In the whitewash of midday, the land looks the same. Dry, hot, barren rolling hills and steep cliffs. But in dusk, in the shadows of a pastel sunset, the land comes alive. Each cliffside, each mountain differentiates from the other. The smallest of indentions make the biggest shadows. The harshest mountains turn velvet. This is a land where 80 feels like 90 and clothes must be shed along the way - but at least it's a dry heat, or so they say. This is a land where you wake up

At Santa Elena Canyon, I am the only one – for a moment at least. It has become a difficult thing to find in this park, solitude, unless one goes off map of course. Something I am prone to do often, but not today. Today I sit, in the middle of the resting Rio Grande. Today I sit, between the ever present yet-to-be and the ever present what was. Today I sit, just out of reach of walls so hardened by the past it takes a torrential river to bring them home, back into the earth o

A maze of washes and draws and mountains and ridges and hills and swales and low points and canyons. A crescendo of building pressure,...

Everybody out here is escaping something, I said. Or running toward something, she replied. I am reminded of a poem from three years...

Death has been on my mind lately. This land is full of it, marked, unmarked. Animals, humans, plants. A land that once thrived – or as...

I followed a bear this morning, along a lush desert trail, past prickly pear in bloom, down a gravel wash with over-reaching roots, into...

In the morning, trying to catch the springs in solitude, I am the only one on this rocky, caliche road and as such can move freely –...

Weather in Big Bend is a work of art. The light-play on velvet, mountains stretched across a powder blue sky, only a thin rake of clouds to curtail the day and then nothing. The sun’s wake is splashed unhindered in every possible direction. Water - translucent, opaque, murky, stagnant, trickling, flooding. The lifeblood of the desert, sculptor of rock and earth, mover of stone and brush. The dictator of survival. Her calling card a vocal perfume of musk and dust and petrichor

I swing the saddle up, lean into the horse and gaze toward Mesa de Anguila - one of the least visited areas of Big Bend National Park -...