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This collection of writings and images by the legendary Big Bend photographer offers adventure, history, personal musings, and natural beauty. Photographer-naturalist Peter Koch first visited Big Bend National Park in February, 1945, on assignment to take promotional pictures for the National Park Service. He planned to spend a couple of weeks, and ended up staying for the rest of his life. Koch’s magnificent photographs and documentary films introduced the park to people across the United States and remain an invaluable visual record of the first four decades of Big Bend National Park. In this book, Koch’s daughter June Cooper Price draws on her father’s photographs, newspaper columns, and journal entries, as well as short pieces by other family members, to present his vision and many experiences of the Big Bend. The adventure begins with a six-day photographic trip through Santa Elena Canyon on a raft made from agave flower stalks. Koch also describes hiking on mountain trails and driving the scenic loop around Fort Davis; “wax smuggling” and other ways of making a living on the Mexican border; ranching in the Big Bend; collaborating with botanist Barton Warnock; and the history and beauty of Presidio County, the Rio Grande, and the Chihuahuan Desert.
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.
On January 1 of 2016, Stefanie Payne, a creative professional working at NASA Headquarters, and Jonathan Irish, a photographer with National Geographic, left their lives in Washington, D.C. and hit the open road on an expedition to explore and document all 59 of America's national parks during the centennial celebration of the U.S. National Park Service - 59 parks in 52 weeks - the Greatest American Road Trip. Captured in more than 300,000 digital photographs, written stories, and videos shared by the national and international media, their project resulted in an incredible view of America's National Park System seen in its 100th year. 'A Year in the National Parks, The Greatest American Road Trip' is a gorgeous visual journey through our cherished public lands, detailing a rich tapestry of what makes each park special, as seen along an epic journey to visit them all within one special celebratory year.
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.
Describes the development of Texas's Big Bend National Park, as well as the controversies that have shaped it over its first fifty years.
This is Patricia Clothier's story of growing up in the 1930s and 1940s on a vast ranch in the mountains and desert hugging the Mexican border in the Big Bend country of Texas, Before it became a national park. Her family weathered rattlesnakes and drought, accidents, loneliness and financial hardships of the Great Depression with fortitude, ingenuity, and grace. Like their scattered neighbors ? miles away over rugged roads ? it was the love of the land that gripped and held them there. Clothier paints a picture of this cast and glorious territory with words as vivid as any artist with a pallet of paints. A joy to read ? an adventure of Western life you'll never forget.' Jean Bradfish (award winning author and editor)
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.
A warm, witty memoir of a young family’s rugged adventure living in the newly established Big Bend National Park in the 1940s. A woman who went West with her husband in the 1840s must have expected hardships and privation, but during the 1940s, when Etta Koch stopped off in Big Bend with her young family and a twenty-three-foot travel trailer in tow—which they named Porky, the Road Hog—she anticipated a brief, civilized camping trip between her old home in Ohio and a new one in Arizona. It was only when she found herself moving into an old rock house without plumbing or electricity in the new Big Bend National Park that Etta realized she’d left her sheltered life behind for an experience in frontier living. In this book based on her journals and letters, Etta Koch and her daughter June Cooper Price chronicle their family’s first years—1944–1946—in the Big Bend. Etta describes how her photographer husband Peter Koch became captivated by the region as a place for natural history filmmaking—and how she and their three young daughters slowly adapted to a pioneer lifestyle during his months-long absences on the photo-lecture circuit. In vivid, often humorous anecdotes, she describes making the rock house into a home, getting to know the Park Service personnel and other neighbors, coping with the local wildlife, and, most of all, learning to love the rugged landscape and the hardy individuals who call it home.
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.