Into the Wild: Alchemy in Big Bend Ranch State Park

By E. Dan Klepper

The night skies of Texas’ Big Bend country often mesmerize in ways that mirror the peculiarities of dark dreams and lullabies. Here, above the crest and trough of a mountain horizon, nighttime skies are at their most dramatic, offering rare glimpses of moons and comets and galaxies in full spectrum or eclipsed in orbit shadow. In the late hours especially, far beyond midnight, the West Texas skies seem to delight in the unraveling of the firmament. Perhaps it is because the routine touchstones—Orion, the Pleiades, Sirius, and the Dippers—are now hanging askew, reassigned to unfamiliar bearings, or are hurtling toward the horizon to become something else entirely. Or maybe it is the mischievous temperament of the sky itself, aware that the few who glance up and into the deepest late night are bleary-eyed and farthest from doubt. These moments, made manifest before the unwitting, provide the wily universe a chance to perform atmospherics unlike those that ever inhabit consciousness. Beyond mere spectacles that occur once each year or in a lifetime or even a millennium, these nightly pageants are proof of the mythic fires in the sky, highlighting a short list of events that have yet to feel the compromise of a man-made world.

Texans who wish to corroborate this galactic exposition may want to pack a tent, a water supply, and some late-night snacks and make their way to Big Bend Ranch State Park, where skies are darkest and city lights—along with city burdens—dwindle until they blink, snuffed like an Advent candle flame, ceremoniously out. The park, located in perhaps the most secluded sector of the state’s boot heel, was once as challenging to navigate as an uncharted sea. But park planners and staff have spent the last year bushwhacking across this vast, desert paradise to provide Texans access to some of its most remote vistas and hidden pleasures. And now, unlike in its roughshod-run past, Big Bend Ranch State Park is entirely open for business. Drive, hike, bike, or pack in to trailheads, overlooks, historic and prehistoric ruins, and primitive campsites, all scattershot across the state park system’s grandest cultural and natural treasure. But don’t make the effort for the nighttime theatrics only. Daylight is good light as well, illuminating the many hidden canyons, wind-riven hoodoos, and ephemeral springs, all of them tucked into a calamitous pile-up of sierras—the Bofecillos, a volcanic range contorted like a beached armada, wrecked but also transformed.

From the February 2009 issue.

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