Thirty-five miles from the Barton Warnock Visitor Center out into Big Bend Ranch State Park and back. Four aid station stops, no crew access, no cell service, and eleven and a half hours to get round.
Zero cell phone signal. The nearest hospital (Alpine, TX) is 100 miles from the start/finish line. Significant portions of the race have no vehicle access. Portions that have vehicle access may be a several hour drive on 4x4 limited access dirt trails to reach pavement. Desert wilderness landscape provides little shelter and temperatures range from freezing at night, to sweltering in the sun. The race rates this course hard, at 176.4 on the cX scale.
The Big Bend Ultra runs on desert trails in Big Bend Ranch State Park in far west Texas, starting and finishing at the Barton Warnock Visitor Center outside Terlingua. The parks here run to over 300,000 acres and sit several hours from San Antonio: water is scarce, fuel is scarce, and there is no cell service anywhere on the course. Five distances share the one start line, from a 10K up to a 100K that is capped at 100 runners. The race area is a gold tier Dark Sky Park, so anyone still out after dark gets the best stars in Texas.
In 2004 a wild idea was hatched: an ultra trail race in Big Bend. It had never been done and the logistics were impossible. It has been held annually ever since, and the January 2027 running is the 23rd. Trail Roots, an Austin running club, puts it on now, and the race's old web address, bigbend50.com, still points at it.
| Mile | Station | Cutoff | Crew access | Bag | Pacer | Med | To next |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0.00 |
Barton Warnock
None · EMS · no cell service
|
? | · | ? | · | ● | 5.10 |
| 5.10 |
Waterhole
None · basic first aid · no cell service
|
? | · | · | · | ● | 2.40 |
| 7.50 |
Whit Roy
None · basic first aid · no cell service
|
? | · | ● | · | ● | 9.75 |
| 17.25 |
Whit Roy
None · basic first aid · no cell service
|
12:00pm | · | ● | · | ● | 8.00 |
| 25.25 |
Contrabando
None · basic first aid · no cell service
|
? | · | · | · | ● | 4.40 |
| 29.65 |
Waterhole
None · basic first aid · no cell service
|
? | · | · | · | ● | 5.35 |
| 35.00 |
Finish
None · EMS · no cell service
|
6:30pm | · | ? | · | ● | ? |
7 people have been out there with a camera or a microphone.
These are other people's work and we link straight to them. Watching costs nothing and needs no account. More of them: every race we hold, on film.
Nobody sees it until we have read it. No account, no sign-in.
This changes nothing on the page on its own. Somebody checks it against the race first.
Somebody watches it before it goes anywhere near this page. What we are after is footage of this course, on the ground. If it would be just as true of any other race, it is not this.
We want the address of the file the race publishes, not the file. We download it from there so the page can say where the line came from.
We read every one of these and we write back. Every fact here carries the source it came from, and the way a wrong one gets fixed is a person checking it against what you tell us.
Cutoffs move, races get postponed, lotteries open and close. We read the race's own sources and record where every fact came from. Put your email in and we will send you what changed, and where we read it.
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I keep this catalog because the information is scattered and hard to trust. Telling you when it moves is the same job.
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