I wake long before sunrise for other purposes, I decided it was a good opportunity to check on Capella and the kids.
I was camped with friends in a West Texas arroyo on a gravel bed just wide enough for two tents. On either side of us were a jumble of limestone boulders and the cliffs they came from. In the distance were humpback desert hills along the Rio Grande.
The arresting part of the landscape, however, was overhead. It was the night sky alight with stars.
I took out my phone, fired up the star-finding app and pointed it in what I thought was the right direction. I dug out of memory the first lines of a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay I memorized in high school.
“See where Capella with her golden kids
“Grazes the slope between the east and north ...”
Alas, I couldn’t find the “goat star” (as Capella is less romantically known). I had done so the night before. But it didn’t matter. Her light had traveled 42 years to reach Big Bend National Park, and there would be another chance. Back in the tent, a scrim of mosquito netting between me and the universe, I saw two shooting stars.
Empty, dangerous and dark
There are many reasons to visit Big Bend, which seems to announce, in true Texas fashion: “No need to go anywhere else; we have it all here.”
It’s big – bigger than Rhode Island. It’s empty, accounting for less than 1 percent of Americans’ 65 million visits to national parks each year. It’s dangerous; three hikers died of heat-related illness there in 2013. It has a world-class desert and river, three canyons, its own mountain range, more species of birds (450) than any other national park and 1,300 kinds of plants, most of which seem to be barb-protected. People who saw last year’s Oscar-nominated “Boyhood” got glimpses of it late in the film.
It’s also the best place in America to fall asleep under the stars.
During the last five years, Big Bend has eliminated or retrofitted the outdoor lights on the park’s 289 buildings, as well as in its parking lots and campgrounds. In 2012, it received gold-tier certification from the International Dark-Sky Association, based on five measures of nighttime darkness and clarity. Only 13 parks in the world have that designation. Big Bend shares with three other places the claim to having the least light-polluted sky in the Lower 48 states.
The time may come when star-gazing is Big Bend’s big draw. (The cover photograph of the official 2014 park calendar was the night sky.) Like most visitors, however, I went there for down-to-earth reasons.
A college classmate I saw at a reunion invited me to accompany him and a friend on a trip they take each fall to celebrate the friend’s recovery from a serious illness years ago. They have a fondness for less-visited national parks. At Capitol Reef in Utah, someone told them to try Big Bend.
Big Bend is nestled in the U-shaped dip of West Texas’s border with Mexico. The name refers to the curve in the Rio Grande, where the river’s flow turns from southeast to northeast. Getting to the park requires flying to the middle of nowhere, and then driving three hours.
“We’re not a place that you drive by and visit,” said Kym Flippo, one of the park rangers. “You either really want to be here or are really lost.”
We spent nine days in Big Bend, straddling the end of October and the start of November. We took two hikes separated by a sojourn in Terlingua (population 799), the nearest town. There, we stumbled into the preparations for two – two! – national chili-cooking contests, which turn out to be the big tourist draw in this part of the country.
Yes, this is Texas
Even before the plane lands at Midland International Airport it’s clear what this part of Texas is all about. Oil-well pumps bob just off the runway, and inside the terminal the advertisements are for work gloves, pipe-threading, and “horizontal completions.” The one nod to non-working visitors is a billboard for the George W. Bush Childhood Home, open six days a week.
After loading up on food and fuel canisters – campfires are prohibited in Big Bend – we headed southwest toward the park. The road passed the King Mountain Wind Farm, 214 turbines on a mesa south of Odessa and evidence that fossil and renewable energy are sometimes bedfellows. Eventually, the half-prairie, half-desert landscape turned into hills and, beyond them, the pillared Chisos Mountains.
Big Bend National Park is a geological textbook. Its oldest rocks date from 500 million years ago. There are ancient sandstone and shale beds, and more recent fossil-bearing limestone. The landscape is carved by igneous intrusions, lava and ash from volcanic eruptions, and tectonic fracturing, uplift and erosion.
The 35-million-year-old Chisos Mountains, topping out at 7,825 feet, are topographical newcomers. (They also are the only mountain range contained entirely within a national park.) They have some features of Utah’s and Colorado’s mountains, but their distinguishing attribute is they’re in Texas. We were constantly running into Texans who couldn’t believe they were seeing their home state.
Journey to the South Rim
For our first hike. my companions – Dick and Gary – and I took the popular “outer mountain loop,” a 30-plus mile tour around the highest part of the Chisos. Popular, however, is a relative term. Only 5 percent of the park’s visitors are backcountry campers, and only 10 percent of overnight stays are in the backcountry. One reason: Big Bend has little reliable water.
Creeks flow only after rain, springs are sometimes dry, and the Rio Grande is too polluted to drink except in an emergency. At least that’s what the park service says. Hikers are told to carry or cache all the water they’ll need, which in hot weather is a gallon a day per person. The three dehydration deaths in 2013 – two of them men in their 20s doing geological research – was an unusually high number. But there’s often at least one a season.
Our destination – and most everyone else’s in this part of the park – is the view into Mexico from the South Rim of the Chisos. We could get to it by a four-mile loop that intersected with the trail we were on, so in the morning we hid our water-laden packs in the woods and proceeded unencumbered to the rim.
It had rained recently, and the fall wildflowers were out. Tubular blossoms of scarlet bouvardia decorated the trail that wound through dwarf oaks and pinyon pines. We passed a couple of tarantulas, big as mice and almost as furry, ambling down the trail with us.
The view from the South Rim is the Big Bend postcard shot (or at least the daytime one). You can take it in from several vertical overlooks so high and unprotected your feet tingle as you inch to the edge of them.
Yellow lichens stained the rock face (if you want to look down), and junipers and laurels, growing from cracks, peeked over the top. To the south were the pink cliffs and mesas of a formation called the Sierra Quemada. To the west are the foothills of the Chisos, covered in what looks like the olive upholstery of our grandparents’ Buicks. In the distance were shiny stripes of the meandering Rio Grande. It was as if a giant Japanese watercolor – uninhabited, idealized, and horizontal – had been unscrolled in front of us.
We headed back to our packs and began our descent into the postcard.
Colors litter desert landscape
One of the 2013 deaths was on the Marufo Vega Trail, which goes to the Rio Grande. A sign at the trailhead announced: “12 mile round trip temp. exceeds 100 F min. 1 gallon water per person/day no shade no water.” Suitably warned, we loaded up on water for this one, too.
The trail passed over hills and then split into two spurs that looped around and met at the river.
The landscape was classic Chihuahuan desert. The shadeless limestone hills were stippled with vegetation – the shin daggers of lechuguilla, the star-burst of sotol, the lavender fuzz of plume tiquilia, ceramic-leafed tidestromia – spaced uniformly to make the most of what little moisture existed. But it had not always been dry. Part of the trail was mudstone embedded with fossil mussel shells.
We saw just two other hikers before arriving at the trail split. We left our gear in a dry streambed – that night’s campsite – and headed down the northern spur of the loop.
It went over more hills and then descended a canyon at an angle steeper than stadium steps. We steadied ourselves with our hands and eventually had to get down and slide on our rear ends. We passed occasional piles of dessicated horse manure attesting to the astonishing fact that the descent could be made on four legs, if not two.
Soon, we were on a bluff that eons ago had been the Rio Grande’s bank. In the distance were the cliffs of the Sierra del Carmen, in Mexico. The river, pea-soup green, flowed north in silence. Above it was a hill with a patch of erosion showing sedimentary layers, like a scar revealed in private. There wasn’t a person in sight, nor a building or animal.
The only thing moving was a late-afternoon breeze off the cooling rock. It would be dark in a few hours, and we had the other half of the loop to do. We left a walk to the river’s edge for another day.
Jupiter and Venus were bright in the sky by the time we got back to our packs on the gravel bar.
The evening show was about to begin.
If You Go
Big Bend National Park is unusually remote. It’s 242 miles from Midland, which has the closest large airport. The closest sizable town is Marathon, 70 miles away. There is no public transportation to the park. The four camp stores have limited selection, so visitors planning to camp should stock up before they arrive. There are five visitor centers, but only two are open in the summer, Panther Junction and Chisos Basin. Chisos Basin has a restaurant, store and motel, and it is the starting point for the outer mountain loop hike. A vehicle pass costs $20 and is valid for seven days. Camping fees vary by location: developed campgrounds $7-14 per night, backcountry campsites $5-$10 per night. For more information, call (432) 477-2251 or visit www.nps.gov/bibe.
