The Last Frontier

Adventure awaits visitors to Big Bend National Park, located in one of America's wildest, most forbidding places

- Marcia DeSanctis

ON MY FIRST MORNING IN BIG BEND, I jumped in a little too а quickly. Driving 78 miles south from Marathon, Texas, I aimed for the heart of the national park: the Chisos Basin, a geological depression encircled by a mountain range of the same name. A friend had recommended the six-mile Window Trail hike; I reached the trailhead at noon.

Disregarding the posted warnings not to hike after 10am because of the extreme heat, I ventured past volcanic outcrops into a dry canyon bed. Fifteen minutes in, I encountered what seemed to be a remarkable painted stick bisecting my path. It turned out to be a deadly Mojave rattlesnake that, thankfully, ignored me.

By the time I reached the Window—a natural stone aperture at the lip of a 65-metre cliff, through which I could see the pastel expanse of the Chihuahuan Desert—it was 38 degrees Celsius, there was no other hiker in sight, and my backup water bottle was emptying fast.

I proceeded cautiously on the way back, ducking for shade wherever I could on the arduous uphill route. By the time I arrived at my air-conditioned car, I had learned my lesson. Big Bend was different. One needs humility, stamina, a little courage… and probably not to hike alone.

“Every other aspect of the Big Bend Country—landscape, configuration, rocks, and vegetation—is weird and strange and of a type unfamiliar to the inhabitants of civilised lands,” wrote the geologist Robert T Hill, who mapped the Rio Grande for the United States government in 1899. Of the river’s 1,885 miles, 118 delineate the southern edge of the park—the boundary with Mexico—including the elbow-like curve that gives Big Bend its name.