Big Bend Ranch State Park - Exploring the Exterior (The Easy Part)

Most people only know about Big Bend National Park. But just west of the big national park is a big state park with a very similar name. Big Bend Ranch State Park stretches over 311,000 acres that very few people take the time to explore. Those that do venture into the park will probably stay on highway 170, to take in one of the easiest points of interest.

One day we headed down Highway 170 to explore the exterior of Big Bend Ranch State Park. Because the road is paved, this is the easy part of the park to see. We arrived very early to the trail head of the Closed Canyon. A short walk from the parking lot took us to the opening in the tall canyon walls.

That's where the fun began--walking between those tall walls into the canyon. If you look carefully, you can see Denisa at the bottom, feeling very small wandering into another of God's wonders.

It's a one-mile walk through the canyon with views that just got better and better. We took way too many pictures as we continued, so we'll just include a few and stop typing for a while.

Sometimes the canyon walls were just an arm's length apart at the bottom.

We knew when we got to the turn-around point when we read the "end of trail" sign. 

But some people have a hard time stopping when it looks like there are more interesting canyon walls behind that sign.

Even though Mark slid down the wall and continued, it was only around a few more bends that he came to a pool of water that he couldn't cross without getting very wet. It looked like that really was the end of the trail.

Our early morning timing was great, as people were streaming into the canyon as we were leaving. It looks like the spring break crowd has arrived to visit this easiest-to-reach stop at Big Bend Ranch State Park.

It was supposed to get warm, but we were blessed with blue skies in the morning.

Our next stop at this exterior section of the state park was a few miles down the road. We wanted to hike a section of the Rancherias Trail. It wasn't far down the trail that we started seeing the rock cairns meant to guide hikers in the correct direction. We're used to cairns made from a stack of three or four rocks. So we were pretty impressed with the effort needed to stack these impressively large cairns on this trail.

Denisa is always stopping to enjoy the plants everywhere. She was especially impressed with these hardy little plants that produce beautiful color in such a harsh environment.

The prickly pear cactuses are on the brink of blooming, and this single pad had a row of eleven blooms lining its top. It will be a blinding display when it finally blooms.

When we backed up, we got an idea of the size of some of these cactus plants. This single plant had hundreds of blooms that were just now starting to open. 

Besides producing blooms, healthy plants were also putting on additional cactus pads. This baby pad was a bright red color, but will turn that desert green color soon.

We spotted a group of javelinas at the top of the ridge, but they scurried over the top before we could take a picture. Mark slogged his way to the top, but the group was already out of sight by the time he peeked over the ridge.

But we saw evidence that they were in the area. Javelinas love the moist and sweet taste of a new prickly-pear pad. Their lips allow them to take a bite of the spiny pad without hurting their mouths.

We hiked down the Rancherias Canyon Trail, which became less obvious as we got further away from the highway.

In fact, we slogged through tall grass, while we tried to stay on track by following the trail information on Mark's alltrails app.

We walked through this wash into the canyon, decorated with cactus hanging from the canyon walls.

Our most interesting flower picture of the day was this bright yellow bloom that was also hanging onto the rock walls.

This is the yellow sting bush. The center o the large yellow bloom is filled with the longest stamens of any flower we have ever seen. But don't get too close, because the leaves, buds, and stems have bristles that feel like a sting if touched. This flower is only found in the United States here in west Texas in the Big Bend area.

We decided to make this out-and-back hike into a loop. According to the alltrails app, it will take a little 0.7 mile of bushwhacking through the desert to connect us to the West side of the 19-mile Rancherias Trail. Since it was getting hotter, we knew we didn't want to hike 19 miles. But this little connector trail would bring the canyon and loop trails together to form a nice loop. How hard could it be to connect the two?

We soon found that moving across the desert without a trail meant dodging all the spines and claws that tried to grab us. We discovered that our favorite desert plant is the creosote, with its tiny yellow blooms and NO spikes! We could brush against a creosote bush without bringing blood. We can't say that about any other plant out here.

You have to look hard in this harsh environment to find beauty like these tiny blooms.

Denisa determined that this was the longest 0.7-mile trek ever, as we dodged cactus and tried to find a way across ravines and canyons to find the other trail.

The best find of our trek was this Engelmann cactus with the biggest quantity of open blooms we have seen so far.

We were hot and sweaty by the time we finally found the trail to make today's hike into a loop. We would never have tried this without the help of the alltrails app guiding us to the other trail. We also wouldn't recommend this particular loop to others, as we would never do it again ourselves.

Back on the trail, the hiking got easier. At times we were surrounded by the tall gangly cactus in what we affectionately named the ocotillo forest. We have been in the desert so long that we are beginning to miss trees.

This part of the country has a rugged beauty all its own.

Denisa can still find the flowers that she loves even in this environment of prickly spines.

She loves the combination of colors as this purple cactus is showing its first yellow blooms of the season. Our loop turned into a 5.3-mile hike, that included a difficult and long 0.7 connector that made it seem longer.

Our next stop along Highway 170 was one of the boat ramps of the Rio Grande River. This highway is also called the River Road, because it follows this river that marks the border between the United States and Mexico. Today we were glad that we decided not to try a float down the river, because we were swatting flies the entire time we stood by the water. We ran for the shelter of the pickup, glad to leave the Rio Grande River and continue on our way.

The next stop on the exterior portion of the state park was the hoodoos trail. It was hot by this time of the afternoon, and a trickling of spring break vacationers had arrived to make even the state park seem crowded. So we took an abbreviated hike here to see the rock formations.

The wind and erosion here had left a few hoodoos in this Rio Grande Valley, and we managed to get a few pictures without the other visitors in them. Who knew that so many families come to Big Bend for spring break?!?

Today we stayed on paved roads, exploring the exterior of Big Bend Ranch State Park along the River Road. This was the easy part of this huge state park. But after hiking over eight miles today, it doesn't feel like we've had such an easy day. After we get our new tires, we're heading into the interior to explore the hard part of this state park. Stay tuned!