Sal Pulled Over and Made Me Get Out

We’d been driving almost five hours and Sal hadn’t said a word in the last forty minutes of it.

Then he pulled onto the shoulder, shut off the engine and the headlights, and told me to get out.

I stood on a two-lane road in west Texas and looked up and couldn’t find a single constellation. There were too many stars in the way.

I’ve seen dark skies before. I thought I had, anyway.

That was the first night. We hadn’t even reached the park yet.

Big Bend sits down in the corner of Texas where the Rio Grande makes its big turn. Over 800,000 acres. Almost 200 miles of river doing the work of a border.

Here’s the number that sold me on it. Around half a million people go in a year.

The Great Smokies do that in about two weeks.

The reason is simple enough. You can’t get there. The nearest commercial airports are Midland and El Paso, and from either one you’re driving a long way. Out of Odessa it’s roughly 300 miles and five and a half to six hours of wheel time. From San Antonio, seven or eight.

There’s no shortcut. No gateway town with forty hotels and a pancake house. Nobody swings through Big Bend on the way to somewhere else, because it isn’t on the way to anything.

The distance isn’t the drawback. It’s the admission price, and it’s the reason there’s nobody in front of you when you get there.

The park also has the darkest night skies in the lower 48. That’s not a brochure line. It’s why the place was named an International Dark Sky Park back in 2012, and it’s what Sal pulled over to show me.

This is the part people get wrong, and getting it wrong ruins the trip.

Down at Rio Grande Village, on the water, summer highs run 102 to 107. That’s May clear through August. The park will tell you flat out that the desert runs about ten degrees hotter than whatever the forecast says up at headquarters.

So, not summer.

Winter is a different park altogether. January and February highs down on the river run 70 to 75. Up in the Chisos Mountains at 5,400 feet you get 59 to 63 and cold nights. Sunny most days. Snow is rare and light.

Spring is warm and pleasant. Spring is also the busiest season by a mile.

Spring is the popular season. Winter is the good one.

Go between November and February. Short daylight, cold mornings, and hardly anybody ahead of you on the trail.

Five days is about right. Four feels rushed. Seven is more than the park is asking of you.

One thing about day four. That crossing only runs Friday through Monday, nine to four. Build the week around it, or you’ll drive down there on a Tuesday and look at Mexico across the water.

Two real choices on where to sleep, and they make for different trips. Inside the park, the Chisos Mountains Lodge puts you up in the mountains with the trailheads out the door. Outside, Terlingua and Study Butte sit twenty-odd minutes from the west entrance, with more beds and more places to eat.

We stayed in Terlingua. Here’s what the five days ran the two of us, my numbers, flying into Midland and driving down.

Drive instead of fly and you cut a chunk off the top. Camp instead of hotel and the park charges $16 a night.

If you’re 62 or over, the lifetime federal parks pass is $80, one time, and it covers you at every federal park from then on. It also cuts that camping rate in half. That’s the best deal in American travel and it isn’t close.

Check the park’s alerts page before you leave. I mean it. Things move around out there.

▸ The restaurant situation. The Chisos Basin restaurant is closed right now, with a food truck running 7 to 3 instead. There was a plan to shut the whole basin down for two years of construction. The park cancelled it in April, so the lodge and the basin are open, but water system work is still coming. Verify before you book.
▸ Two backcountry roads are shut. Old Ore Road and Black Gap Road are closed indefinitely from flash flood damage. If somebody’s old guidebook sends you down either one, ignore it.
▸ Water is not optional. The park says to carry a liter per person for every hour you plan to hike. Out in that country that’s a rule, not a suggestion. Take more than you think you need.
▸ Don’t force the creek. If Terlingua Creek is running high at Santa Elena, the park says plainly not to cross it. Turn around. The canyon will still be there.
▸ Don’t count on your phone. There’s almost no service across most of the park. Download your maps at the hotel and tell somebody where you’re headed.

I figured the canyon would be the thing I remembered. It’s the picture everybody takes.

It wasn’t.

What got me was that little village across the river. We paid our five dollars, a man rowed us over, and twenty minutes later we were eating lunch outside in a town with no road to the rest of Mexico worth speaking of.

Everything in Boquillas comes across that river in a rowboat. Everything.

Sal asked me on the walk back what I made of it. I told him I’d flown to Europe twice and never once felt as far from home as I did eating lunch four hundred feet from Texas.

We drove out on the last night and stopped on the same stretch of shoulder where he’d made me get out five days earlier.

Same sky. I still couldn’t find the constellations.

This time I didn’t try.

— Walter