Our first off-road trip down Glen Springs Road in Big Bend National Park

We took our first off-road trip here at Big Bend in May 2018.  We'd been here for a month and needed to get off-road and see how the Green Monster, our RAM 1500, would do on the seasonally-maintained back roads of Big Bend National Park.  Our plan was to get off-road as much as possible during our 6-month stay.  So, off we went.

Off-roading is a big deal here with hundreds of miles of roads available for high-clearance and 4-wheel drive vehicles.  The Green Monster is high-clearance but not 4-wheel drive.

As we learned over time, much of Big Bend National park is only viewable from these roads. For example, River Road (East and West) follows the Rio Grande for 50 miles.  At its midpoint, near Tally, it gets you to the third big canyon here in the park, Mariscal Canyon, which is only accessible off-road! And exploring Glen springs now would make it possible to hike Pine Canyon later in our stay.

We started down Glen Springs Road about 7 miles from Panther Junction Visitors Center and then took River Road East to get back to Rio Grande Village (RGV) and the main park road 118.  Glen Springs road is 15.8 miles and the section of River Road we took was 8 miles, for a total of 23.8 miles.

What we found was that Glen Springs Road was relatively easy to drive and flat most of the way.  There always seem to be a few sections of back-roads that are particularly bad. Some examples we've found are washed out (river washes) that drop 1 to 2 feet when you enter them, 30 - 45 degree angled sections that really require 4-wheel drive to climb over and out of, extremely rocky or large rock areas that require that you go very slow or knock out a CV joint, stabilizer or step on the truck, and areas that have not been cleared from brush and scratch both sides of the vehicle.

But Glen Springs did not present problems like this and we feel, for our first off-road trip, that we've conquered a new way to explore the park.

Here are our conquering photos - don't laugh!









As we moved on down the Glen Springs road we did actually find the lush, desert springs down a rather challenging road, which we walked since there was no apparent turnaround.

The spring area was covered by a large multi-trunked Cottonwood tree, probably the largest I've ever seen.   As we approach, it got larger and larger.  You could see this tree from miles away. 

As we've experienced in many areas of Big Bend, as you approach there is just quiet.  The birds are silent waiting to see who the new intruder is, and there is just the sound of the breeze passing through the cottonwood leaves.  It's a moment you treasure each time and you sit for a moment and close your eyes and listen.

large multi-branched Cottonwood tree at Glen Springs

It seems over time the tree had started to lay down, creating even more cover for desert wildlife to take shelter and escape the desert heat.  Large trees create their own ecosystem, and this one definitely had its own with moist areas below, lots of low, protective limbs and towering branches two stories high.

The spring continued to travel in many directions away from the treed-canopy, one flowed into the small canyon just off the road.

We enjoyed the wondrous space mother nature had created at the spring and then moved on down the road to find canyons carved into the land were thousands of years of rainfall forced its way through the desert. The carved canyons presented colorful layers of rock and sediment left from the ocean that once covered this area 90 million years ago.

Stopping for a final view of the lush area and canyons that seem to go on forever our breath was taken away with the Chisos looming miles away.

We then turned left on River Road East, heading back toward civilization and RGV, with the amazing peaks of the Sierra del Carmen mountains in Mexico directly ahead of us.  It was an exciting and memorable first off-road trip for us.  Here's our album with all photos from the Glen Springs trip.

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Check out the Blog post on our 2018 Pine Canyon Hike at Big Bend National Park!