[...] I would like to request that information be posted here in the thread ... so guests and other members can benefit from it as well. [...]
Ditto. ... I might be driving to Big Bend NP in the next year. ...
Starting at the beginning, if you're coming from Houston/Austin/San Antonio, take Hwy 90, not I-10. It was the main route Florida-California before the Interstate was built, so it's easy driving, not divided but wide. Much less congested (so if you don't like to share what's left of the road after the 18-wheeler takes his ...)
Keeping this a bit on topic, Hwy 90m keeps fairly close track of the main line of the Southern Pacific, and today's route of the
Sunset Ltd, for most of the distance San Antonio-El Paso. (Close to El Paso, the town of Sierra Blanco was a golden spike site, where the Southern Pacific met -- help me now -- the Texas & Pacific or sumpin, making a second transcontinental route.
Coming from Dallas, I know almost nothing of I-20. Try the meteor crater near Odessa, and the dunes of Monahans Sandhills State Park.
On Hwy 90, don't blow thru Hondo. Slow down so you can read the famous sign: "This is God's country, don't drive thru it like Hell." (You could see it from the train, too, except the
Sunset passes at night.) Uvalde and Brackettville are interesting, but close, so save them for a weekend trip.
Nearby Del Rio, as seen from the road, has all the charm of a World War II army base town. But looking past the gas stations and motels, liquor stores and beer joints, the old town is remarkable. One of the biggest springs in Texas feeds small canals, ditches really, that run thru neighborhoods of gracious homes to irrigate gardens, orchards, and farms.
Moving on, Lake Amistad, a reservoir on the Rio Grande, flanks the road (and the parallel RR) which together cross the now-flooded channel of the Devil's River. Further along, the highway bridge high over the Pecos has great views. In fact, on the east bank a turnoff leads to a 'roadside park' on the edge of the chasm. Well worth a short walk-about. (The RR, with the famous 'High Bridge' over the Pecos, crosses upstream from here, not beside the highway at this point.)
Next comes Langtry. Here Roy Bean, apparently self-appointed but with popular assent, served as the judge on the wild frontier. His saloon/courthouse is maintained by the State of Texas, with a visitor's center offering a great selection of brochures for towns and attractions on down the road. An adjoining small botanical garden labels the shrubs, trees, cacti, and wildflowers you might see in West Texas. The center offers clean restrooms. Unless you fancy doing your business behind a prickly pear cactus, you should use these facilities.
For the 150 miles or so to Marathon, "Gateway to the Big Bend", most signs of human civilization have dried up and blown away.
Sanderson at least has restrooms (remember Langtry!). A few vintage motels, which like the town, were left stranded when the Interstate opened 65 miles to the north and drained away the transcontinental travelers.
Sanderson was a major RR town back in the days. (And remains a stop on the
Sunset Ltd in tribute to that history.) WB crews that took over at San Antonio got off in Sanderson, spent the night, and the next day took over an EB train. Crew members could sleep in a Southern Pacific dormitory. Or spend time with the friendly young women who worked in the town. Ahem.
When union contracts were changed, the shifts became 'hours worked' instead of 'miles covered'. Sanderson was done for.
Then to pile on the troubles, a flash flood wiped away half the town's homes, of the poor people living alongside an arroyo known as Sanderson Canyon.
Today the 'Cactus Capital of Texas' has a historic courthouse -- check it out, that's what we do on Texas road trips. Next door stands a classic 1930s vintage high school building. Nearby stands a Masonic Lodge that used to be a bank (or is it vice versa).
Leaving town, heading upstream, so to speak, along the dry Sanderson Canyon, dams or hillside dikes were built to prevent another devastating flood. (You can see some from the road, but look closely. The rock dikes on rock hillsides are camouflaged.)
Sanderson is left with one extraordinary sight: It's on a migration path of Monarch butterflies heading to winter in Mexico. So every year, for some days in October, you can drive around carefully -- Watch out! Don't crush them! -- amidst clouds of butterflies, butterflies, butterflies, butterflies, butterflies, and more butterflies.
The migration would be a great natural attraction if they could get the timing right, like, 'the second weekend in October'. But the butterflies fly when they feel like it, for a few random days in the month. (Go and return on Hwy 90 gives you two chances to encounter the endangered beauties.)
Next place worth a mention is Marathon, and the Gage Hotel. Built by a local rancher for his guests to stay, the original building has been restored, and rents a few of the old rooms if you want to live the old-fashioned way. Later owners added a motel wing, surrounding a shaded garden and swimming pool. The current owner expanded the food service to include patio dining as well as restaurant and bar. You don't have to spend any money to step into the lobby area or the bar, but the food is highly rated. The hotel and the 'downtown' front on Hwy 90, with the RR tracks a few steps away.
By this point, you'll have reached an altitude keeping temperatures cool at night, and tolerable if you stay out of the sun, attracting a number of get-away-from-it-all retirees. 'Downtown Marathon' has its own relaxed vibe, as if these proprietors retired from the big city and needed something to do. So, a bakery (mostly cookies) shop; a bookstore offering pottery and affordable paintings and carvings too; an antique shop or two or three; a store with blue jeans, fancy belts and buckles, embroidered cowgirl blouses, saddles, and the like; as well as a place selling sandwiches and ice cream. You know that ice cream tastes better in the desert.
You can turn here and head to Big Bend on what passes for a shortcut in West Texas. I never went that way. But I've read there's a place to hunt for rocks, including a kind of agate found only here.
You can continue ahead, to turn at Alpine. Or go from Marfa to Presidio, thence by scenic drive back towards Big Bend.
The National Park is the #1 attraction, of course. Desert, mountains, wildlife all easily available for "windshield tourism," making it great place to take an elderly person along. If you want more activity: hiking, rafting, rock climbing, etc. More details on Wikipedia, of course. Worth a special mention is the highway between the Park and the sleepy border town of Presidio, definitely a scenic drive, following the Rio Grande's green littoral making its way between desert hills.
Advice from a still-vivid personal experience: When the signs say, STEEP GRADE USE LOW GEAR, you should do just that and don't shift gears until they say so! The road coming down from the Lodge makes a T intersection at the bottom of the long, long, long hill. If you survive the brake-free turn you have forced upon yourself and hapless passengers, you have to go to the garage that has considerable experience replacing burned-out brakes.
In Alpine, Sul Ross is a smallish (2,000 enrolled) state college with beautiful Georgian Revival style red-brick, white-stone-trim buildings, on a drive-thru campus sitting on a mountain slope overlooking the town, with a nice museum.
Alpine has no Walmart (no big box stores between Del Rio and the intersection with I-20), and as a result, an old-fashioned downtown with locally owned stores survives, if barely. The Holland Hotel, unimpressive exterior, elaborate public spaces, now a boutique hotel, sits across the street from the station. [My parents spent their honeymoon night here in 1936.]
I want to give grateful praise to Alpine's hospital. After driving from Del Rio, I started to feel exhausted. I pulled over and asked my friend to drive. Then when I waked up, we were turning in at the Emergency Room. They did their thing, proclaimed a diagnosis of pneumonia. It just caught me. Went from well to sick in about an hour, thinking I could keep going a little more, a little more -- until Wow, I couldn't! (So I sympathized with Hillary back in September.) A shot and a pocket of pills, a good night's sleep in a local motel, juevos rancheros for breakfast, and I was back in the driver's seat.
Anyway, there's no other healthcare facility from Del Rio to Van Horn, halfway to El Paso.
Folks excited by ghosts and alien sightings could be interested in the "official viewing area" for the mysterious Marfa lights, between Alpine and Marfa on Hwy 90. Reports of strange unexplained moving lights in the desert near here go back to 1883.
However SPOILER ALERT if you ask about the famous lights at the McDonald Observatory (see below), they may look at you as if you had asked if the earth was really round and not flat. Then they give their explanation. (See Wikipedia.)
Bah! Humbug! Those science guys probably believe in global warming too. LOL.
Marfa features the lovely Paisano, on the National Register of Historic Places, by architect Henry Trost, whose fine work ornaments the El Paso area. Among its guests were the 150 members of the cast and crew of
Giant, the 1950s movie now a classic.
Well, O.K. Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, and James Dean soon moved to private houses. But they came to the hotel every night to eat and watch the dailies screened in the ballroom. I don't think the stars were being divas. Stars attract attention, and sadly, some of that attention is nuts. I'm sure studio security had orders not to let anything happen to Elizabeth Taylor! Or Rock Hudson or young James Dean for that matter.
The town's main street slopes uphill from the RR, thru the modest downtown and past the Paisano Hotel and the movie theater, to a stately courthouse in a square; a scaled-down version of Austin's Congress Avenue.
Improbably, Marfa became an art colony after minimalist artist Donald Judd moved here in the 1970s, eventually converting the abandoned buildings and grounds of a World War II air base into a sprawling museum of his sculptures (and a few other works). Today many artists live and work in Marfa and fill the local galleries found in old commercial downtown buildings that would otherwise be empty.
Judd fit the Texas ethos: Make it big and it will get noticed. You don't have to like contemporary art to enjoy his Chinati Foundation's indoor/outdoor museum. Not just big, it's enormous, vast, awe-inspiring, stunning ... I'm not able to think of anything quite like it in all the world.
The county historical group had put a museum in an adobe building on Hwy 90, a block or two west of the main street. [That's the house where my parents were married, by a retired preacher who earlier had married my mother's mother and grandmother.] Sadly, I see that the museum is closed now. I hope the building still stands.
West of town, in the big empty just past the dried-up town of Valentine, is the Prada Store. Hard to explain, but see it to believe it. It's thought-provoking art, they say, or you might say it's a choice example of a West Texas sense of humor. Surely it's the only such thing in all the world, and not to be forgotten. Srsly.
Make a U-turn back toward Marfa and pass thru dusty Valentine again. Official signs mark a turnoff for a "Scenic Drive" into the Davis Mountains. I've seen antelopes, peccaries, deer, turkeys, rabbits, vultures, owls, etc among the scenery.
In the heart of this pile of mountains is the little town of Fort Davis. Eyeball the elaborate courthouse. You can check out another restored old hotel, the Limpia, Spanish for clean, named for the town's mountain stream; fine dining.
North of the town is its reason for being. Fort Davis was a frontier fort built to make West Texas safe for white people. Set against the doomed Indians were black units -- a principal deployment of the Buffalo Soldiers. Now a National Historic Site, many buildings were restored as part of the so-called 'make-work' New Deal projects during the Great Depression and its massive unemployment. You probably can't find a better example of the days of cowboys and Indians, buffalo and longhorns, covered wagons and stagecoaches this side of Custer's Last Stand.
From the restored fort, follow a few signs uphill on another scenic drive. Like Big Bend, this area is a sky island, where temperatures fall as the altitude rises. So cactus gives way to grasslands then scrub brush and rugged trees until it's crowned with forest.
Davis Mountains State Park is another inheritance from the New Deal period. [My uncle worked here with the Civilian Conservation Corps, building roads and trails.] The park features the handsome Indian Lodge, where today you can get a room, a good meal, or just your beverage of choice while you take the view and the mountain air.
Going further uphill gets you to the McDonald Observatory, owned and operated by the Univ of Texas. At the nice visitors center you can start a guided tour of the astronomical workplaces. Get close to the stars -- the guides let you reach up and touch the massive telescopes that grab specks of light from a zillion light-years across time and space. Glorious views from atop Mt Locke, at 6,791 feet, one of the highest peaks in Texas. If you can't catch a tour (make reservations!) do drive up the public road as far as you can go.
To go home on a different route, head north to I-10. (Did I mention it's best not to let your gas gauge drop below half full? It can be a long long way to the next service station!) More trucks and less to see on the interstate, tho the sprawling wind farms atop mesas near Ft Stockton are quite impressive. With oil wells nearby you can see our energy future and our energy past within a few minutes driving.
Check out other examples from the great era of Texas courthouses in Ozona and Sonora. If you have a minute more in Ozona, drive slowly around a few blocks east of the town square. See if that flock of wild (wild? LOL) turkeys still patrol the yards of the fine, oil-money mansions from the mid-20th Century.
For this trip, spring may be the best season, or any time after it rains, when the desert blooms with wildflowers (like yucca and cenizo). Summer is hot, even for Texans it's hot. Winter is cool with a few dustings of snow. October has those Monarchs at Sanderson, and some fall color in the mountains. But go when you can. It's always worth the trip.