Morning light illuminates the prickly pear at Big Bend Ranch State Park

This was taken at the Papalote Llano campsite in Big Bend Ranch State Park in December, a campsite near the location of one of the old ranches in the park.  One of the benefits of getting off the main road in the park (remote enough by itself) is getting a deeper understanding of how vast and undisturbed the land is at Big Bend.

Pictured here is a windmill, near a neighboring campsite (and by neighboring, we mean it is a hike and you can't see one campsite from another), so the lesson about life on the land before it was a park is close by.

The park's website says, "By the 1880's several area ranches had been established and cattle, goats and sheep became a common sight on the landscape." Read more about the park's history--from prehistory and the archaeological record to present day--here.

More photos from the campsite: