About five miles in, RR 170 enters, then straddles, Big Bend Ranch State Park.
Where the river ends, a long stretch through flatlands starts carving into earth again. Locals call RR 170 the “River Road” because it hugs the Rio Grande starting at Presidio, a dusty, low-slung border town once favored by Pancho Villa. To get to Ranch Road (RR) 170 requires time and effort it’s about 250 miles from the nearest big city (El Paso), and its start is basically the back door to what’s already one of the U.S.’s most remote National Parks: Big Bend. Route: Ranch Road 170 from Presidio to Terlingua It’s as close to a feeling of “This road is allll miiiiine!” as you’ll get. You’ll come close to catching air before some dips, and need to brake deftly before and after FM 349’s many semi-blind corners. So why risk it? No one uses it so it’s in great condition and because it snakes through the scrub-peppered western gullies of the Pecos River, it’s a phenomenal test of your ride’s suspension. This is where No Country for Old Men took place. You will, at times, think you’re speeding across another planet. You will see more vultures than vehicles.
The real Lonesome Highway is FM 349, which bisects one of America’s least densely populated counties: Terrell, population 900 or so, nearly all of whom live in a village not even on this road. 62/180 just south of Guadalupe National Park is known as the Lonesome Highway because of the scene it sets: A dead-straight asphalt strip in abject desolation that points straight at El Capitan.
#Easiest driving test routes in austin series#
Once you power past the two-mile stretch that crosses the Lake Ray Roberts dam, FM 455 becomes a meandering series of gentle turns and swells - with a few more of those right-angle corners peppered in to keep you and the farmers honest - all the way to Montague. Thing is, Dallas’s decades-long expansion north is starting to seep into FM 455 here, to the point that this portion’s been in varying states of repair for years. The result was roads built between those patches, with straight sections connected by a sharp 90-degree turn.įor the first 25 miles to Pilot Point, FM 455 north of Dallas is a mass of these strung together, making it a superb stretch for acceleration-brake transitions and low-speed apexing. When some FMs were paved, farmers didn’t want concrete mucking up their patches of land. In the good ol’ days, farm-to-market (FM) roads were made so farmers could get crops to the county seat without having to drive the tractor or buy a muddin’ four-by.