Park Newspaper

Where is the best place to see the sunrise or sunset? Truly, the answer is anywhere in the park! With huge horizons and dramatic scenery, it is spectacular wherever you are.

For J.O. Langford and his family, the hot springs along the Rio Grande represented health, business and home. And for several decades in the early 20th century, they were also the center of a desert community.

In the years before it became a national park, Big Bend's remoteness favored banditry along the border-- and an increased U.S. military presence. Remnants of the Big Bend’s military history remain near Glenn Springs and Castolon.

Parks like Big Bend preserve not only darkness for the benefit of people, more importantly, they allow flora and fauna to thrive in environments that each and every species evolved to exist in—cycles of light and dark, varying in length only by the seasons, for millions of years.

At first glance, ocotillo looks like a large shrub that died-- just a cluster of drab, gray stalks covered in sharp half inch spines, and no obvious signs of life like leaves along the branches. This bare-bones appearance is actually part of ocotillo’s desert survival strategy.

Picture it: A steamy summer morning in Big Bend. The year is 1934. Reveille has just sounded on a bugle, and a company of young men, already sweating from the heat in their tar paper huts, start to rise. They pull on their blue jean dungarees, load themselves into one-and-a-half ton trucks, and make the steep drive out of the Chisos Basin, stopping twice to pour water on the vehicles' struggling radiators.

Why worry about a tiny fish or one species of grass, which, if it were to disappear would hardly be noticed by most people?