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Robert Beal
El Jardin of Good and Tired

I. Into Old Mexico

Tuesday - 7 Dec 2004
Big Bend National Park , West Texas - U. S. A.


The Chisos Mountains, within Big Bend National Park, support a Chihuahuan Desert sky island; the scramble up Emory Peak tops out them out at 7825 feet. The park includes 1250 square miles of West Texas, equivalent to a square that is 50 miles from corner to corner, and has the huge Big Bend Ranch State Park to its west and the huge Black Gap Wildlife Management Area to its east. It is in Brewster County, the biggest county in the lower 48; the county seat and closest town, Alpine, is 100 miles north of the entrance to Mariscal Canyon where the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo del Norte begins a big bend. The Rio runs 110 miles through the park, and it is on the other side that the country really opens up.

While there are increasing numbers of visitors to the park, the Chihuahuan/Coahuillan backcountry of Big Bend is one of the least populated parts of Mexico—a disecumene, my favorite kind of place. This is big, empty, dramatic vista country, through which in October one of the fiercest of all tribes used to raid under the Comanche moon, from the buffalo paradise of the Llano Estacado, terrorizing, plundering, sometimes all the way to the Yucatan, returning driving remudas of fine horses, many of which carried traumatized captives who would fetch handsome ransoms for enterprising traders in the Spanish city of Albuquerque.

The fear-rich post 9/11 environment provided the convenient excuse to finally close centuries-old informal international boundary crossings from both Mexico and Canada. Now the Big Bend region’s only legal border crossings are 300 river miles apart. One crossing is to the east in Via Acuña/Del Rio downriver from the Lower Canyons; the other is upriver in Ojinaga/Presidio at the mouth of the Rio Conchos, which flows northeast from the Barrancas del Cobre region of southwestern Chihuahua and at the whim of the Mexican dam authorities provides most of whatever flow the Rio Grande might have from there on. While the dollar has been luring away villagers for decades, just before 9/11 there were nearly 200 folks in my wife’s family’s native village of Santa Elena, namesake of and just downriver from the park’s most famous canyon (its 1500-foot high mouth the subject of an Ansel Adam’s photograph). Now with village rowboat ferries illegal and the tourists gone, about four families remain in Santa Elena, gardening, farming, ranching, and hunting along the now often waterless floodplain.

Few people make the day-long first- and second-gear drive from the border cities into the desplobado—the no-one-home country. Farther into Mexico from Big Bend—to the west, south, and east—the few ranchitos and ejidos are sparse dots on the desert, far even from the few roads to the few trading towns, and at $3 (US) for a gallon of Mexican gas, even fewer rigs are rolling these days. The sky islands that loom above the desert remain strongholds of solitude. Five years before I met Iselda, I took a pack through what is now called the Maderas del Carmen Protected Zone of northeastern Coahuilla and while in the Sierra del Jardin for nearly two weeks found no recent signs of man. As my father-in-law Hilario Acosta says, “It’s quiet over there.” (Hilario regularly makes the long-way-around trip through Ojinaga to Santa Elena from his and Dominga’s adobe hacienda in Terlingua, visiting and/or staying with friends and relatives as he goes—this is his journey now, instead of the 45-minute drive using one of the roads he used to grade for the Park Service. His destination, Santa Elena, is incredibly only about 16 miles as the crow flies down Terlingua Creek.)

From the southeastern part of Big Bend National Park, looking across into Mexico, the escarpment of the Sierra del Carmen and its distinctive Cerro Pico Cerda loom impressively over Boquillas Canyon. This is a part of the big bend, just downriver from the village of Boquillas del Carmen, where the 1800-mile river (our second-longest) runs, for about 2½ miles, northwest back toward its source in the La Garita Mountains of Colorado—even, for a half mile, chasing its tail south of west.

Eastward, in Coahuilla, the uplifted limestone El Carmen reef tilts down and under the base of an igneous mountain range labeled on Mexican maps as Sierra del Carmen (El Jardin). This ruggedly carved volcanic milieu rises high enough, to about 9400 feet, to support fine stands of, in descending order, spruce, fir, and pine, blending into who-knows-how-many kinds of oak, with some parks and savannaha, as well as madrone, maples, juniper, and, then, scrub oak, sometimes in impenetrable thickets spilling through chutes between rock palisades and, in places, on open slopes(Sierra Nevada scrub oak did in the Donner party). Sotol, century plant, yuccas (palmas), and blue agave predominate on the yet lower slopes, while the signature Chihuahuan desert plant—lechuguilla (don’t “let it getcha”)—prefers the limestone soils of the long, sloping back of the El Carmen slab to which the northwest-flowing canyons of the Sierra del Jardin lead. Back toward Boquillas, down off the west-facing El Carmen escarpment and its foothills, the waves of the creosote sea lap onto the benches above the Rio flood plain at 1800 feet elevation. Mexico has designated this entire area across from the east side of Big Bend National Park as the Maderas del Carmen Protected Area, for what that is worth.

Ten years ago, with a one-way ride and three Mexico government maps purchased from a couple of gringo river guides in Boquillas, I surrendered to this country as it took me for a 15-day walkabout, one of my most compelling and challenging.









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