{"id":1225,"date":"2016-10-22T12:06:34","date_gmt":"2016-10-22T16:06:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/relativerest.com\/?p=1225"},"modified":"2016-10-22T12:06:34","modified_gmt":"2016-10-22T16:06:34","slug":"big-bend-national-park","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/relativerest.com\/?p=1225","title":{"rendered":"Big Bend National Park"},"content":{"rendered":"

Friday, Oct 21<\/h3>\n

Today’s glorious tourist stop was Big Bend National Park<\/em>. I gave up my valuable sleep to get to the park as the sun was rising so that I could spend about four hours driving the two main scenic roads, taking photos and fitting in a couple of short walks before driving on to Eagle Pass, Texas.<\/p>\n

The park is enormous and, because of its isolation, has the third lowest visitation of all the National Parks but the views and facilities are as good as any other park I’ve visited. The Ross Maxwell Scenic drive is the name given to the road that passes mountains and canyons to get to Santa Elena Canyon on the Rio Grande. This was the most scenic section I saw and Santa Elena Canyon is spectacular as the river flows through the very narrow gap between 1,200 feet high vertical cliffs. The river itself was very docile and it looked like I could easily have paddled across it to Mexico.<\/p>\n

The second scenic drive is the much shorter but winding scenic road to the Chisos Mountains Basin. This was also spectacular but the nature of the road meant that I had to pay more attention to driving than the views.<\/p>\n

After leaving Big Bend I traveled on to Eagle Pass, TX pretty much following the border for much of the way. This was not scenic which was good because I had not connected my tablet properly to its power source and it shut down when the battery died. I lost the section of video it was recording at the time and had to wait about 30 minutes for it to charge enough to continue recording so there is a long straight section on the map with no video. However, the park views are not affected and the best way to view my experience in Big Bend is to check out the map and video here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This is one of many great views along the Ross Maxwell Scenic Drive\"big-bend-ross-maxwell-drive\"<\/p>\n

Tuff Canyon, the largest canyon along the Ross Maxwell drive\"big-bend-tuff-canyon\"<\/p>\n

Santa Elena Canyon\"big-bend-santa-elena-canyon\"<\/p>\n

A view of the Chisos Mountains from along the road.\"big-bend-chisos-mtns\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Friday, Oct 21 Today’s glorious tourist stop was Big Bend National Park. I gave up my valuable sleep to get to the park as the sun was rising so that I could spend about four hours driving the two main scenic roads, taking photos and fitting in a couple of short walks before driving on … Continue reading Big Bend National Park<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[61,3],"tags":[67,9],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/relativerest.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1225"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/relativerest.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/relativerest.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/relativerest.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/relativerest.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1225"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/relativerest.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1225\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1232,"href":"http:\/\/relativerest.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1225\/revisions\/1232"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/relativerest.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/relativerest.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/relativerest.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}