A photographic and descriptive guide to the diverse plant life of the Big Bend region of Texas, including uncommon or rare species such as orchids.

Fully updated and revised, this comprehensive guide features forty-seven trails in Big Bend National Park.

Most people visit Big Bend National Park and have a wonderful, incident-free vacation. For a tiny number, however, a simple mistake, unpreparedness, or pure bad luck has lead to catastrophe. Massive rescue efforts and fatalities, while rare, do happen at the park. Heat stroke, dehydration, hypothermia, drowning, falls, lightning, and even murder have claimed victims at Big Bend. This book chronicles selected rescues and tragedies that have happened there since the early 1980s. The lessons you learn reading this book may save your life.

"Every community needs a nature center just like it needs a school, church, and library. Nature centers teach environmental values. This book is a practical and usable guide to establishing and operating a nature center from authors who did it themselves and who studied dozens of other nature centers across the country. It is full of useful information, and a must read for anyone interested in nature centers."--John Flicker, President, National Audubon Society"The authors' love of nature and their labor of love in establishing the Cibolo Nature Center come through loud and clear. . . . They offer a wealth of wisdom based on their own experiences in a clear, readable style. They also present significant information on where help is available."--Michael Riska, Executive Director, Delaware Nature SocietyPreserving wild land as a community nature center can be a powerful antidote to the stresses of modern living. This practical handbook is designed to inspire, inform, and enable readers to create a local nature center, or help an existing nature center grow and prosper. It will be an essential resource for nature center pioneers, as well as volunteers, board members, donors, government officials, or new members who want to educate themselves about the operation and potential of a nature center in their community.Brent Evans and Carolyn Chipman-Evans give step-by-step instructions for creating and maintaining a nature center. They cover topics such as starting from scratch; gathering support; organizing the organization; building community; handling costs, budgets, and funding; managing land without managing to ruin it; and planning. Photographs, line drawings, and boxes with helpful tips amplify the entire book.

The grandeur, remoteness, rich history, and dramatic ecologic diversity of the Big Bend is dramatically captured in this beautiful collection of intimate photographs. Showcasing rugged landscapes and geological wonders, this celebration of the region includes images of the historic towns and sweeping territory of southern Texas. Capturing the diverse local flora and fauna of the region, this volume illuminates the wonders of nature in new and provocative ways.

A Guide to the Rocks, Landscape, Geologic History, and Settlers of the Area of Big Bend National Park.

This book will help turn every trip to Big Bend National Park into a memorable adventure. Veteran naturalist Gary Clark and photographer Kathy Adams Clark help you choose the best hike or drive in Big Bend National Park, based on the season in which you visit; the number of days you have in the park; and your activity, age, and fitness levels. The Clarks provide valuable practical information, along with a descriptive list of items essential for being outdoors in desert and mountain environments and an overview of park rules. They describe more than thirty activities available in the park: two-hour or half- and full-day adventures; adventures for the physically fit or physically challenged; and adventures with children, for nature lovers, or in vehicles. The Clarks also point out scenic highlights and animals and plants that might be seen along the way.

Winner, 2018 Carroll Abbott Memorial Award, sponsored by the Native Plant Society of Texas The Trans-Pecos region of Texas is home to a variety of big game species, including desert mule deer, pronghorn, desert bighorn sheep, white-tailed deer, elk, feral hog, and javelina; several species of exotics, such as aoudad, axis deer, and blackbuck antelope; and domestic livestock that includes cattle, horses, goats, sheep, and bison. Prepared by a team of range specialists at the Borderlands Research Institute in Alpine, Texas, this field guide will allow the area’s ranch managers, private landowners, resource professionals, students, and other outdoor enthusiasts to identify the key woody plants that serve as valuable forage for these animals. Encompassing 18 West Texas counties, with application in like habitats in the western Hill Country and southern Rolling Plains as well as in northern Mexico and eastern New Mexico, the book provides a thorough introduction to the natural features of the region and descriptions, nutrition values, and management prescriptions for 84 species of browse plants. In addition to informing readers about the diet of the region’s large animals, this fully illustrated, user-friendly reference also intends to inspire the continued good stewardship of the land they inhabit.

The winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, this intriguing anthology of stories explores the complex twists and turns of human relationships in such works as "Fog," "Thanksgiving," and the title story, about a grieving widower, feeling the onslaught of age, who finds himself attracted to a young birdwatcher no older than his daughter.

As a young teamster on a pack-mule train, Wilfred Dudley Smithers saw the Rio Grande's Big Bend for the first time in 1916, and it captured his imagination forever. For decades thereafter he returned to Texas' last great frontier-the great bend of the Rio Grande on the Texas-Mexico border-chronicling the region and its people in words and photographs. The years that Smithers chronicled in the Big Bend were sometimes violent ones. Pancho Villa and Chico Cano were among the many "bandits" playing hide-and-seek with the U.S. Cavalry-events Smithers recorded. He was also an eyewitness to liquor-running and smuggling during Prohibition. His principal subjects, however, were the people of the Big Bend: local ranchers, Mexican American and American families, miners, Texas Rangers, and others living simple lives in this harsh and beautiful land.