Santa Elena Canyon: The Rio Grande's Greatest Cut

Mesa de Anguila is a limestone plateau that the Rio Grande spent millions of years trying to cut through. The river won. What it left behind is Santa Elena Canyon, a corridor barely a few hundred feet wide with walls rising fifteen hundred feet on each side, one wall in Texas and one wall in Chihuahua, Mexico.

The canyon interior is a different world from the desert above it. The light reaches the river for only part of the day. In the cool shade of the walls, you can hear the water and nothing else. The trail from the trailhead follows the bank into the canyon, crossing a seasonal creek at the entrance and then continuing along the base of the cliff where the river has undercut the limestone into overhangs.

The Rio Grande here marks the international boundary line between two countries, drawn by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in eighteen forty-eight. The river is indifferent to that designation. It carved this canyon according to its own hydrology, following the path of least resistance through the limestone plateau over geological time scales that predate every nation whose territory it now divides.

The canyon is among the most dramatic river gorges in the United States. Late afternoon light on the western entrance cliff is when the scale of it becomes fully apparent: fifteen hundred feet of limestone, straight up, with the river running through a gap you could throw a stone across.