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That's a shame, because visitors to Big Bend will find an arid wilderness as strange as it is beautiful. Everywhere you look the land seems to shift like the ocean, flattening here and surging to a great swell there only to come crashing down into a canyon. At the center of the park, the Chisos Mountains float into view like so many icebergs on a calm sea.
Here, where Texas bumps into Mexico as the Rio Grande pulls a 350-mile-long U-turn, the elevation dips to 1,800 feet along the milky green river and tops out at Emory Peak's 7,825. As the altitude shifts so does the temperature and terrain.
In a 30-minute span, you can go from the shade of a lush bamboo grove along the banks of Rio Grande, drive through the sun-blasted shrub desert of prickly pears, creosote bush, and ocotillo to the cool mountain air of the Chisos Basin at 5,200 feet. You'll find critters and plants that don't live anywhere else in the United States, such as the forlorn-looking Mexican drooping juniper and the Big Bend mosquitofish, a shiny little guy that has been around since the mastodons and lives in only three of the park's ponds. It's all breathtakingly weird.
Established in 1944, Big Bend is young, and surprisingly so is its desert, geologically speaking. It was only 4,000 years ago that the region was a leafy woodland, geologists believe. Then the glaciers melted and a hot wind blew up from Mexico and kissed most the deciduous trees goodbye.
Hunter-gatherer types showed up well before the land overheated, somewhere around 8000 BC, but ever since Big Bend turned desert it hasn't been a hot spot for human habitation. When the Spanish first came through in the mid-16th century, they named it El Despoblado, ''Uninhabited.''
Today, 8,000 people live in Brewster County, which includes all of the park. That's why intrepid travelers who make it to Big Bend will be rewarded with the delicious feeling of having this wondrous corner of the world to themselves.
The closest you can get by commercial airline is the new Midland International Airport, and that means taking a prop plane from Houston or Dallas. Heading southwest from Midland, you'll first drive through sagebrush flatlands dotted by the rhythmic deep bowing of the pump jacks. As you turn south at Pecos or Monahans, what little traffic there is will fall away as you head into ranching country.
This region of Texas, where the Rocky Mountains bottom out, has no shortage of peaks: the Del Norte Mountains, the Glass Mountains, the Rosillos Mountains, the Christmas Mountains, to name a few. Depending whether you're headed to the park via Alpine or Marathon, the last towns of any size, you'll drive along the seemingly impenetrable Santiago Mountains, and you'll slip through the shadow of the chain's namesake, which crests at a craggy 6,521 feet.
As if the remoteness of the park doesn't keep enough people away, there aren't that many places to stay once you get there. In the Chisos Basin, an earthen bowl rimmed by buttes and peaks, you'll find the only accommodations in the park. Nestled in the basin, the National Park Service's Chisos Mountain Lodge is an oasis that offers 1950s motel-style rooms, with lofty ceilings and rustic furniture right outside your door to plop into after a hike and contemplate the crenellated peak before you. There are also hotel-style rooms and five in-demand cottages. There is also a bare-bones dining room with a stunning view.
There's a long list of ways to take in the scenery at Big Bend: hiking, horseback riding, biking, rafting, and birding. Big Bend, with more different resident and migrant birds than any US park, offers primo birding.
Big Bend is a major river running destination, but in recent years low rainfall has reduced the Rio Grande to a trickle in some spots. Canyons, such as the epic St. Elena, are now better navigated by canoe than raft. Outfitters have compensated by adding mountain bike tours, even at night, and jeep tours.
There are 65 trails, not counting the 200-plus primitive ones. The easy-does-it, 0.3-mile Window View Trail will lead you to the panoramic chute where all the water from the mountain basin exits to the desert below. The Lost Mine Trail is an easily graded trail that rises 1,100 feet to a ridge overlooking two magnificent canyons.
Big Bend is not a place to be messed with, as park literature repeatedly points out. Temperatures can rise well above 100 in the summer, but even at more moderate temperatures the desert quickly sucks you dry.
Then there are the flash floods, poisonous snakes, mountain lions, and bears, and the slim likelihood that if you were to get into trouble that anyone would be around to help you. Wear a hat, slather on the sunscreen, and drink lots of water.
However, you haven't totally left civilization behind. In Terlingua Ghost Town - a misnomer, because people live there - you'll find a top-notch gift shop, the Terlingua Trading Post, and restaurant, the Starlight Dinner Theater.
At the Starlight, a theater that's been restored just enough, you can dine on antelope cooked in wine-reduction chipotle sauce, wash it down with a tasty $4 margarita, and polish off a baked-to-order blueberry cobbler doused with bourbon cream sauce. Bands often take the stage or you may be serenaded by locals who sometimes gather on the front porch to warble and drink beer, lots of it.
Most of the guidebooks recommend a trip to Boquillas, a down-and-out Mexican tourist town just across the Rio Grande at the southeastern end of the park. The reason to go is The Falcon, a restaurant that serves three tasty bean tacos for $1 and has a porch with a stunning view of the Boquillas Canyon. Amazingly in this period of ultra-security, all you have to do to cross the border is step into a boat and pay two dollars. On the other side you'll find a legion of pickup trucks and burros waiting for hire, but it's only a 10-minute walk to town.
Few locations have the power of place that Big Bend has, and the park is likely to leave you feeling changed. Whether it's the grandeur, the strangeness, or the remoteness, some aspect of the park is going to get under your skin and, if you're lucky, stay there.