Big Bend National Park United States

Legendary

Bordering Mexico, the park is named after a large bend in the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo river.

Photo by Alexander Hatley

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Big Bend National Park contains an entire mountain range inside its borders, the only national park in the country that can claim that. The Chisos Mountains rise right out of the desert floor, cool and green in the middle of one of the hottest, driest landscapes in North America.

The park sits in far west Texas, named for a dramatic curve in the Rio Grande, which forms the border between the United States and Mexico here. The river flows southeast for hundreds of miles, then suddenly bends northeast, carving through canyons with walls that rise nearly straight up.

People have lived in this region for over 10,000 years. Hunter-gatherers first arrived not long after the last Ice Age, followed by farming communities, the Chisos people, and later Comanche and Apache groups who crossed the area on trading and raiding routes.

Congress established Big Bend as a national park on June 20, 1935, though it took years to acquire all the land. The park officially opened to the public in 1944, becoming the first national park in Texas.

Big Bend protects the largest stretch of Chihuahuan Desert land anywhere in the United States. That desert stretches across more than half the park, home to cactus, roadrunners, and desert bighorn sheep built to survive brutal heat and almost no rainfall.

Rising above all that desert are the Chisos Mountains, reaching 7,832 feet at their highest peak, Emory Peak. The mountains create their own cooler climate, with forests and wildlife found nowhere else in the park.

During the 1930s, young workers with the Civilian Conservation Corps carved a road into the heart of the Chisos Mountains, building the route still used to reach the Chisos Basin today.

Hike into Santa Elena Canyon, where limestone walls rise 1,500 feet above the Rio Grande. Drive up into the Chisos Basin for cooler air and mountain views. Paddle the river itself, floating right along the international border between two countries.