FM 170 Camino del Rio: The Road That Hugs the River

Farm-to-Market Road one seventy runs seventy-five miles along the Rio Grande between Presidio and Lajitas through terrain that most visitors to Big Bend National Park never see. It is one of the more dramatic roads in Texas, which is a state not short on dramatic roads, because for long stretches it runs along the rim of the river canyon with nothing between the pavement edge and the water below except a few feet of gravel.

The road passes through Big Bend Ranch State Park, three hundred eleven thousand acres of Chihuahuan Desert that has fewer facilities, fewer paved spur roads, and fewer visitors than the national park to its east. The state park is not the national park. There is no visitor center in the conventional sense, no lodge, no restaurant. There is the river, the desert, the canyon walls, and the road.

The corridor that Farm-to-Market one seventy traces is an ancient travel route. Spanish explorers moving between the settlements at El Paso and the missions of the lower Rio Grande valley used this corridor in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Comanche raiders moving south through the Big Bend gap used routes through this terrain. Mexican ranching families whose land-use rights predated both Texas statehood and American sovereignty maintained their operations along this river bottom.

The road itself was graded and paved in the twentieth century, imposing a modern surface on a corridor that had been in continuous use for centuries. The Spanish name, Camino del Rio, the road of the river, is the oldest accurate name for what you are driving.