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Places to go in Texas.

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5 places

Big Bend National Park Canyons & deserts

Big Bend National Park

Terlingua, TX · Chihuahuan Desert, West Texas

Big Bend is named for the sweeping curve where the Rio Grande turns north along the Texas-Mexico border, wrapping over 800,000 acres of Chihuahuan Desert, river canyons, and the entire Chisos mountain range. Walk the short Santa Elena Canyon trail beneath limestone walls that rise some 1,500 feet and narrow to a slot barely wide enough for the river. One of the most remote parks in the lower 48, it rewards visitors with vast solitude and famously dark night skies.

Guadalupe Mountains National Park Mountains

Guadalupe Mountains National Park

Salt Flat, TX · West Texas / Chihuahuan Desert

Guadalupe Mountains National Park rises from the West Texas desert as an exposed fossil reef from the Permian sea, crowned by Guadalupe Peak, the highest point in Texas at 8,751 feet. Hike the steep trail to that summit or stand beneath El Capitan, the sheer limestone prow that signals the range from miles away. In late October, McKittrick Canyon blazes with bigtooth maples, a rare burst of fall color in the desert.

Padre Island National Seashore Beaches

Padre Island National Seashore

Corpus Christi, TX · Texas Gulf Coast

This is the longest stretch of undeveloped barrier island left in the world, seventy miles of Gulf shore where the paved road ends and the beach simply keeps going. Drive past the last access point and you trade lifeguards and boardwalks for shelling at the tide line, wildflowers in the dunes, and the kind of solitude that is hard to find on an American coast anymore. Come in summer and you can watch park biologists release Kemp's ridley sea-turtle hatchlings, the most endangered sea turtle in the world, scrambling down the sand toward the surf.

Natural Bridge Caverns Caves

Natural Bridge Caverns

San Antonio, TX · Texas Hill Country

Four college students went looking for passages off a sinkhole in 1960 and broke through into the largest commercial cavern in Texas, named for the 60-foot limestone bridge arching over its mouth. The Discovery Tour drops 180 feet into rooms hung with 6-foot soda straws, sheets of cave bacon, and chandeliers and columns that climb past 40 feet, with an underground stream still feeding the formations grain by grain. Book the 9am Lantern Tour to walk it the way the discoverers did, lit only by the swing of a handheld flame.

Caverns of Sonora Caves

Caverns of Sonora

Sonora, TX · Texas Hill Country

Out on the dry ranchland west of Sonora, a staircase drops 155 feet into a cave that mineralogists rank among the most beautiful on the planet, and the reason is the helictites: thousands of translucent calcite crystals that twist sideways and curl against gravity, packed so thick in one passage it is called the snake pit. The guided Crystal Palace tour winds close to two miles past coral-like clusters, fishtail crystals, and the famous butterfly formation, all of it still wet and growing in 98 percent humidity. It stays an even 72 degrees down here year round, so the cave is just as worth the drive in August as in January.