El Despolblado

El Despolblado - Spanish for unpopulated, empty place. The land of no people.

Desolate Majesty: Preserving beauty without borders.

There is a place that I escape to on my holidays and vacations - a place that is far off the beaten path and you can not get to unless you are going there on purpose. A place of few people, virtually no mobile phone / cell phone signals, no televisions, virtually no radio stations - unless you have satellite radio. A place that I can't be reached at.

Where is this place? If you look at a map of Texas, you will see in the western part of the state a "Big Bend". This is the Rio Grande (River) - typically it is written as only Rio Grande as Rio means river and Grande implies large or big. It's the dividing line between Mexico and the United States. It's a unique place as few people live her and the ecosystem is composed of three distinct spheres - the river, the mountains, and the desert. This is the Chihuahuan desert at it's finest.

How big is this place? Well, Big Bend National park is more than 800,000 acres - or almost 80 miles by 80 miles. That's a lot of area to explore.

There are two special things about Big Bend National park. (1) absolute silence - you can have a campsite and hear absolutely totally nothing - the sound of nothing and (2) the stars come out at night as there are virtually no man made lights there. It's probably the largest darkest spot in all of the continental USA (lower 48 states). You can actually see the Milky Way.

There are actually two additional large areas in this West Texas Trans Pecos Big Bend Region that are even less populated. It is possible to camp in this areas and not see anyone else for the entire length of your stay. Black Gap Wildlife Management area adjacent to Big Bend National park on the East side which is composed of another 103,000 acres. Then, there is the largest state park in Texas which is Big Bend Ranch at another 300,000 plus acres and is located on the west side of Big Bend National Park.

In later posts, I will explore these areas in depth.

For now, let me leave you with some pictures of a backpacking trip that I did back in the Spring of 2008. This was a "drop everything" trip. A park ranger friend emailed me and said "drop everything" lets go backpacking. He was transferring to another park with his family and this was to be his last official trip there. So, I dropped everything... http://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=lm5prmd.c66ge4w5&x=0&y=tdx3dz&localeid=en_US

Links
Big Bend National Park - www.nps.gov/bibe
Big Bend Ranch State Park - www.tpwd.state.tx.us/spdest/findadest/parks/big_bend_ranch/
Black Gap WMA - http://www.tpwd.state.tx.us/huntwild/hunt/wma/find_a_wma/list/?id=2
Big Bend Chat discussion board - www.bigbendchat.com