Hello, Cheryl! For Santa Elena specifically, there was no parking issues. The lot does fill up. However, you can park along the road leading up to the parking lot, which is what we did. You will have to cross Terlingua Creek before getting to the trail. Thus, I do recommend wearing water shoes. I would recommend Merrell all out blaze water shoe (those are the water shoes I wore to hike the narrows at Zion). However, for this trip, I wore cheaper Zhuanglin Women's Quick Drying Aqua Water Shoes off of Amazon and they worked out well. Hope that helps! Have fun at Big Bend NP!

@@hr_adventures thanks, I’ll see if I can find my shoes and if not, I’ve still got time to order!