Marfa Municipal

Since at least the 1880s, unexplained lights have appeared in the desert east of Marfa — glowing, splitting, merging, and vanishing over the Chinati Mountains. The lights have never been definitively explained despite scientific studies. Some appear to be car headlights on US-67, but others behave in ways that defy easy explanation. The official viewing area is 9 miles east of Marfa on US-90. From the air at dusk, the vast empty desert and mountain silhouettes create the perfect atmosphere for mystery. Marfa itself has transformed from a tiny railroad town into an internationally recognized art destination.

McDonald Observatory sits atop Mount Locke (6,790ft) and Mount Fowlkes (6,660ft) in the Davis Mountains of West Texas — the highest mountain range in the state. The site was selected in 1932 for its dry air, stable atmosphere, and exceptionally dark skies, among the darkest in the continental United States. The Otto Struve Reflector (82-inch), dedicated in 1939, was the second-largest telescope in the world at the time. It is joined now by the Harlan J. Smith Telescope (1968) and the 9.2m Hobby-Eberly Telescope (1999), one of the largest optical instruments ever built. Weeks after Apollo 11 landed, McDonald astronomers bounced a laser pulse off the corner-cube reflector Buzz Aldrin had placed on the Sea of Tranquility — a billion photons sent, a single photon returned — and measured the Earth-Moon distance to within inches. The observatory still runs lunar laser ranging today.

Santa Elena Canyon is a 13-mile slot where the Rio Grande cuts through 1,500-foot limestone cliffs. From the air, the canyon appears as a dark crack in the desert with Mexico on one side and Texas on the other — the international border runs down the center of the river at the bottom. Big Bend National Park's 800,000 acres of Chihuahuan Desert wilderness spread out beyond the canyon in every direction. The Chisos Mountains rise from the desert floor like a volcanic island. Ghost of Marfa Army Air Field's runways are still etched into the terrain nearby. This is some of the most remote and visually dramatic landscape in the lower 48.

Big Bend National Park is the only U.S. national park that encompasses an entire mountain range — the Chisos Mountains, a 20-mile volcanic spine rising from the Chihuahuan Desert in far southwest Texas. Emory Peak crests at 7,825 feet, the second-highest point in Texas after Guadalupe Peak. The Chisos are technically a down-faulted block (a graben) — they stand high because a hard layer of South Rim volcanic rock formed a caprock that resisted erosion while everything around it wore down. Pine Canyon Caldera is the underlying source. Volcanism here ran from 46 to 28 million years ago. At the heart of the range sits The Basin, a natural mountain bowl 5,400 feet up that holds the lodge, visitor center, and campground. The South Rim Trail (12-14 miles, all-day) climbs from the Basin to the Chisos's southern escarpment for one of the most striking panoramas in Texas — Mexico's Sierra del Carmen rising to the east across the Rio Grande, the desert basin spreading 3,000 feet below. The range is a sky island: pine-oak woodland on the summits, isolated from other forest by hundreds of miles of desert, hosting species (Colima warbler, Mexican black bear, mountain lion) found nowhere else in Texas.