Road Trip to Big Bend National Park

This spring break, I got to experience a little bit more of Texas in a road trip from Austin to Big Bend National Park. Big Bend is in the Southwest of the state, where the Rio Grande forms a natural border with Mexico. Driving out of Austin, it was incredible how quickly the landscape changed – pretty soon, we were out in the middle of the desert. On the first night, we stopped in Marfa, an isolated town built historically as a pit stop for the railroad that runs through the state. However, over the years the town has become an artistic hub – in the 70s, artist Donald Judd fell in the love with the stark beauty of this small desert town, and set up a contemporary art museum called the Chinati foundation. The town is full of abandoned factory buildings, which have been converted into striking galleries filled with Judd’s artwork. My personal favourites were the ‘15 Untitled Works in Concrete,’ which lie in an empty field within the town and beautifully frame the stark desert landscape. Perhaps the most surprising thing about Marfa was the deliciously fresh food – having found little else to eat but beef jerky for a full day on the road through the desert, it’s safe to say we appreciated it. 

Our next stop was Terlingua, which lies just outside the Big Bend National Park. Terlingua was first founded as a mining town in the 1880s – the remnants of this settlement lie in the historic ‘ghost-town,’ which can be found in Terlingua to this day. The town has continued despite the decline of mining in the area, but due to its position in the middle of the harsh Chihuahan desert, water must be supplied into the town from elsewhere. Terlingua is now mainly a tourist destination for travellers going through Big Bend, and is filled with desert sports centres, motels, and concert venues. The most breath-taking part of our journey was our canoe trip down the Santa Elena canyon, where the Rio Grande flows for about 13 miles, surrounded on either side by steep cliffs that can reach up to 1,500 feet. We rowed 3 miles upstream, where we camped on a bank on the Mexican side. Here, we pitched our tents, lit a fire, and slept under the stars. The next day, we went bouldering further up a steep side-canyon before taking the decidedly more relaxing journey back downstream. 

I think this trip made me appreciate the sheer vastness of Texas. After 16 hours of driving, we had only covered a tiny portion of the state. 

By Charlotte Webster