Big Bend Ranch State Park

Our trip to the Big Bend region of Texas was planned to allow us to visit two different parks: Big Bend National Park (covered in my earlier blog posts) and Texas' Big Bend Ranch State Park. We selected as our home base an RV park in Terlingua, Texas (Roadrunner Travelers RV Park) which was located mid-way between the two parks. We alternated our days between the two parks.

Big Bend Ranch State Park is a completely different experience from the National Park. Covering 311,000 acres (486 square miles), Big Bend Ranch is Texas' largest state park. Once a sheep and goat ranch, it was purchased by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Division in 1988. It has only been fully open to the public since 2007. When it was purchased the sale included a small herd of Texas Longhorn cattle. However, the herd was later relocated to other state parks in Texas with better grazing conditions.

Different from other Texas state parks, Big Bend Ranch State Park is vast, rugged and largely undeveloped. The elevations range from about 2,300 feet along the Rio Grande up to 5,135 feet. There are no RV campsites - all camping is extremely primitive and travel anywhere in the interior of the park requires 4-wheel drive. In addition to hiking and mountain biking, Big Bend Ranch State Park provides some of the best horseback riding in the state, with some equestrian campsites providing pens. River rafting is available down the Rio Grande, and those with a high-clearance four-wheel-drive vehicles can explore nearly 70 miles of unmaintained dirt roads in the park that were once used for fence building, water line construction, livestock wrangling and mineral prospecting and mining.

The southern edge of the park follows the Rio Grande River. The single paved road through the park (Texas FM 170, also known as River Road or El Camino del Rio) runs for 60 miles along that border and offers spectacular views. Referred to as the most scenic drive in Texas (and one of the most scenic in the U.S.), it starts in desert country before climbing up and down steep ridges and through canyons alongside the river. This map shows the road's path (in red) along the Rio Grande: