Big Bend National Park: Chisos Basin

We were super excited to hit Big Bend National Park for a couple of reasons. First, it is the first park we got to in the Southwest, which is the hotbed of national parks. We've finally hit the part of our trip where we'll really be seeing a ton of national parks. Second, it was the first truly scenic park we've seen in a while. And it was great to see real mountains!

The park can be broken down into three main section, the Rio Grand region in the east, the Chisos Basin in the center, and the Ross Maxwell scenic drive. Really there is enough to explore in each of those areas to spend multiple days but we gave each area one day, and we'll break the blog into three post, one for each of those days.

Official NPS Map. Click and zoom in to enlarge for details. 

We entered the park from the North and hit the Persimmon Gap Visitor Center first (red arrow on map). There wasn't much at the visitor but we did ask the ranger if there was anything we should see on our way down to Panther Junction, where the main visitor center is (green arrow on the map). She said that the Fossil Discovery Exhibit was a must see, and we are super glad she did. There was a lot of information about the Dinosaurs that lived here, and the archeology that has been done over the years. And some of the Dinosaurs were alarmingly big...

 

After the Fossil Discovery Exhibit we headed down to the Panther Junction Visitor Center, which is the main visitor center. From there we discovered that the camping was filling up fast. We weren't planning on camping in the park, but did some math and figured out it made the most sense. The closest free spots would have required more gas than simply paying the $16 a night, and we'd rather have that money support the parks, use less gas, and stay in a nice camp ground. So we didn't spend much time at the visitor center before booking it up the hill to the Chisos Basin Campground, the last spot in the park to have spots.

The drive up to campground was stunning.



Since we were already up in the basin we decided to start with hikes in that region. We settled on doing the hike down to The Window (blue arrow on the map).

This hike was very cool, as it descends over 800 feet to end at the top of a narrow pour off, basically the top of a mostly dry waterfall. There was nice scenery the whole way but the views of valley below at the end of the hike were stunning.

 

 

 

To wrap up the evening, we took advantage of the fact that we were at the NPS campground to go to a ranger talk at the amphitheater. It was a fun slide show about some of the hikes on the Ross Maxwell Scenic Drive, which gave us a great reference for when we headed there two days later. A great way to wrap up our first night in the park.