Along the Rio Grande, a Hot Spring and a Warm Welcome
The Rio Grande (or the Río Bravo del Norte, from a southerly perspective) is all
that separates Texas and Mexico within the boundaries of the park, winding its way for 118 miles between forbidding canyon walls; making the abrupt southeast to northeast shift that gives Big Bend its name; and changing in color (chocolate milk in one light, celadon in another) and flow (sometimes grande, often pequeño).
At any location in or near the park, you can simply look to the ever-changing sky, particularly in the evening, when fiery sunsets of pink
and orange and dusty blue give way to an unfathomable darkness spattered with a breathtaking bounty of stars, including a clearly visible Milky Way (Big Bend is a stargazing mecca, officially designated by the International Dark-Sky Association); like me, you may have the stupefying realization that this is what the night sky actually looks like.
To find out, writers for Travel spent time in five pairings of places: Brownsville, Tex.,
and Matamoros, Mexico; El Paso and Ciudad Juárez; Nogales, Ariz., and Nogales across the border in Mexico; San Diego and Tijuana; Big Bend National Park and Boquillas, Mexico.
It’s hard to convey how humbling it is to visit this little pocket of the United States-Mexico border, a place the National Park Service calls “one of the last remaining wild corners of the United States.” Boosters market Texas as a “whole other country,”
but the land within and without Big Bend National Park really is.
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