West Texas, January 2021

After taking a brief hiatus from traveling for the end of 2020, I had to get back on the road again at the end of December. I had to make it to Austin, Texas by New Years for a (rescheduled) wedding, which meant I had to spend a couple of weeks quarantining afterwards. I thought West Texas would be a great place to spend some time in the wide open desert, with way more than six feet between me and another person.

Terlingua, Texas

I spent my first week in Texas in Terlingua, a tiny town in the bottom of the Big Bend, just outside Big Bend National Park. Depending on your source, the population is somewhere between 50 and 100 people, and the closest town is about an hour and a half drive away. It’s the site of a former quicksilver mine that closed in the 1940s, leaving a ghost town behind, which you can now tour (as I did). In the 1960s and 70s national park tourism became a thing, and people started coming back to Terlingua as a launching pad for their Big Bend NP adventure (as I also did). It’s a bizarre place for sure, but a great place to be socially distant!

Big Bend National Park

Big Bend National Park has been on my bucket list for years, and I think anyone who is friends with a Texan has heard about how great it is. It is massive, and most of the area is taken up by vast desert – except for the big chunk of land that is the Chisos Mountains that just pops up 6,000 feet out of the desert floor to the top of Emory Peak 7,800′ above sea level. I spent most of my afternoons in Terlingua exploring the desert and taking day hikes in areas like Santa Elena Canyon (the first images below). On the weekend I backpacked up the Chisos Mountains, one of my favorite things I did. On New Years Eve it had snowed in Texas and by the middle of January the snow on the trail had either melted into mud or been packed down into solid ice, making the hiking a challenge. It was a tough hike, but the view from the top was impossible to beat!

Alpine and Marfa, Texas

My second week in Texas I spent a little further North than Big Bend in the town of Alpine – just next door (by West Texas standards) to the slightly more famous town of Marfa. Both are so cute and charming, although I admit that they were both very, very quiet – presumably because of covid. In Marfa specifically just about every place I tried to go was closed; in one of the photos below you can see my car parked in a parking spot on Main Street in Marfa and there isn’t a single other soul in sight. Despite that, I still enjoyed these artsy little towns in the middle of the desert.

Guadalupe Mountains National Park

My last stop in Texas before heading West was Guadalupe Mountains, home of the tallest point in the state. The climb to the top of the high point is doable as a day trip, but I got there too late in the day to start the 9 mile hike, so I opted for the shorter (and arguably more scenic) Devil’s Hall hike instead. The campground was unfortunately full, so I couldn’t stay the night. But these beautiful mountains were definitely worth a stop.