They say everything is bigger in Texas. As my friend Chris and I hit our fifth hour of travelling to Big Bend National Park from El Paso, the nearest city with significant airline service and Interstate connectivity, we started to realize this was not just a marketing slogan. We were on our way to the most remote National Park in the Lower 48, with some of the best Land Rovering terrain in the entire National Park Service system.
My friend Chris O’Neill and I are big National Park enthusiasts, and we’re both trying slowly to visit some sum of the National Park Service’s checklist. Chris is going for the 63 “National Parks,” while I’m going for all 423 units – parks, historic sites, battlefields, monuments, and all. Big Bend is an essential for both of us, and a place I have been dreaming of visiting since I first saw it in a Lonely Planet: USA guidebook at my local library in the mid 2000s.
Big Bend is in West Texas, where the Rio Grande makes…well, a big bend on its journey from the Gulf of Mexico to New Mexico. It’s far from pretty much anything. El Paso is 300 miles away. The nearest town of significance, Alpine, is the capital of the “Big Bend Country,” and has Amtrak service three times a week in each direction, a state college, and a few hotels; it’s still 72 miles away. (We stayed there the night before to position ourselves, staying at the fantastic old Holland Hotel.) Terlingua is at the western edge of the park, but anyone who built grand visions of it in their head from Jerry Jeff Walker's seminal album might be disappointed; it's nice, but not big.
Now, you might think that that’s an American-centric view; the park is on the border, and there’s all of the wonders of Mexico on the other side. This is true, and there’s the small village of Boquillas del Carmen across the Rio Grande, a de facto extension of the park. But Boquillas is so far from anything else of major consequence in Mexico that when the informal border crossing closed after 9/11, most people left town until US Customs built a videochat border crossing outpost in 2013 and visitors came back. There isn’t much else on the other side of the border except for continuations of the scenery and landscapes from the American side.
But those landscapes. Those…are why you come here. Big Bend is where even a Desert Rat such as myself can come and find new and surprising things.
We started our journey at the Panther Junction Visitor Center, the main visitor center in the middle of the park. Beyond my National Parks Passport stamp compulsion, we had to make a second backcountry reservation – certain campsites are available online (and I got our first night on the Internet via the Recreation.gov system), while others in lower demand are booked in person at the visitors center. After exploring some of the paved roads, we headed to our first trail, the Old Ore Road.
In the 1890s, silver was discovered in the Sierra del Carmen, near Boquillas, Mexico. The Old Ore Road was built in the early 1900s to transport lead, zinc, and silver ore from these mines via mule and pack train to the railroad station in Marathon, Texas, for shipment to smelters in El Paso. Today, its commercial use is obviously in the past, but 26 miles of it remain as an off-road trail in the National Park. It’s an unmaintained road, and while there are parts of it that we were able to take at relative speed, generally it was a slow-going, deliberate drive in the LR3.
Of course, in a modern Land Rover, an off-road journey need not be uncomfortable. I jacked the truck up into Off Road Height, and navigated the road with good wheel placement and a mix of low and high range, with far more low gearing than I honestly expected I’d need. We crunched over rocky trails, purple cactus and century agave brushing the side of the LR3, leaving tiny souvenirs of our grand adventure in the paint.
We spent our first night camping at Roys Peak Vista, one of the eleven reservable backcountry sites along the Old Ore Road. Chris set up his tent among the sagebrush, while I set up my sleeping platform in the back of the LR3 that I’d been living out of for the prior two weeks. We set up my camp stove and Ignik Gas Growler on the tailgate and whipped up dinner (an Indian meal-in-a-bag) in the intense stillness. The sun set quickly just two weeks after the Solstice, bringing sudden darkness over the mountains and a haze of light on the horizon. We’d only passed one car, going the other way, since we hit the trail. The only other sign of life was the pinprick headlights of cars coming down from the Chisos Mountains Lodge, miles and miles away. We figured the next closest human, after each other, was at least five miles away.
After a very quiet night, we made coffee with my AeroPress and then packed up and headed down the road. The rest of the Old Ore Road was the same vistas, but now with the added benefit of being bathed in morning light. We followed the road to its end, and then drove a few miles on pavement to our next goal, the Boquillas Port of Entry.
Chris and I have both become rather into travelling in Mexico lately – he took his Land Cruiser to Baja last summer, and just a week prior I’d driven the LR3 to Sonora. We were both looking forward to the journey across the river together to Boquillas del Carmen, the aforementioned remote town that has become an extension of the Big Bend experience. We parked, walked the short trail down to the river, and paid $5 for a rowboat across the Rio Grande. This seemed rather unnecessary, as the river was only a foot or so deep, but we decided to support the local economy. From there, we paid another $5 for a pickup truck ride up the hill to town, about three-quarters of a mile.
Boquillas is a small village – a restaurant, a bar, a few gift shops, a church, and a few houses. Without a car, and with a hard return deadline of 3PM to make it through the border crossing, we didn’t have time to poke around the far reaches. Instead, we got lunch at Jose Falcon’s, the most venerable of the businesses in Boquillas, along with a few regional brews. (I’m a Tecate fan; Chris likes to play the field of Mexican mainline brews and went for a Carta Blanca.) After lunch we meandered through town, checked out the church and bar, bought some woven bracelets from the cute kids who followed us around, and then having more or less exhausted Boquillas’ potential and our deadline to get back to America (there didn’t seem to be a hotel if we got stuck), headed back across the border. This time, we decided to wade across the Rio Grande, for the experience -- there's nowhere else you can (legally) enter America by walking across a river.
Our final trail was the River Road, a 51-mile route along the Rio Grande. This wasn’t quite as beat up as the Old Ore Road, and the biggest issue was keeping the LR3 under 25 miles an hour on the good sections so the suspension didn’t deflate to Normal Mode. We spent another night camping, this time among a herd of semi-wild horses with bells around their necks that clanked eerily in the night.
We stopped to explore the Mariscal Mine, which was the center of the area’s quicksilver (a fancy name for mercury) mining endeavors until 1943, now abandoned but somewhat intact. A quarter of all the quicksilver ever made in America was produced here, an industry that was fully abandoned in this country in 1992. As we got closer to the western end of the River Road, it got closer to the river itself, and we saw more Border Patrol vehicles doing rounds.
We ended our journey at Santa Elena Canyon, where the Rio Grande cuts a path through the Sierra Ponce cliffs and slices them into an American and a Mexican sector. It’s a popular hike in the park, and we’d now fully rejoined the “on-roaders.” First, you walk through the chilly Rio Grande, up to your knees in icy cold water. Then it’s a half mile or so along the cliffs to an overlook, with the wind up the canyon so intense today that the water seemed to be flowing uphill. Return is the reverse, but the dip is a bit more refreshing this time.
Having more or less ticked off our entire Big Bend checklist, Chris and I decided we were satiated and headed out, via Terlingua, on a six-hour highway run to San Antonio. He was flying home from there, and I was heading back east towards New Jersey via ramblings in the Southeast.
I’d dreamt of visiting Big Bend for a very long time. I’ve been to a lot of National Parks, and this ranks up there with personal favorites like Death Valley, Denali, and Canyonlands. It’s a more subtle beauty, but the remoteness, the Mexican element, and the history here left a massive impression on me. It’s also so worth doing this park in the backcountry, taking a proper 4x4 and enjoying the solitude. After all, that’s why you have a Land Rover, isn’t it?
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