In February, we had a wonderful opportunity to tour the Dead Horse Mountain Ranch. The ranch is over 10,000 acres situated between Big Bend National Park and The Black Gap Wildlife Management Area. Our friends at Hidden Daggers Adventures offer outfitting and guided adventures at the ranch and the surrounding parklands. In the near future, we will start offering excursion packages from the Desert Air Motel guided by Hidden Daggers Adventures. Stay tuned for more on this!

Our crew getting ready to leave the motel on Friday morning.

Tara and Joe are excellent tour guides! They are a wealth of knowledge when it comes to the plants, wildlife, culture, and history of the area. Tara’s family has been in the area for many generations and started acquiring the land that makes up the Dead Horse Mountain Ranch back in the 1980s.

We left the motel on a Friday morning and made our way to Marathon. We stopped at The French Grocer for some provisions before heading towards the ranch.

Tara and Joe outside of The French Grocer

The ranch is located off of 2627 which is the road leading down to the old ghost town of La Linda. The lodge at their ranch is about a 45-minute ride on a dirt road off of 2627. As you make your way deeper into the ranch, it becomes evident why they named their company Hidden Daggers.

A shot of our van driving the dirt roads in the ranch.

We had a blast cruising around on the UTVs. Some of the dirt roads are a little too primitive to traverse in a normal vehicle.

One of several UTVs available at the ranch.

We had the privilege of being the first guests to rappel down one of the canyon faces.

They had also just recently finished a trail to the top of one of the Dead Horse Mountain peaks. As you summit the mountain you have a panoramic view of Big Bend National Park. You can see Persimmon Gap, Grapevine Hills, and the Chisos Basin from the perch.