This was the north view from my tent, photographed on the second morning of my 2010 Big Bend National Park visit.
The Chisos Mountains (pronounced chee-sos) is roughly in the center of Big Bend. According to Park literature, the most popular of the uncertain origins for the name Chisos is that it’s a shortened version of the Castilian Spanish, hechizos, meaning enchanted. Couple this with Big Bend’s Spanish nickname, El despoblado (the Uninhabited Land) and you have a pretty good idea of the area.
The Chisos Basin is shaped a lot like a super-sized volcanic crater, but the geology doesn’t really support that notion. Apparently something else was at work and expert speculation has suggested that the “rim” of the Basin—part of which is pictured above—was formed by the eruptions of volcanoes to the south and east. There’s a bit more to it (because of numerous geological events spanning a lengthy period of time), but that’s the gist.
I stayed in the basin for four nights. Due to the surrounding mountainous area, and the Earth’s angle, at night the moon was visible only briefly (when at all). The remainder of the each night was pretty darned dark and generally cold (at least during my two visits to the place).
And if you arrive in the area during darkness, the morning panorama of the Chisos Mountains is knock-down glorious to behold. It was so impressive that after a minor wave of vertigo, I literally laughed out loud.
The original image is a Tagged Image Format File (TIFF) with a file data size of 35.1 megabytes (MB).
For display on this web site the TIFF was duplicated and the duplicate re-formatted as a Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPG/JPEG) image with a file data size of 1.55 MB. To approximate detail visible at the time of capture the image was sharpened as necessary and resampled via the Photoshop Bicubic Sharpen algorithm. The re-sampling increases the image resolution from 300 Dots Per Square Inch (DPI) to 360 DPI.
Unless otherwise noted the image was corrected to offset color shift and balance. This restores black (shadows), white (highlights) and neutral gray (neutral mid-tones).
• An unnumbered image is the only one of the subject matter.
• A number corresponds to the sequential order in a subject-matter-related sequence.
• The letter “B” indicates color correction to approximate what was visible when the image was captured.
• The letter “C” indicates enhancement beyond an approximation of what was visible at the time of capture.