Shanto Roy

I Explore Research, Tech, Travel, and Business. PhD Student @UHCS.

2 minute read

Recently, we visited the Big Bend National Park and it was an excellent road trip experience from Houston. In this post, I will post some details regarding the most iconic place in Big Bend National Park.

Santa Elena Canyon is the most spectacular place in the Big Bend NP, and most probably, if you have seen some images of Big Bend NP online, definitely the first few will be of this Canyon.

The Canyon is close to the Mexican border and at the end of the Ross-maxwell Scenic road. Just before the last parking area, you will find two more nearby places first: the river access and the Santa Elena Canyon viewpoint.

Here, I have added a photo of the River Access area.

And, here is the remote viewpoint

Now, from here, you will have to go down a mile ahead, and you will find the parking area. From here, you will have to hike 1.6 miles roundtrip way. You can find more trail details in Alltrails.

First, you will have to cross the river, and then you will have a canyon hike up and down before reaching the final endpoint of the hike. Although the canyons go up to $1500$ feet from the ground, the highest point of the hike will be around $160$ feet.

During the canyon hike, you will see mindblowing scenarios and probably the best scenes of the entire trip. Checkout the following image of mine as an example.

At the end of the hike, there is only the river trail left. The river is shallow but muddy. If you have canoe or boats, you can go further. Checkout the view here.

Here, check out my video of the entire hike. I used a GoPro Hero 8 Black and my chest mount to capture the entire hike. Please, like, comment, share the video if you you find it informative. Also, subscribe my channel for more travel videos.


Big Bend is a scenic dry national park and has a lot to offer. In the next posts, I will provide more details of the places we stopped during the whole roadtrip and other places in the Big Bend NP to visit.

Here’s our entire team.

That’s all for today! Cheers!!! 😎

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Final Notes

I have started posting my travel diary on a new travel blog Digital Nomad Goals. Read my stories there. Here’s a few examples:

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