Dawn was spreading like a giant egg yolk on the horizon when we reached the gate. It was 16 miles from State Highway 118 to the office where visitors pick up the key, past the Bad Rabbit Café, then a bit farther on unpaved roads to the Christmas Mountains property. The key was attached to a long piece of wood, like the restroom key at old gas stations.
My friend drove the white rented Jeep through, and I locked the gate behind us. For four hours, we’d have the Christmas Mountains, a small range on the northern boundary of Big Bend National Park, near Terlingua, to ourselves. The locked gate enforced the one-group-at-a-time rule: The 3.5-mile road is only a few feet wider than a car and bends back on itself like a coiling snake. There’s no place to turn around until you get to the 5,728-foot summit. A broken-down vehicle would back up traffic until help arrived, and, in the beautiful emptiness of the Big Bend, that could be a long time.
