Big Bend National Park in southwest Texas has everything you might want in a national park –- isolated mountains for hiking and camping, a scenic and wild river for kayaking, canoeing, and rafting, dark skies for stargazing and a species-rich desert for birdwatching and exploring.  But because the park is located hundreds of miles from a major airport and one hundred miles from the nearest interstate highway, it is perhaps one of the country’s least visited of the big national parks. 

In this week’s podcast, the Traveler’s Lynn Riddick begins a two-part series about her recent trip to Big Bend -- a vast wilderness in the Chihuahuan Desert along the Rio Grande. Lynn meets up with the park’s chief of interpretation, Tom Vandenberg, who offers an overview of the park’s varied geology and diverse ecology, its human history and what the future may hold for visitors seeking adventure and solitude in the park’s 800,000 acres.