Tag Archives: Big Bend National Park

Our best idea

Mt. Rainier National Park, WA

Tomorrow is the 100th birthday of the National Park Service. All of America seems to be celebrating right now, and rightly so. In my opinion, our wildest pockets are our true national treasures, and our national parks, as Wallace Stegner said, our best idea.

Olympic National Park, WA

So since I’ve spent a good chunk of my sketching life in national parks both close to home…

Arches National Park, UT

…and far afield…

Crater Lake National Park, OR

I figured I’d add my voice to the celebratory din, in the form of a little sketchbook retrospective.

Badlands National Park, SD

Beyond the centennial itself, I’m always up for toasting the parks. Not only do I think park rangers are the best people on earth,

Redwood National Park, CA

but I also sometimes think they’re the only thing standing between wildness and destruction.

Carlsbad Caverns National Park, NM

And anyway, I’m not exaggerating when I say I’m a total park nut myself. It’s my goal to visit every NPS property before I die, including national parks, historic sites, national monuments, everything. (Actually, I’ve crossed a goodly chunk of them off the list already—

Guadalupe Mountains National Park, TX

—and I even have the stamps to prove it.)

Olympic National Park, WA

I know I have a long path ahead of me before I reach that goal,

Grand Canyon National Park, AZ

and getting there won’t be easy.

Big Bend National Park, TX

Yet I can’t tell you how grateful I am that the opportunity exists in the first place—

Rocky Mountain National Park, CO

that so many people have fought to preserve these wild places, and won.

Saguaro National Park, AZ

Best of all is the feeling that no matter how long it might take me to get to each park with my sketchbook,

Glacier National Park, MT

I know it’ll be there waiting for me, as close to unchanged as humanly possible. Thanks to the National Park Service, the window of opportunity remains open.

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Bird- and beastwatching

Whenever I travel closer to home, where the flora and fauna are familiar to me, my birdwatching sketches look a lot like any other in my sketchbooks: full scenes, with plenty of time taken to get the details right. (And if my subject should happen to wander away—well, if it’s something I’ve seen before, memory can usually fill in the rest.)

When I was at Big Bend, however, the combination of excitingly “exotic” wildlife and an insane amount of it made my drawings just a jumble of frantic chicken scratches and field notes.

I felt like a student in art school again, concentrating hard to commit my subjects to paper in just a few seconds, drawing and redrawing everything again and again to try to nail down anatomy and details in real time.

As you can probably guess, I like having more time to “finish” a sketch… but I also love that life drawing in a place where I don’t know bupkis keeps me on my toes.

The road less traveled

Since I’ve got a road theme going this week, I thought I’d spend the next couple of posts highlighting some of my very favorite squiggly lines on the map. Everyone seems to have California Highway One at the top of their road trip bucket list (for good reason!), but FM170 in West Texas deserves to be on that list, as well.

The River Road isn’t nearly as well-known as the Pacific Highway because it’s in the absolute back of beyond. Whoever coined the term “middle of nowhere” probably had this place in mind—but as it’s right near a national park, it probably also escapes the notice of tourists wanting to take the faster state highway to and from the park.

And that’s a shame, because this road is a gem. It winds right alongside the Rio Grande, through the Santa Elena and Colorado canyons, passing ghost towns and old Spanish missions along the way. In the 70-mile section we traveled that day, we only saw one other soul—and that was a local immigration cop parked along the roadside. We didn’t pass a single tourist along the way.

I would have loved to drive this road (I have a thing for taking mountain curves with a stick shift!), but I wanted to spend the time drawing. So the Tailor, bless him, tackled the hair-raising turns, and didn’t bat an eye when I made him pull over about a hundred times for spectacular vistas.

I can’t recommend this road enough. If you go, though, make sure you have plenty of drinking water, engine coolant, gasoline, and a fresh spare tire, just in case. If you break down, you’re going to need the tools and skills to get yourself back out again—this is the type of route that laughs at puny human concepts like mobile phone coverage (pro tip: there isn’t any) or roadside assistance. This is the kind of place that analog map freaks like me are talking about when we say GPS ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.

But if you’ve got a paper map and a good sense of adventure, hit the road: because this is the place.

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Pet sounds

The Tailor and I bought two new pairs of binoculars for our trip to Big Bend last year, because we knew we could expect to do some serious birdwatching there. What we didn’t find out until the ungodly hours of our first morning in the tent: the birdlistening was every bit as intense.

Island in the sky

I’ve talked before about being on Island Time—and in a weird way, this is kind of the same thing. You see, islands don’t just exist in water; you can find them in the middle of the desert, too.

The Chisos Mountains, in the heart of Big Bend National Park, rise 4,000 feet above the parched desert floor below. The elevation gain gives them a dramatically different climate than their surroundings. The name they call these types of mountains just melts my heart: sky islands.

I don’t know about you, but that reminds me of the sort of things I used to dream up when I was a kid. Of Shangri-la and castles in the air. Of quests and secrets. Of dirigibles and airships.

Who says park rangers aren’t romantics?

Ka-bloom

The Tailor and I visited Big Bend in mid-April, our best chance to catch the cacti in bloom. When we got there, a park ranger warned us not to get our hopes up. He told us they’d been experiencing a record drought—the park had only received about three inches of rain, total, over the past two years.

And then, that night, the wind picked up and the skies opened.

It absolutely poured on our tiny two-man tent (which miraculously stayed dry). Half an inch in four hours. Now, if you live in a naturally stormy place, you’re probably thinking, “That’s nothing!” But in the Chihuahuan Desert, after a prolonged drought, that storm gave us just cause to worry about washed-out roads and flash flooding.

The next morning, we thought our best reward might be cooler temperatures—until we went on a hike, and discovered what was waiting for us:

These guys wasted absolutely no time. Nearly every plant in the park went from zero to peak bloom in just a few short hours. I have never seen anything like it.

That day the phrase “painted desert” had a whole new meaning.