Big Adventures
I CAN’T SAY FOR CERTAIN THAT THE coyotes woke me up. But I can say that when I stirred awake in my tent in Big Bend National Park at 4 a.m., the coyotes’ howling chilled me even more than the near-freezing temperatures.
Their plaintive wails matched my mood. I had flown to Dallas and driven 560 miles to Big Bend to go on a hike I had been looking forward to for months. But one of my hiking partners injured his knee, and we had to cancel. That meant I had three days in southwestern Texas and nothing to fill them with except listening to coyotes and studying the Milky Way through the roof of my tent.
Those were incredible activities in the dark.
But what about in the light?
As the sun rose and the echoes of the coyotes faded, I decided I had come to Big Bend for adventure, and one way or the other, I was going to find it. Big Bend—a region in southwestern Texas bordered on the south by the Rio Grande and including the Davis and Chisos mountain ranges—covers millions of acres of rivers, creeks, deserts, mountains, ridges, canyons, and more. I vowed to see as much of it as I could, from as many different vantage points as I could, while going as fast as I could.
lining—and soon discovered that all of
