Part 3 Guide and Adviser 110 Map of the Park 112 Approaching Big Bend 114 Facilities and Services 117 Walking Trips and Hiking 119 Birding 120 Floating the River 122 Fishing 123 Tips for Desert Travelers 124 Park Regulations 125 Armchair Explorations 126 Index 127 1 Welcome to Big Bend Country [Illustration: Indians held that after making the Earth the Great Spirit dumped leftover rocks on the Big Bend. “The unknown land,” Spanish explorers labeled it. Its mythic topography inspired quests for lost mines and instant wealth in gold and silver. A rainbow over Cerro Castellan implies its own pot of gold.] Where Rainbows Wait for Rain Far down on the Mexican border the Rio Grande makes a great U-turn. Inside this mighty curve lies a national park and the special and spectacular section of southwest Texas known as “Big Bend Country.” More than a century ago a Mexican cowboy described Big Bend as “Where the rainbows wait for the rain, and the big river is kept in a stone box, and water runs uphill and mountains float in the air, except at night when they go away to play with other mountains....” This land is so vast and so wild that you can feel your human smallness and frailty. Silence takes on the quality of sound, and isolation can bring you face to face with the interdependence of all life forms. Paradox abounds. There is killing heat and freezing cold; deadly drought and flash flood; arid lowland and moist mountain woodland; and a living river winding its way across the desert. Spanish explorers called Big Bend the “unknown land,” and for hundreds of years civilization passed it by on either side. Entrenched behind deep river canyons and walled in by rough and rugged mountains, this vast country remains today a world apart. Fewer than 13,000 people occupy an area about the size of Maryland, mostly in two or three towns strung along the highway to the north. Only three paved roads run south into Big Bend, and whatever route you take, you’ll find yourself in country that looks less and less familiar the farther you penetrate it. Here are the landscapes, plants, and animals typical of the Chihuahuan Desert, a high dry wilderness that spills northward out of Mexico into far west Texas and southern New Mexico.