Big Bend National Park: The Most Remote Park in the Lower Forty-Eight
Near Terlingua, Texas
From Terlingua, the western entrance to Big Bend National Park is a short drive by road. The park protects eight hundred one thousand one hundred sixty-three acres where the Rio Grande makes a great horseshoe bend around the Chisos Mountains, and it is consistently ranked among the most remote national parks in the contiguous United States. The land was set aside as Big Bend State Park in nineteen thirty-three after a campaign to acquire private ranch land.
It was transferred to the federal government and established as a national park in June of nineteen forty-four. The park contains three distinct environments: the Rio Grande floodplain and its dramatic canyons, the Chihuahuan Desert lowlands, and the Chisos Mountains at the center, which rise to over seventy-eight hundred feet and support a different, cooler ecology. The park has been designated an International Dark Sky Park, a Gold Tier recognition of the exceptional darkness of the night sky in this part of the Trans-Pecos.
On a clear night in the Big Bend country, the Milky Way is visible as a solid band, and the silence is the kind of silence that is increasingly rare in the modern American landscape.
