Westbound — Rio Grande canyon walls on your right, Mexico across the river to your left
The Prettiest Empty Road in Texas
Texas's prettiest drive is also its emptiest — fifty miles of pavement pinned between a desert and a river, with the steepest hill in the state thrown in.
FM-170 — El Camino del Rio, the River Road — runs along the Rio Grande through the Big Bend country, fifty of the most beautiful and remote miles in Texas. National Geographic once called it maybe the prettiest drive in America, and it earns the claim: the road bends with the river (Mexico on the far bank the whole way), threads canyons, and climbs the Big Hill, a fifteen-percent grade that's the steepest paved road in the state, with an overlook at the top that throws seventy-five miles of desert at your feet. Then it climbs out of the river country to Marfa, the high-desert ranching town that became, improbably, one of the great contemporary-art destinations in America. Two hard rules: this is some of the most remote driving in the Lower 48 — no fuel, no cell, no services between Lajitas and Presidio, so fill up and carry water — and don't do it in summer, when the low desert runs past a hundred degrees and the road's dips flash-flood.
Breakfast and a full tank at the Lajitas Golf Resort, the desert oasis at the start of the road (the bakery pastries are the move) — last services for a long while. A few miles on, the Contrabando movie set, a lonely adobe ruin on the riverbank that's stood in for a dozen Westerns; most of the old "town" washed away in a 2008 flood, but the surviving casita and the river make a fine photo and leg-stretch.
The rest of the drive is Big Bend Ranch State Park — the largest state park in Texas, three hundred thousand acres of canyon and Chihuahuan Desert so empty it makes the national park next door feel crowded. The road is the show: the Big Hill, Colorado Canyon, the slot of Closed Canyon if you feel like a walk.
Lunch at El Patio in Presidio — homemade enchiladas and a cold drink in one of the hottest towns in Texas — and top off the tank again before the sixty-mile climb north. Up on the high-desert plateau waits Marfa: Donald Judd's minimalist-art outpost, the Chinati Foundation, the Prada Marfa sculpture marooned out in the scrub, and the unexplained Marfa Lights that flicker on the horizon after dark. Dinner is the prix-fixe at Restaurant Cochineal (reserve ahead — it's one of the best meals in West Texas), and a night at the BOHEMIO, a design-forward adobe lodge a few blocks from the galleries.
And hold the plan loosely — out here there's nothing BUT the open road and the long view. The plan's a backbone, not a cage: the unmarked pullout over the river, the hot spring down a dirt track, the gallery in a town of two thousand, the dark sky so loaded with stars it stops you cold. The desert rewards the traveler who slows down and pays attention. Just keep the tank full, carry more water than you think you need, never drive a flooded dip, and let the emptiness do its work. The best stop out here is the one that isn't on any map. Go find it.
