Scenes from the Desert Southwest

Back in November my mother texted to ask if I was serious about taking a road trip with her to Big Bend National Park in Texas.

I was.

The park had been on my radar for a few years as a possible backpacking destination. With a major construction project set to start in 2025 that will limit access to some areas for about two years, the time was right.

I flew into El Paso, where she picked me up and we began our journey to Big Bend’s Chisos Basin Campground. Along the way we stopped at two of New Mexico’s National Parks—White Sands and Carlsbad Caverns—and camped in her RV at Oliver Lee Memorial State Park and the Bureau of Land Management’s dreamy Sunset Reef Campground. A detour thanks to a high wind warning put us in Big Bend’s Cottonwood Campground for a night. That gave us a chance to explore Santa Elena Canyon, where the cliffs soar 1,500 feet above the Rio Grande and the canyon wren’s descending call echoes through cool shadows.

My backpacking trip began at our site in the otherworldly Chisos Basin and took me through the spires of Pinnacle Pass for an evening at the Toll Mountain campsite. From there I hiked the Boot Canyon trail out to the park’s South Rim for a second night in the backcountry. Hunkered in my tent a few hundred yards from the dizzying drop into endless desert, I listened to the wind roar along the cliffs all night as it has for longer than anyone can imagine and as it probably will for longer than anyone will live to see. It was like sleeping near an ocean with heavy surf, and thinking about it fills me with the same feeling I get when I hear spring peepers in the Barrett Street Marsh from the Northampton Stop & Shop parking lot—gratitude for wonders big and small, and appreciation for all the immutable patterns and places we’re lucky enough to experience.

It’s a feeling Bill Fay captured best in his song “Never Ending Happening“: Just to be a part of it is astonishing to me.

Here are some photos from the trip.