It's Grand: Big Bend National Park Is a Spot Worth Singing About

Butch Hancock probably isn't the first singer-songwriter to wind up, 35 years after that first promising album, sleeping under a tarp down by the river. But he is the first one I've ever watched wake up. When I crawled out of my tent that chilly morning, he lay a few yards away, flopped near the water's edge, barefaced under the sky. Soon the two of us were lined up with the others for coffee from the camp stove. We had covered 13 miles of the Rio Grande in our rafts the previous day, then camped at the mouth of a canyon, 400-foot limestone walls suddenly jutting into the sky. After dinner, we circled the campfire -- eight customers, three river guides and Hancock, strumming and singing about "bare footprints on the desert sand" and "blue moonlight on the Rio Grande."