Drawn the Road Again

Tag: Big Bend National Park

  • Our best idea

    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…

  • Bird- and beastwatching

    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…

  • The road less traveled

    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…

  • Pet sounds

    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

    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…

  • Ka-bloom

    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…