BGTW AWARDS

Aaron Millar picked up Travel Writer of the

Year. His Texas feature, America’s Last Frontier, was one of two

National Geographic Traveller entries

The far west of Texas is America’s last frontier. As I stand on the edge of the Rio Grande — a thin line of rushing muddy water that divides Mexico from the US — I hold both countries in a single view. To the north, there are oil rigs and shopping malls; to the south, horseback vaqueros (cowboys) and a crumbling, waterless town. But here there’s nothing. These are the borderlands, an inbetween place where wranglers and artists, misfits and ranchers, shelter in the vastness of the desert. Life here, on the periphery, is wilderness and silence, the boundless spirit of independence that built this country, and the eyes of another looking in.

The heart of it is Big Bend National Park, 800,000 acres of sparse and dusty grasslands in the far southwestern corner of the state. In the centre are the Chisos Mountains, the only range in the US contained completely within the borders of a national park. From a distance they appear like a giant’s fist, knuckles of jagged rock punching up from beneath the earth. I can see them rise, peak and fall at once, like a wave — an island surrounded by desert on all sides. And indeed they are. Reaching nearly 8,000‘ high, the Chisos — a name that means ‘enchantment’ — command their own ecosystem, a cooler, lusher habitat prowled by black bears and mountain lions. A streak of green and red, the mountains pull heat into swirling clouds of thunder that spark the sky with shards of light and flashes of luminescent rainbow.

I’ve come here because almost no one does. In a year, Big Bend receives less than a third of the visitor numbers Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon attract in a single summer month. Those iconic landscapes are beautiful, but crowded; Big Bend is a private show.

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