Big Bend National Park:
Where the Rainbows Wait for Rain

Far down on the Mexican border the Rio Grande makes a giant U-turn. Inside this mighty curve lies a national park and the special and spectacular section of southwest Texas known as "Big Bend Country."

More than a century ago a Mexican cowboy described Big Bend as "Where the rainbows wait for the rain, and the big river is kept in a stone box, and water runs uphill and mountains float in the air, except at night when they go away to play with other mountains..." This land is so vast and so wild that you can feel your human smallness and frailty. Silence takes on the quality of sound, and isolation can bring you face to face with the interdependence of all life forms.

Paradox abounds. There is killing heat and freezing cold; deadly drought and flash flood; arid lowland and moist mountain woodlands; and a living river winding its way across the desert.

Spanish explorers called Big Bend the "unknown land," and for hundreds of years civilization passed it by on either side. Entrenched behind deep river canyons and walled in by rough and rugged mountains, this vast country remains today a world apart. Fewer than 13,000 people occupy an area about the size of Maryland, mostly in two or three towns strung along the highway to the north.

Only three paved roads run south into Big Bend, and whatever route you take, you'll find yourself in country that looks less and less familiar the farther you penetrate it. Here are the landscapes, plants, and animals typical of the Chihuahuan Desert, a high dry wilderness that spills northward out of Mexico into far west Texas and Southern New Mexico.

Basically, Big Bend's desert is a rolling land of creosote bush and butch grass. But it grows gorgeous forests of giant yucca and solid stands of lechuguilla, a barbed and bladed plant found only in the Chihuahuan Desert.

Big Bend's desert has living sand dunes, painted badlands, and petrified trees, and since it is a geologically young desert, its landforms stand in rugged relief. Igneous dikes march across plain and mountain like so many man-made stone walls. Chimney-tall stacks thrust up from barren flats as from a ruin. Volcanic ash heaps, white as snow, lean their concrete shoulders against maroon hills.

The Indians used to say that after making the Earth, the Great Spirit dumped the leftover rocks on Big Bend. Heaped up, scattered wide, and piled into mountains, they lie here to this day.

Since vegetation is so scant, Big Bend mountains take their shape and color from the rocks of which they are made. They loom castellated, cathedral-domed, flattopped, and razor backed. They all look red, yellow, gray, black, white, and all the shades of brown, empurpled by distance or misted over after rain in a gauzy film of green. You don't know which is more awe-inspiring, looking up or looking down, since the mountains rise with striking suddenness between the vaulted sky and the open plain.

Approaching the Chisos Mountains for the first time, you can't believe that cars can breach those bastions, or that high inside there actually is a Basin where travelers have camped since people first gazed on these mountains. Undulating foothills fling themselves like breakers against the sheer rock cliffs. Standing atop the escarpment that walls up the Chisos South Rim, you see hills and mountains rolling like ocean waves far, far below, with here and there a gleam of silver where the river runs.