A Scenic Drive Through Big Bend National Park In 14 Photos

A couple of days after arriving in Terlingua, we decided to take a trip to Big Bend National Park.

I’d done a little research beforehand and seen that dogs aren’t allowed on hiking trails in the park. That was a bit of a shame seeing as we’re traveling with our dog Truffles, but it wasn’t all bad news.

Dogs are allowed in the park on campsites and in your car if you’re driving through, so we decided to explore the park by car with Truffles so that we could see if we wanted to head back there a day or two later to go hiking by ourselves.

The park was closer to our cabin than Google Maps suggested, so we were pleasantly surprised when we reached the entrance about an hour or two earlier than expected.

Almost as soon as you enter Big Bend National Park, you’re greeted by wide open expanse with mountains lined up in the distance.

We didn’t have a map of the park with us, so we just followed some of the signs. There are a few different routes you can take through the park that all provide some kind of scenic drive.

The park has numerous gravel areas where you can pull off at the side of the road to stop and take a photo, so we did just that. Multiple times.

This part of Texas sees very little rain, so you’ll mostly see brush and cactus rather than trees. There was the kind of cactus we saw a lot of while in Texas (and which I managed to poke myself with a couple of times near our cabin)…

…as well as a couple of other much more interesting-looking types of cacti.

We continued driving and stopping and driving and stopping until we came to a scenic overlook where we stopped for a little longer.

The overlook was called Sotol Vista and looked out at Mexico, the Rio Grande and Santa Elena Canyon in the distance. If you look in the middle of the photo below, you can see the canyon. It doesn’t look very large from a distance, but as you’ll come to see, it’s much larger close up.

While at the overlook, we got chatting to another couple who were traveling with their dog too. They mentioned that there was due to be a free stargazing event in Terlingua that evening, something we hadn’t known about before then.

Big Bend National Park is an International Dark Sky Park, so we’d considered staying into the evening to see if it was even more stunning than the view we had from our cabin. Knowing that there was a special event though where the park would be providing telescopes to look at stars and planets, we decided we’d attend that instead.

The road we were on – I think it was actually called Scenic Drive – continued down towards Santa Elena Canyon. As before though, we continued to stop along the way to take some photos.

After following the winding road down, we were soon much closer to Santa Elena Canyon. The canyon is 8 miles long and 1,500 feet deep, with it narrowing to a width of only 30 feet in places.

You can take a 1.7 mile round-trip hike to one of the narrowest points of the gorge, but we weren’t able to do that seeing as we had Truffles with us.

The canyon was carved out over time by the Rio Grande river. Apparently you can go rafting along this section of the river at certain times of the year, but the water levels seemed much lower when we visited.

It was just after 3pm by this point, so we decided to head back towards Terlingua. The Stars Over Terlingua event was due to start at 6pm, so we wanted to get back with enough time to grab some dinner seeing as we knew we’d also want to stop for more photos along the way.

Final Thoughts

Big Bend National Park is a beautiful park in southwest Texas and would be a stunning place to camp and hike. The fact that it’s an International Dark Sky Park makes it even better as it means you can see the Milky Way at night.

Having visited Big Bend Ranch State Park a couple of days later, I have to say that I actually prefer the State Park over the National Park – check out this post to find out why.