Visitor center · Big Bend National Park
Get your bearings beside the park’s oldest exposed rocks.
Overview
Map
Plan your stop
The highest, rockiest slopes around here are a summer buffet for grizzly bears.
Big Bend Tour Guide
Parkwolf is a GPS audio tour guide for Big Bend National Park. As you drive, it chimes in with what’s ahead: hidden gems, upcoming stops, history, geology, and wildlife, right through your car’s speakers.
See the Big Bend audio tourRecorded for this place
Persimmon Gap Visitor Center“You're approaching Persimmon Gap Visitor Center, a small information stop at the northern entrance. Use it for maps, books, and a few exhibits if you'd like help choosing your next stop.”
Plays as you drive up to Persimmon Gap Visitor Center in the Parkwolf Big Bend Tour Guide.
More stories near here in the app
“Fantastic app with many points of information… It’s great to just turn on while you’re driving and it gives you an audio tour of the national Park. We love it!!!!”
Guide
Persimmon Gap Visitor Center is a small, one-story white adobe information center at Big Bend’s northern entrance on Highway 385, in a low pass between the Santiago Mountains. If you’re coming south from Marathon, it’s about 42 miles down the road and a useful place to get oriented: there are exhibits, park information, maps, a bookstore and an information counter. It’s a modest stop; save Panther Junction for a fuller exhibit visit.
Persimmon Gap takes its name from the Texas persimmon trees growing in this low pass; people have used it as a north-south travel corridor for centuries. Across the road, gentle hills expose some of the park’s oldest rocks. They were part of an ancient mountain range nearly 300 million years ago, then worn down and buried by later sediments before uplift brought them back into view as the Santiago Mountains formed.
Wildlife
377 sightingsBlack BearMost seen around 7 PMSighting map
329 sightingsCollared PeccaryMost seen around 7 PMSighting map
500 sightingsWhite-tailed DeerMost seen around 7 PMSighting map
985 sightingsRoadrunnerMost seen around 8 AMSighting map
228 sightingsRavenMost seen around 5 PMSighting map
264 sightingsTurkey VultureMost seen around noonSighting mapSighting maps show where each species has been reported across Big Bend. Wildlife moves, so no sighting is guaranteed.
Keep exploring
ModerateDog Canyon Trail4 mi · 2.5 hr · 3.2 mi awayA mostly level desert walk to the limestone walls of Dog Canyon.
ModerateDevil’s Den Trail7.5 mi · 5 hr · 3.2 mi awayA narrow limestone slot from a long desert rim walk.Parkwolf’s Big Bend ranking
The audio tour guide for the drive, plus offline maps, trails, and wildlife heatmaps for when the signal drops.
