Big Bend National Park
— — a desert that holds its own mountain range.
Not only on a wall.
“Eight hundred thousand acres of Chihuahuan Desert pressed against the Rio Grande, where the river swings south and then back north and gives the park its name. The Chisos Mountains rise in the middle, the only range fully contained inside a US national park. Three deep canyons cut the river border with Mexico: Santa Elena, Mariscal, Boquillas. The sky is among the darkest in the lower 48, and on a moonless night the Milky Way carries enough light to walk a dirt road by.
Big Bend National Park, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Big Bend National Park covers 801,163 acres of the Chihuahuan Desert in Brewster County, far west Texas, along 118 miles of the Rio Grande that form the border with Mexico. Congress authorised the park in 1935 and it was established in 1944. The terrain stacks three distinct environments inside one boundary: river floodplain, open desert, and the Chisos Mountains, which rise to 7,832 feet at Emory Peak. The Chisos are the only mountain range fully contained within a single US national park.
Big Bend was certified by DarkSky International as a Gold-Tier International Dark Sky Park in 2012, the gold tier denoting essentially undegraded night skies. Bortle 1 conditions occur across most of the park, and the visible star count on a clear moonless night routinely exceeds 2,000. Summer days in the desert lowlands push past 100 °F (38 °C); in the Chisos high country, temperatures run 15 to 20 °F cooler. The window above Boot Canyon and the Lost Mine Trail give the best high-elevation views west across the basin.
Three canyons mark where the Rio Grande cuts through limestone uplifts along the park's southern boundary: Santa Elena, with walls rising 1,500 feet from the water; Mariscal, the most remote and accessible mainly by river; and Boquillas, the longest at 33 miles, where flatwater paddling is possible most of the year. River trips put in at Lajitas or Rio Grande Village. Across the river at Boquillas Crossing, a small Mexican village reopened to day visitors in 2013 after a decade of closure, reached by rowboat ferry.