Big Bend National Park Trivia
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47 free Big Bend National Park trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Big Bend National Park trivia quiz covers the vast, remote park in West Texas where the Rio Grande makes its great turn along the Mexican border. Questions range across the geography (the Chisos Mountains, Emory Peak, the canyons of Santa Elena, Mariscal and Boquillas, the Chihuahuan Desert), the wildlife (Mexican black bears, cougars, the Colima warbler that breeds nowhere else in the US) and the fossils, including the giant pterosaur Quetzalcoatlus dug out of the Javelina Formation. The human history is just as rich: the Chisos and Comanche, Spanish presidios, buffalo soldiers, the quicksilver mines of Terlingua and Mariscal, the hot-springs resort on the river, the 1916 raid that brought in the cavalry, how Texas handed the land to the nation in 1944, the border rules that make a float trip an international departure, and the village of Boquillas across the water. There is also the darkest night sky in the contiguous United States and a chili cook-off founded by Carroll Shelby. Questions run from easy to expert with the difficulty shown on each one. Every answer was checked against a reference page and each question carries its citation. If you enjoy this one, try our Yellowstone and US National Parks quizzes next.
30 of 47 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Big Bend National Park takes its name from a great curve in which river?
The Rio Grande
The Rio Grande, which forms well over 1,000 miles of the US–Mexico border, makes a sweeping turn along the park's southern edge, cutting three deep limestone canyons.
Q 02Big Bend is the largest US protected area of which of North America's deserts?
Chihuahuan
Big Bend is the largest US protected area of the Chihuahuan Desert, which stretches deep into Mexico; south of the river the park is flanked by two Mexican protected areas.
Q 03The Chisos Mountains hold what distinction among US mountain ranges?
The only range entirely inside one national park
They cover just 40 square miles and are the southernmost range in the mainland United States, but not the whole country.
Q 04The whole park lies within which single Texas county?
Brewster
Brewster County, the largest county in Texas, holds the entire park; its seat, Alpine, is about 100 miles from park headquarters.
Q 05What is the highest point in the park?
Emory Peak
Emory Peak rises to about 7,825 feet, roughly 6,000 feet above the river, and is named for William H. Emory, chief surveyor of the 1852 boundary survey; from the basin the nearer Casa Grande looks taller.
Q 06Which of these is not one of the three canyons the river cuts through the park?
Palo Duro
Palo Duro is the huge canyon in the Texas Panhandle; the park's three cut through limestone uplifts with nearly vertical walls.
Q 07How many bird species have been recorded in the park?
More than 450
More than 450 bird species have been recorded in Big Bend, more than in any other US national park; the count sits alongside some 1,200 plant species, 56 reptiles and 75 mammals.
Q 08Which small grey songbird breeds nowhere in the United States except the high canyons of the Chisos?
Colima warbler
The Colima warbler arrives in mid-April, nests on the ground in the oak-maple woods around Boot Canyon and the South Rim, and heads back to southwestern Mexico by mid-September.
Q 09Roughly how many cougars actually live in the park, despite some 150 sightings reported each year?
Around two dozen
Only around two dozen cougars are thought to live in the park; most animals hide by day, and it comes alive at night with coyotes, kangaroo rats, grey foxes and collared peccaries.
Q 10Which animal recolonised the Chisos Mountains on its own in the late 1980s?
Mexican black bear
Mexican black bears, nearly wiped out locally by the mid-1900s, wandered back into the Chisos from Mexico's Sierra del Carmen in the late 1980s and re-established a breeding population.
Q 11Which predator did the state of Texas refuse to let the park reintroduce in the late 1980s?
Mexican wolf
Texas blocked a late-1980s plan to reintroduce the Mexican wolf, arguing over whether the park held enough deer and javelinas to feed a pack; the subspecies had been wiped out in Texas by 1970.
Q 12How many cactus species grow in the park?
About 60
About 60 cactus species grow in Big Bend, prickly pear, claretcup and pitaya the showy ones; the park has some 1,200 plant species overall and about 3,600 kinds of insect.
Q 13Camps along the Rio Grande once boiled which desert plant for a commercial product?
Candelilla
Candelilla (Euphorbia antisyphilitica) yields a hard vegetable wax, boiled out of the stems at riverside camps; candelilla wax went into cosmetics, polishes and chewing gum, a mainstay of the border economy.
Q 21What was the area called when lawmakers in Austin first protected it in 1933?
Texas Canyons State Park
The legislature created Texas Canyons State Park in 1933 and renamed it Big Bend State Park later that year; Congress passed enabling legislation in 1935 and Texas deeded the land to the federal government.
Q 22In which year did Big Bend become a national park and open to visitors?
1944
Big Bend became a national park on June 12, 1944 and opened to visitors on July 1 that year, in the middle of World War II.
Q 23Between 2009 and 2019, about how many people visited the park in an average year?
377,000
Big Bend averaged about 377,000 visitors a year between 2009 and 2019, making it one of the least-visited national parks in the lower 48 as well as one of the largest and most remote.
Q 14Which giant pterosaur was found in the park's Javelina Formation in 1971?
Quetzalcoatlus
Quetzalcoatlus, named for the Aztec feathered-serpent god Quetzalcoatl, was found when graduate student Douglas Lawson spotted a wing bone in an arroyo; its wingspan is estimated at 33 to 36 feet.
Q 15Barnum Brown and R.T. Bird found neck vertebrae of which giant sauropod in the park in 1940?
Alamosaurus
Alamosaurus, a long-necked titanosaur, is the park's giant sauropod; Brown and Bird's 1940 dig also turned up jawbones of the huge crocodylian Deinosuchus.
Q 16The park's redesigned Fossil Discovery Exhibit opened in which year?
2017
The redesigned Fossil Discovery Exhibit opened in January 2017; it replaced an older roadside bone display that had shown the horse ancestor Hyracotherium and the hippo-like Coryphodon, whose real fossils were swapped for replicas.
Q 17Which people crossed the park on a named trail on their way to raid deep into Mexico until the mid-1800s?
Comanche
The Comanche Trail passed near the hot springs on the river; the last great native war leader in the region was an Apache of Spanish ancestry named Alzate.
Q 18Which Spanish explorer's expedition passed near the Big Bend around 1535?
Cabeza de Vaca
Cabeza de Vaca, a shipwreck survivor walking across the continent, passed near the Big Bend around 1535; later Spanish expeditions hunted metals or converts, and in the late 1700s Spain built presidios along the river.
Q 19Lieutenant Henry Flipper, who served near the Big Bend, was the first African American to do what?
Graduate from West Point
Many soldiers guarding Trans-Pecos Texas were Black 'buffalo soldiers', a name apparently given to them by Native Americans.
Q 20A May 1916 raid on which settlement led Wilson to mobilise the Texas National Guard and station cavalry there?
Glenn Springs
Glenn Springs, a wax-camp settlement with a nine-man Army detachment, was raided on the night of May 5, 1916; the attack drew national headlines during the Mexican Revolution.
Q 24Which metal was extracted from the cinnabar ore mined at Terlingua and Mariscal?
Mercury
Mercury, or quicksilver, was roasted out of cinnabar; the Terlingua district yielded nearly 150,000 flasks before falling prices shut its mines in the 1940s, and Native Americans reportedly used the red ore for pictographs.
Q 25What is the V-shaped notch in the Chisos Basin's western rim called?
The Window
The Window is the pour-off notch through which the Chisos Basin drains westward; the Window Trail descends about 2.8 miles from the Basin trailhead to its slickrock lip.
Q 26Which Chicago businessman founded the Chisos Mining Company that built Terlingua?
Howard Perry
Howard Perry, a Chicago businessman, founded the Chisos Mining Company in 1903; his mine ran 23 miles of workings on 17 levels before the company went bankrupt in 1942.
Q 27Which car maker with a huge ranch nearby co-founded Terlingua's 1967 chili cook-off?
Carroll Shelby
Carroll Shelby, who owned a huge ranch near Terlingua, helped launch the 1967 cook-off with writer Frank X. Tolbert; two rival championships grew from it, held on the first Saturday of November.
Q 28Visitors cross the Rio Grande to which Mexican village, whose crossing reopened in 2013?
Boquillas del Carmen
Boquillas del Carmen lost nearly half its people after the crossing was closed following the September 11 attacks; it reopened in April 2013 as a Class B port of entry with limited weekly hours.
Q 29What did the mining company at Boquillas build across the river around 1900 to move ore?
A cable car
The company strung an aerial cable car, or tramway, about six miles across the river to carry ore from Mexico's Sierra del Carmen mines; up to 4,000 people lived in the village until mining stopped in 1919.
Q 30Since June 2009, what does Homeland Security consider a river float trip in the park to be?
An international departure
Because the river is the border, Homeland Security has treated a float trip as an international departure since June 2009; paddlers need a passport or similar ID to 're-enter' the United States even if they never touch the Mexican bank.