the Chisos Mountains, which have peaks of up to 8,000 feet. These landscapes are all hemmed in by the lush Rio Grande, carving a green stripe through the desert as it makes a dramatic bend to the northeast on its way to the Gulf of Mexico. 

Forget the physical address—Big Bend National Park is not in Texas. It’s in “far west Texas,” which is so isolated and so completely different from the rest of the region in both personality and terrain that it might as well be its own state. The whole scene has an edge-of-the-world quality to it, from the mountains that seem to rise out of nowhere, like some geographical mistake on the horizon, to the sandy terrain that shimmers in the midday sun. The juxtaposition of these vistas and the subtlety of life that thrives within it is fascinating, too. The park is home to nearly 1,300 different species of plants, 450 species of birds, and 75 different mammals. It’s a land of mountain lions, barberry sheep, tarantulas, rattlesnakes, coyotes, roadrunners, and javelinas. Rise early and you’ll see the desert come alive.