Chapter II: Part 3: Guide and Adviser 110 (1)

Map of the Park 112
Approaching Big Bend 114
Facilities and Services 117
Walking Trips and Hiking 119
Birding 120
Floating the River 122
Fishing 123
Tips for Desert Travelers 124
Park Regulations 125
Armchair Explorations 126

Index 127

1 Welcome to Big Bend Country

Where Rainbows Wait for Rain

Far down on the Mexican border the Rio Grande makes a great U-turn. Inside this mighty curve lies a national park and the special and spectacular section of southwest Texas known as “Big Bend Country.” More than a century ago a Mexican cowboy described Big Bend as “Where the rainbows wait for the rain, and the big river is kept in a stone box, and water runs uphill and mountains float in the air, except at night when they go away to play with other mountains....” This land is so vast and so wild that you can feel your human smallness and frailty. Silence takes on the quality of sound, and isolation can bring you face to face with the interdependence of all life forms.

Paradox abounds. There is killing heat and freezing cold; deadly drought and flash flood; arid lowland and moist mountain woodland; and a living river winding its way across the desert.

Spanish explorers called Big Bend the “unknown land,” and for hundreds of years civilization passed it by on either side. Entrenched behind deep river canyons and walled in by rough and rugged mountains, this vast country remains today a world apart. Fewer than 13,000 people occupy an area about the size of Maryland, mostly in two or three towns strung along the highway to the north. Only three paved roads run south into Big Bend, and whatever route you take, you’ll find yourself in country that looks less and less familiar the farther you penetrate it. Here are the landscapes, plants, and animals typical of the Chihuahuan Desert, a high dry wilderness that spills northward out of Mexico into far west Texas and southern New Mexico.

Basically, Big Bend’s desert is a rolling land of creosotebush and bunch grass. But it grows gorgeous forests of giant yucca and solid stands of lechuguilla, a barbed and bladed plant found only in the Chihuahuan Desert. Big Bend’s desert has living sand dunes, painted badlands, and petrified trees, and since it is a geologically young desert, its landforms stand in rugged relief. Igneous dikes march across plain and mountain like so many man-made stone walls. Chimney-tall stacks thrust up from barren flats as from a ruin. Volcanic ash heaps, white as snow, lean their concrete shoulders against maroon hills.

The Indians used to say that after making the Earth, the Great Spirit dumped the leftover rocks on Big Bend. Heaped up, scattered wide, and piled into mountains, they lie here to this day. Since vegetation is so scant, Big Bend mountains take their shape and color from the rocks of which they are made. They loom castellated, cathedral-domed, flattopped, and razor-backed. They look red, yellow, gray, black, white, and all the shades of brown, empurpled by distance or misted over after rain in a gauzy film of green. You don’t know which is more awe-inspiring, looking up or looking down, since the mountains rise with striking suddenness between the vaulted sky and the open plain. Approaching the Chisos Mountains for the first time, you can’t believe that cars can breach those bastions, or that high inside there actually is a Basin where travelers have camped since people first gazed on these mountains. Undulating foothills fling themselves like breakers against the sheer rock cliffs. Standing atop the escarpment that walls up the Chisos South Rim, you see hills and mountains rolling like ocean waves far, far below, with here and there a gleam of silver where the river runs.

Big Bend’s Rio Grande takes its moods from the weather, the season, the time of day, and the changing nature of its bed and banks. The river runs lavender-rose at sunset, brown between frost-reddened shrubs, shining like a tin roof under hazy skies, white as chopped ice where rapids churn, olive-green beneath the brooding cliffs of Old Mexico. Nobody knows which came first, the mountains or a through-flowing river, but for hundreds of river kilometers the Rio dodges and doubles, and where it cannot go around it rasps its way across the mountains. Deep-cut canyons alternate with narrow valleys walled in by towering cliffs. You can’t get across except at a handful of fords, or up steep trails at favorable stages of water. These canyons and escarpments lend Big Bend its monumental character, for as it digs, the river lays bare millions of years of Earth history. To run a desert river canyon is to penetrate the long, tortuous corridor from everlasting to everlasting: Time is here turned to stone. Imprisoned, yet wild and free, the Rio runs the ages down inside a rock-ribbed vault.

Human beings have lived in the Big Bend area for ten to twelve thousand years. The first to come were probably nomadic hunters following the big game that drifted south ahead of the last great continental ice sheet. They hunted elephant, camel, bison, pronghorn, and horses, as indicated by their kill sites discovered in the mesa and Pecos River country to the north and east of the park. But as the Earth warmed up and glaciers melted, a deadly dryness crept eastward from Mexico’s Sierra Madre Occidental and engulfed Big Bend. Moisture-loving plants died out or were driven out by drought-resistant species, and as the climate and vegetation changed, so did the animals. Many Ice Age mammals perished forever and the hunters themselves seem to have disappeared.

Not surprisingly, the next people to infiltrate Big Bend were nomadic Indians adapted to desert life. Theirs was a follow-the-food economy, and they camped in caves and rock shelters close to such water sources as the Rio Grande and its tributaries, springs, and rock wells. They hunted desert animals for meat and skins, ate juniper berries, pricklypears, century plant hearts, yucca blossoms, and mesquite beans. They made baskets, nets, mats, and sandals from basketgrass and the long slim leaves of the yucca. Today, thousands of years later, remnants of these may still be found in dry caves. These prehistoric nomads also disappeared, perhaps killed or absorbed by the Jumanos, a semi-pueblo people who came to occupy the river valleys west of the park.

Cabeza de Vaca and his companions are thought to have been the first Spaniards to reach Big Bend. In 1535 they were astonished to find a farming people—probably the Jumanos at Presidio—living in actual houses at the junction of two rivers. Many years were to pass before the _conquistadores_ scouted this far country. Driven by their lust for gold and silver and zealous to Christianize the Indians, the Spaniards ignored Big Bend because they thought this unpeopled desert held no riches. The only Indians then living in the park were the Chisos, a tribe from north central Mexico that passed its summers in the mountains north of the Rio Grande. The Spaniards had the habit of enslaving Indians to work their mines, and the Chisos retaliated by coming down from Big Bend to raid the Spaniards. In 1644 the Chisos won a great victory, but in the end, they were driven out by a new group of Indians who filtered down the Rio Grande from New Mexico. These were the Mescalero Apaches, so-called because they ate the heart of the “mescal” or century plant. So fierce and skilled in battle were they that even the Spaniards fled before them. By 1720 they dominated Big Bend, becoming known as Chisos Apaches. Regarding themselves as mountain folk, the Apaches became the most successful desert dwellers and guerrilla fighters this country has ever known. What nature did not provide they took by raiding. Belatedly the Spaniards tried to stop the raids by building forts near major Rio Grande fords. One of these, a combination mission and presidio, was built about 1770 on the Mexican side at the park’s San Vicente crossing. But the Apaches kept up the pressure, the Spaniards fled, and the fort soon lay in decay.

About this same time a new group of raiders, the Comanches, appeared in Big Bend. These nomadic buffalo hunters may have been the finest horsemen the world has ever seen. They ruled the south plains from Oklahoma to Texas and used Big Bend as a highroad to Mexico. For more than a hundred years, at the full of the September moon, the painted warriors crossed the Pecos and swept down past the flattopped hills and on up the long, empty, gently sloping desert floor toward the blue mountains, threading the Santiagos at Persimmon Gap where U.S. 385 now enters the park. They forded the Rio Grande at present-day Lajitas, picked Mexico clean as far south as Durango, and turned home at the end of the year. Driving captives and herds of horses and cattle northward, they probably recrossed the Rio at Paso de Chisos just to the west of Mariscal Canyon. We are told that for decades after the last Comanche left Big Bend, the great War Trail burned like a white scar across the landscape, scuffed bare by countless hooves.

Anglo-Americans took no interest in Big Bend until the Mexican War of 1848 fixed the border along the Rio Grande. In the 1850s, two U.S. Boundary Survey teams traveled downriver by boat and mule train, and their published reports give the first scientific look at Big Bend country and its plants and wildlife. But for the next quarter-century Big Bend belonged to the Indians, and to the U.S. troopers who pushed endless patrols across its everlasting wilderness, facing sun, thirst, alkali dust, danger, and sometimes death, for $13 a month. The Mescaleros knew the country. They knew how to use its mountains, caves, canyons, and arroyos, and where to find water, wood, grass, and game. But tracked at last into their most secret and remote retreats, nothing remained for them but the reservation. As for the Chisos Apaches, they were tricked into Mexico by a promise of asylum, only to be captured and killed or dispersed across Mexico.

Although Big Bend Indians had long used cinnabar red in their war paint and rock paintings, not until the end of the last century did commercial mining of cinnabar ore begin. To look at the ruins of Terlingua and Study Butte today, it is hard to imagine that 2,000 souls lived and worked just west of the park. Yet the Chisos Mining Company was once the world’s second largest quicksilver mine, producing 100,000 flasks of mercury between 1900 and 1941. The park’s own Mariscal Mine had a relatively short life and never really made money. All of the mines finally succumbed when the rich ore veins played out and the price of quicksilver fell. Similar fates overtook the copper, zinc, and lead mines that drew a couple thousand people to both sides of the river near present-day Boquillas. These mines were located in Mexico’s Sierra del Carmen and the ore crossed the river to the U.S. side via a steam-driven aerial tramway. Mule-drawn wagons and trucks then hauled it over the Old Ore Road to railhead at Marathon 160 kilometers (100 miles) away.

To feed the miners, Anglos and Mexicans set up irrigated farms near Boquillas, along Castolon valley, and at Terlingua Abaja. These activities took an enormous toll on Big Bend’s natural resources. Woodsmen scoured the country far and wide for timber for buildings and for firing mine furnaces. Ore train mules fed heavily on the chino grama grass. And when the mines failed and the farmers abandoned their fields, they left the land so bare that much time went by before the desert shrubs began taking over.

Ranching did not really come to Big Bend until after the Indian Wars. But once surveying parties began to locate and survey sections, cattle, sheep, goats, and horses came by trail and rail to feed upon the virgin grasslands. First-comers took up lands with permanent water; from the earliest days ranchmen headquartered at Oak Spring in the Chisos. Later arrivals had to dig wells and install windmills as Sam Nail did at the Old Ranch. The 1930s saw the end of “open range” ranching, and fencing became a prime concern for such ranchers as the Burnhams at Government Spring and Homer Wilson in the Chisos. Other ever-present problems involved water resources, drought, livestock losses from disease and predators, and remoteness from markets, schools, and doctors. Most ranchers understood the land and many loved it. They used their pastures to capacity, but they did not overstock the range until the 1940s. Then, just before the national park came into being, ruinous overgrazing all but wiped out the grasslands.

Today, Big Bend National Park sprawls across 3,205 square kilometers (1,252 square miles) inside the southernmost tip of the Bend. Even with interstate highways, park headquarters is a long way off. It is 660 kilometers (410 miles) from San Antonio to Panther Junction, 520 kilometers (323 miles) from El Paso, 173 kilometers (108 miles) from Alpine’s meals and motels, 110 kilometers (68 miles) from the last community, Marathon. But the journey is well worth the effort, because the park preserves some of the nation’s most dramatic land forms and rarest life forms.

The main body of the park is a great 65-kilometer (40-mile) wide trough or “sunken block” that began to subside millions of years ago, when Mesa de Anguila and Sierra del Carmen cracked off and slowly tilted up to the west and east. The Rio Grande draws the park’s southern boundary, slicing through three mountain ranges to form Santa Elena, Mariscal, and Boquillas Canyons. And right in the middle of the sunken block, rising higher than all the other mountains, the Chisos hang above the desert like a blue mirage.

What makes a desert, of course, is scanty precipitation. And because of the great range in altitude—from 550 meters (1,800 feet) along the river to 2,400 meters (7,800 feet) atop the Chisos—there is a wide variation in available moisture and in temperature throughout the park. This has produced an exceptional diversity in plant and animal habitats. Receiving less than 25 centimeters (10 inches) of rainfall in a year, almost half the park is shrub desert. This plant community begins right next to the river and runs on up to about 1,050 meters (3,500 feet). Another 49 percent of the park is desert grassland, a somewhat less dry environment that you will encounter on mesa tops and foothills to about 1,700 meters (5,500 feet). From there on up, mountain canyons and slopes may sustain typical southwestern woodlands with pinyons, junipers, and oak trees. The Chisos heights receive some 46 centimeters (18 inches) of rain per year and are considerably cooler than the desert. Consequently you will even find 325 hectares (800 acres) of forest in two or three high canyons, where towering Rocky Mountain-type trees persist from cooler, moister times. And that is not all: A lush green jungle grows in a narrow belt along each bank of the Rio Grande and pushes out across the desert along creeks and arroyos. And in the river itself live creatures you wouldn’t expect to find in the middle of the desert!

Big Bend National Park is home to more than 70 species of mammals, almost as many species of reptiles and amphibians, a score or more fishes, and a fascinating host of insects and other arthropods. The wide choice of habitats makes Big Bend a birder’s paradise that offers more different resident and migrant birds than any other U.S. national park. Thanks to its location, the park marks the southernmost reach of some U.S. plant and animal species, and the northernmost reach of some Mexican species. Some plants and animals found here occur nowhere else in the world.

Since its establishment in 1944, the national park has developed programs and facilities in line with its two-fold purpose of preserving and protecting natural and historic values while also enriching the lives of its visitors. Santa Elena Canyon and historic Castolon form an important sight-seeing area in the southwestern corner of the park, and the road from Panther Junction to Santa Elena is probably the most scenic in the park. The Basin lies in the heart of the Chisos Mountains. This beautiful valley has complete motel, dining, and camping facilities, and an amphitheater where park naturalists give evening programs. The Rio Grande Village-Boquillas area on the southeast side of the park offers delightful camping, a visit to the nearby Mexican village of Boquillas, and a view of Boquillas Canyon’s magnificent portal. More than 175 kilometers (110 miles) of paved park roads link major sites and well-kept hiking, horse, and nature trails will take you to other spectacular areas. For properly equipped desert buffs, primitive backcountry roads and trails offer exciting opportunities for true wilderness adventure.

But whether you come to the park for a weekend or a week, for vistas and views, or for a close-up look at nature and its mysteries, you will find that Big Bend is more than the sum of its parts. When the setting sun paints the Sierra del Carmen red and blue and purple, you feel both Big Bend’s unity with all Earth processes and its wonderful uniqueness. In those many-colored cliffs hung above the desert, you see rainbows waiting ripe with promise for the miracle of rain.

2 From the Rio to the Chisos

_Text by Helen Moss_

A World of Difference

Stand on the bald knob of Emory Peak and you’ll see the Chihuahuan Desert rolled out below you with wave upon wave of mesas and mountains reaching out to the rim of the world. You can see for hundreds of kilometers in all directions. Not a house, not another human being, no living thing moves. Big Bend looks round, complete, as timeless and permanent as planet Earth itself and as beautiful and barren as the Moon. But Big Bend isn’t just one world, and it isn’t lifeless. It is many different worlds inhabited by countless creatures both great and small pursuing an extraordinary variety of lifestyles. These worlds may be as narrow as the mosquitofish’s spring-fed pool, as wide as the cougar’s hunting range, as dry as the pocket mouse’s burrow, as wet as the beaver’s pond, as open as the mule deer’s golden grassland, or as canopied as the Colima warbler’s forested canyon.

And the Big Bend world is not as changeless as it seems. Over an unthinkably long span of geologic time, and sometimes overnight, Big Bend has experienced sweeping changes that carried off whole communities of plants and animals. The great order of dinosaurs died out, and no one knows why, yet the scorpion and turtle have lived on here virtually unchanged through countless ages. Other plants and animals have staked survival on the long, slow process of adaptation to a changing environment. While one ancient lily evolved into grass, for example, another became the giant dagger we see today. Cholla cactus shades itself with thorns and the kangaroo rat manages never to take a drink.

In Big Bend as elsewhere, what animals live where is largely determined by what plants grow where. This in turn depends on such variables as the type and condition of the soil, elevation, climate, temperature, humidity, amount of cloud cover and direct sunlight, exposure to the wind, availability of water, and the drastic changes for bad and for good wrought by man. Yet there is nothing clear-cut or fixed about the edges of the different plant communities. The floodplain goes green or returns to dust depending on the river’s rise or fall. The shrub desert, the grasslands, and the woodlands all crawl uphill or down, putting out skirmishers along their lines of march. Within the national park natural forces are once again free to shape and reshape Big Bend’s different worlds. The battle seesaws back and forth between drought and ponderosa pine, tarbush and tabosa-grass, the eater and the eaten, the river and the rock, and the sun and the ageless land.

In Big Bend you can turn back your personal clock to a time when mankind was still very obviously part of nature. You can walk in the desert and drink solitude as sweet as spring water or sit on the edge of a mountain meadow knee-deep in grass. You can watch the whitetail deer drift through the forest in a silence as perfect and ethereal as song, watching you but expressing no fear. For in the park you are just one more of nature’s creatures free to live and to grow in Big Bend’s self-healing, life-renewing world.

For many people the spirit of the desert is embodied in the vulture tirelessly circling empty skies above a bleak and barren land, the harvester of death keeping watch over desolation. But the desert is far from lifeless or the vulture wouldn’t be on patrol. The meager shrubs are miracles of adaptation and those seeming barren wastes rustle under the feet of countless busy creatures. Across the eons evolutionary selection has produced a different design for living within each species, yet all are subject to the same law.

Heat and aridity are the chief factors controlling all Chihuahuan Desert life. Most desert creatures stay in hiding during the day, keeping out of the sun in underground burrows, under rocks, or in the shrubs’ sparse shade. Many birds and most larger mammals don’t even visit the desert during the heat of the day. And although plants cannot crawl out from under the sun, nature has protected them by different means.

Probably the best way to see the living desert is to get out and walk and look. Study a plot of shrub desert in a single day and night. The most obvious desert dwellers, and sometimes the only living things you will see, are the plants. These vary from one stretch of desert to another because different species prefer different living conditions. But you will likely find plants in several categories, including woody and fibrous shrubs, cactuses, and other succulents. All have their own ways of resisting heat and drought, and all provide food or shelter to one or another special animal.

If success can be judged by sheer numbers, then the most successful desert shrub must be creosotebush, an evergreen bush that can make a living on the poorest and driest soils. You cannot mistake it for any other. The ground around it is apt to be bare and the individual bushes so evenly spaced that they look hand planted. This characteristic creosotebush pattern is probably caused by root competition for scant moisture. Each creosotebush has a long taproot reaching down maybe 9 meters (30 feet) to find underground water, while a network of shallow roots spreads far and wide to capture every drop of surface moisture. The plant protects itself from moisture loss by giving its dark green leaves a light-reflecting coat of resin. In the springtime, and often after rain, it bursts into brief yellow flower. It fruits in fuzzy little white balls, and you sometimes see a plant bearing both fruits and flowers.

Fortunately for the creosotebush, its taste is so unpleasant that few large animals care to eat it. But the little creosotebush grasshopper spends his whole life living and nibbling on the shrub. You’ll hear him chirping away in a creosotebush, but unless he jumps you may never find him. He’s a great ventriloquist who across countless generations has evolved protective coloring, the same dark green as creosote leaves, marked with the same red and white of its little stems and fruits. You may never see the mottled gray and black walking-stick insect either, who sticks his front legs straight out in front of him to look exactly like a woody creosotebush twig. Creosotebush holds the desert soil as blowing sands heap hummocks around its stems, and these make favorite burrowing sites for all sorts of little desert rodents and reptiles. Look under almost any creosotebush, and you will see their holes. You may even see a busy line of ants taking bits of creosote leaf and fruit to an underground nest.

Another curious woody shrub resembles a sheaf of coachwhips. If you see ocotillo after rain, it will look like a green fountain. If you see it during a dry spell, you may think it is dead. Not so. Ocotillo puts on a fresh close-fitting suit of green leaves whenever it rains. Then as soil and air dry out, it sheds its leaves right down to the bare brown stems. This cuts back on the plant’s water needs. Moisture loss is further reduced by resinous cells that form the inner bark. In springtime the tip of each ocotillo wand burns with a cluster of scarlet flowers.

Cactuses have done away with leaves altogether, thus reducing their surface area and cutting down on moisture loss. Although they look dry and forbidding, inside that harsh exterior their flesh is moist and succulent. The food-making function has been taken over by the thick, green, wax-covered stems. And since the stems are also used to store water, they have ballooned into a weird and wonderful assortment of shapes and sizes. You’ll find the mound-building strawberry cactus with its mass of finger-like heads, the Texas rainbow cactus with its small group of cylindrical heads topped by bright yellow flowers, the tuber-like living rock, the dog and cane cholla, and the great sprawling pricklypear that lifts its beavertails from desert flat to mountaintop.

Cactuses come heavily armed with spines so cleverly shaped that they are called “fish-hook,” “eagle’s claw,” and “horse crippler.” These spines serve a double purpose: By building a lattice work around the stem of a cactus they shade it from the sun, and in many cases they make the cactus too prickly for animals to eat. Some animals have learned to use cactus spines for their own protection. The big, ratchet-voiced cactus wren likes to build its nest in the densely spined cholla, and the packrat often piles pricklypear pads in its nest area.

Pricklypear is the commonest cactus in the park and also the easiest to identify. Purple-tinged pricklypear is just what its name suggests, and so is the brown-spine pricklypear. Blind pricklypear looks as if it has no thorns, but if you touch one of the velvety buttons on a pad, you will pick up a fingerful of almost invisible, but highly irritating little spines. Engelmann pricklypear is the most abundant species. And to human taste its fruits are delicious, although the tiny glochids, barbed spines, can hurt the mouth. Many desert creatures eat pricklypear: Flies, bees, and butterflies come to feast at the showy blossoms; birds, coyotes, peccaries, and deer eat the reddish fruits; small rodents reach between the spines to nibble on the juicy pads. In times of drought ranchers burn off the spines and feed the pads to cattle. And people lost in the desert can do as the Indians did—peel, cut, or roast the skin off the pads and the flesh yields both food and moisture. Some pricklypears are too bitter to eat, however.

Cactuses

One of the most interesting plants in the Chihuahuan Desert is a sturdy bunch of blades called lechuguilla. This fiercely spined agave lives nowhere else in the world. When Cabeza de Vaca crossed Big Bend in 1535, the lechuguilla grew so thick that he didn’t dare walk at night. Today you find it growing singly or in colonies from the shrub desert clear up into the Chisos woodlands, its needle points still menacing hikers, horses, and deer.

Lechuguilla is a fiber plant that keeps its juicy parts underground until it blooms, which it does only once a lifetime, after ten to fifteen years. The bloom stalk shoots up like a giant asparagus spear maybe four meters (15 feet) tall, flowering from the bottom up in close-packed purplish or yellowish blooms. Then the whole plant perishes by degrees. You may find a lechuguilla whose blades have died and dried while the bloomstalk is still moist and green. Eventually the bloomstalk, too, will turn into wood strong enough for a deer to lean against when rubbing velvet from his antlers.

Lechuguilla reproduces both by seeds and by rhizomes, and you sometimes find tiny new rosettes breaking ground on the runners of a mature plant. Peccaries often root up the juicy lechuguilla rhizomes, while mule deer relish the tender bloomstalk, munching it much as a cow chews a stalk of corn. Pocket gophers eat the core right out of a standing plant by tunneling underground.

The kinds of animals you meet in the desert will differ with the time of day and the time of year. They must find food and moisture, mate, and raise their young without exposing themselves to killing heat and the risk of dehydration. Insects, spiders, scorpions, and reptiles all derive their body temperature from their surroundings. This is why they stiffen up to the point of helplessness when it’s cold, and why crawling on a super-hot surface will kill them in short order. Their temperature regulation problems are compounded by conditions in the desert, and most of them cope by modifying their behavior.

In the early morning you may see grasshoppers sunning themselves on a rock as rattlesnakes will do. They line up broadside to the sun’s rays, raising their wings and lowering their legs to expose their abdomens directly to the sun’s warmth. By noonday they line up parallel to the sun’s rays to minimize heat absorption, and they will seek shade. Also, instead of hopping over the ground, many Big Bend grasshoppers live in and fly from bush to bush. The surface of the desert may be 20 to 25 degrees Celsius (40 to 50°F) hotter than is the air just over a meter (4 feet) above the ground. This is why in the daytime you will mostly see only flying insects, such as butterflies, grasshoppers, true bugs, true flies, and bees, and why so many crawling insects stay hidden during the heat of the day. However, there are some curious exceptions: The darkling beetle scurries about over the sand throughout the day. An air-filled space under its hard outer wing-covers acts as a kind of insulation between the back and abdomen. Some darkling beetles also raise the abdomen at an angle of about 45 degrees. Speed is of the essence for this little scavenger as it scurries from cover to shade.

Some grasshoppers are ground dwellers that have lived on the desert pavement so long that they even look like stones. Many come in conventional grasshopper shape but are mottled in shades of gray and mauve. The toadhopper that inhabits wash bottoms and rocky areas has taken on the color, shape, and texture of rock. Fat and squatty, he will camouflage himself, tucking his antenna right down in front of his face and pulling his legs in close to his body. You can’t even see him when you know he is there. By comparison, the lubber grasshopper advertises his presence. He is a large black beast gaudily marked in coral-snake red and yellow. Apparently these colors warn predators that the lubber is distasteful. He is out and about from late morning on.

Also seen in broad daylight is the worm-like millipede rippling its way across the desert pavement. This maroon-colored plant eater has up to 200 legs arranged in short double pairs along a 13-centimeter (5-inch), many-segmented body. He isn’t poisonous and won’t sting or bite, but he may emit a substance lethal enough to kill other insects in a confined area.

Of course, the chief daily events of life in the desert are eating and being eaten, and predators that favor a certain diet make it their business to be out when their kind of dinner is around. Thus the grasshopper-eating lizards brave the daytime heat to do their hunting. Most often seen is the quick moving western whiptail. The greenish collared lizard may be seen racing along on his hind legs like a miniature dinosaur. Lizards are about the biggest ground dwellers you scare up on a noonday walk—unless you happen on a lizard-eater like the big, pink western coachwhip snake.

At twilight you become most aware of the desert’s residents. The coolness brings them out. Some must hurry and eat before it gets full dark, while others have the whole night ahead of them. At first you may sense the desert’s coming-to-life more by listening than by looking. You hear the lesser nighthawk trilling like a toad. Then, without warning, the whole desert begins to sing, as katydids, grasshoppers, and crickets join in a tapestry of sound so rich you can almost touch it.

Soon the desert cottontail creeps from his thicket to nibble pricklypear fruit. He stays close to home and prefers brushy terrain. The blacktailed jackrabbit passes the day in a form, a basin scratched out beneath some bush. He can cover the ground in enormous jumps, and his megaphone ears help cool him by dissipating body heat. The desert mule deer, another blacktailed, long-eared browser, may also appear at dusk to forage mesquite and lechuguilla. And a band of peccaries—or javelinas as they are also called—may rattle through the brush. They have a great fondness for pricklypear and their mouths are so tough they eat roots, fruits, pads, spines, and all. The ferocity of these wild pig relatives is more fiction than fact. If you meet one face to face, he may take a few steps toward you, but not out of meanness. He’s nearsighted!

Evening can linger a long time in the desert and night can strike quickly as a cat’s paw. You watch the sun go down, turning the clouds above the Chisos red, painting Sierra del Carmen crimson, while a single golden shaft breaks through the clouds and hits El Pico like a spotlight. Then the sky goes smoky blue and mauve over the eastern mountains, and the clouds to the west turn ashen as burned out coals.

Lizards

Snakes

Two Non-Drinkers

The kangaroo rat metabolizes both energy and moisture from seeds
that contain less than 4 percent water. It has no sweat glands and
cools itself by breathing. Its nasal passages, cooler than the rest
of its body, condense breath moisture for retention. Its kidneys,
among the most efficient in the animal world, excrete uric wastes as
a concentrated paste, not as liquid, saving further precious water.
Its deep burrow has a year-round relative humidity between 30 and 50
percent. These rodents sometimes fight with each other, leaping high
into the air and striking at each other with their strong hind
legs.]

You can see the nighthawk now against the pale and pearly afterlight, and a star pops out, then another and another. Suddenly, more stars seem to be twinkling than can possibly exist in the universe. In the absence of man-made light they are an overwhelming presence. The Milky Way stretches from horizon to horizon. Who can believe that our Sun is just a middle-sized star, and planet Earth a mere speck spinning on the fringes of that gorgeous luminosity?

On a night of no moon, in the mist of starlight, the mule deer may stay active until dawn. On mild, windless nights the hunters and the hunted come out in full force: insect-eating scorpions, tarantulas, and wolf spiders; seed-eating pocket mice and kangaroo rats; rodent-eating snakes, badgers, and owls. What a hurrying and scurrying, what popping up from holes and burrows, what slithering and digging, what squeaks and shrieks, what patient waiting in ambush. And by what ingenious means do the hunters find the hunted in the dark! Beep-beeping bats locate insects and avoid obstacles by bouncing sound waves, imperceptible to humans, off objects as they fly. The female katydid wears her ears on her knees; by waving her front legs she zeroes in on the male’s mating call. Cold-blooded rattlers heat-sense warm-blooded rats and mice. And just as an astronomer opens the aperture on his telescope, so the owl at night widens his enormous eyes for light from far off stars.

Toward dawn the morning star burns like a lamp in the east, and gradually, a pale flush spreads upward from the crest of the Sierra del Carmen. A bank of clouds hangs off the Fronteriza, and as the overhead stars wink out and the morning star burns on, the pale glow turns peach and seeps higher. Just enough air stirs to shake the mesquite. A waking bird emits one cluck. Soon the clouds below the Fronteriza go salmon pink and flare with internal fire. As the sun tops the Sierra del Carmen and spills a glare sharp as ice shards over the desert, you hear a distant bark. One yap, two, a soprano howl, an alto tremulo, then chord upon chord in wild and worshipful sounding chorus. Somewhere in the ruddy hills a pack of coyotes seems to sing the sun up.

Waterholes, Springs, and the Fifth Season

One of the most astonishing sounds in the desert is that of trickling water. One of the happiest desert sights is a pool dancing with aquatic creatures. Who can believe it: Tadpoles darting about, water striders dimpling the surface, blue darners stitching zig-zags through the air and dipping the tips of their abdomens into the water? What a celebration of life in the midst of apparent lifelessness.

Water is the single most important need of almost all life forms in the desert. The larger mammals, many birds, and some insects must drink daily to survive. Some amphibians and arthropods must spend at least part of their lives in the water. Each waterhole is a little oasis supporting its community of plants and animals, and drawing from the outside world a thirsty parade of creatures that comes to it to sustain life.

Apart from the river, there are at least 180 springs, seeps, and wells in the park that serve as wildlife watering places. Most of these are springs located within the grasslands on the lower slopes of the Chisos Mountains. Springs differ greatly, ranging from a seep with 0.5 centimeters (0.25 inches) of water standing in the grass, to a 25-centimeter (10-inch) deep pool the size of a table top, to a string of pools connected by a flowing stream. Since springs depend for their flow on water seeping through the ground, and since this in turn depends on rainfall, the amount of water found at a spring may vary greatly from season to season and from year to year. Other crucial factors are evaporation and the water consumption and retention properties of the spring’s plant life.

You can see most springs a long way off. They stand out like timbered islands in an ocean, with tall cottonwoods, willows, and honey mesquite, and man-high thickets of thorny acacia festooned in silver showers of virgin’s bower. Dozens of little rodent holes perforate the ground among the roots and the tall grasses quiver with furtive comings and goings. Life at such a spring follows a regular pattern from dawn to dusk, although it may actually be busiest at night when most desert creatures are abroad.

At first daylight four or five redheaded turkey vultures stir in the cottonwoods where they have spent the night. They shrug their black shoulders and wait for the sun and the thermals to rise. An early blacktailed gnatcatcher chases a late moth, but the moth proves the better acrobat and makes it to safety in the thicket. Doves leave the ground with a flutter of white-barred wings and level off across the desert. By following the game trails to water, you can read the sign of nighttime visitors: The cloven-hoofed track of peccaries imprinted in the ooze, cigar-shaped coyote scat complete with fur, the flat-footed print of a striped skunk, and the larger cloven hoofprints of mule deer.

Soon it is full morning with flies biting, lizards scuttling, and butterflies feeding in jackass clover. By noonday a brisk breeze is shaking the cottonwood leaves, producing a sound like rushing water, and two ravens have come to croak in a little mesquite. Now they fly, with the sun striking silver from jet feathers. They circle the oasis, flapping and soaring, driving their shadows below them over the ground.

Here on a willow trunk is a life-and-death contest. Rubbed raw by the branch of a neighboring tree, the willow is exuding sap from a saucer-sized wound. Drawn to the sap, six butterflies stand on the damp spot peacefully feeding, slowly opening and closing their wings. All at once a mantidfly pounces from ambush and grabs at a butterfly with his clawed front legs. The butterfly leaps like a scared horse, and in reaction the whole group takes to the air. But in a moment they settle back down, roll out their tongues like party toys, and begin to sip. Another fierce lunge by the mantidfly, another scattering of butterflies. And all the time you can hear the tick-tick-tick of a beetle boring a burrow in the diseased wood.

As evening comes on, the doves come in from the desert, flying low along the line of seepage. The vultures return to roost, lazily circling the cottonwood’s crown. While it is still light the butterflies seek cover in the cottonwood leaves. As it gets dark the moths come out, and after them the bats, beep-beeping as they cut erratic patterns through the dusky air. Soon the breeze will die down, and the starlit night will throb with the long drawn trill of tree crickets. In the wee small hours there will be no sound, no breath of air or outward sign of life. Then suddenly along a sandy trail moves a blackness shaped like a high-backed child’s chair. It is a striped skunk, tail-high, come to take its turn at the waterhole.

Few and far between are the springs with sufficient flow to send a brook singing down a ravine. But such a place is Glenn Spring, the chief spring along a dry draw that starts in the Chisos and cuts deeply through many-colored clays as it crosses the desert. Historic photos show Glenn Spring enclosed within a man-made rock wall. Today you cannot even find the source, so thick is the tangle of tules and cane grown up around it. The flow from Glenn Spring trickles down the draw about 1.5 kilometers (1 mile), collecting in pools and gurgling over rocks before it goes underground. Some of the pools are crystal clear, and some are black with the acids of plant decay. Deeper pools are fern-green with algae. Little black snails harvest algae on the rocks and leopard frogs croak and plop, so quick to hide among the reeds that you can hardly find them. These slim, spotted amphibians, insect feeders, mate in water. Their larval young, free-swimming tadpoles, must live in water, feeding on microscopic organisms until they grow lungs and legs for life ashore.

The tadpole itself falls prey to giant water bugs, air-breathing water dwellers that are also strong fliers. The water boatman is a vegetarian who sculls about from one underwater plant to another. You can hardly tell him from the backswimmer except that the latter swings his oars upside down and spends much time on the surface hanging head down, the better to spy the aquatic insects upon which he feeds. The water strider is another hunter, but this spider-legged semi-aquatic skates atop the water, seeking terrestrial insects that have dropped onto the surface. Just as the birds and bats eat different foods at different feeding levels, so do the creatures that inhabit a pool, be it only centimeters deep.

And the creatures above the pool: The damselfly alights on a reed and rests with its transparent, netlike wings closed above its slim body. The stouter-bodied dragonfly rests with its wings outstretched and likes to fly in tandem. Both of these aerial beauties must lay their eggs in water, and their larvae are fully aquatic predators that breathe with gills like fish.

Many of the same water insects inhabit yet another type of waterhole, the tinaja, a natural pothole that traps rain or runoff in solid rock. Dependent on rainfall, tinajas often dry up, yet they may be the only water source over a large area. If a tinaja is deep enough it may survive evaporation, but the water may shrink back so far below the lip of the bowl that animals cannot reach it. A cougar once drowned in a tinaja here because it could not climb out again. Tinajas may also turn into death traps for the plants and insects that inhabit them. In a well-balanced pool the algae create the oxygen and food that aquatic creatures need, but as the pool dries up there is less and less oxygen and the products of decay become concentrated. At last these become so poisonous that the reproductive engine cuts off and the pool is literally dead. But even a dead pool may be a source of life to outside animals.

Ernst Tinaja is a good site for watching desert wildlife. It lies in a rocky, canyon-like drainage near the Old Ore Road. Though the upper tank measures 6 by 9 meters (20 by 30 feet) animals may not be able to use it because when the water is 3 meters (10 feet) deep it lies more than one-half meter (2 feet) below the edge. But mule deer and javelina frequent the smaller pools, which likely hold algae and a roster of aquatic life.

Other important tinajas may be found on Mesa de Anguila. The mesa top has a maze of trails leading to and from tinajas that have served as a focus of life across countless centuries. You can find Indian shelters in the form of overhanging cliffs up and down a canyon, with a permanent tinaja right in the middle.

Like the so-called lower animals mankind has long been dependent on waterholes. Since the first prehistoric Indians came to Big Bend, people have lived beside springs and tinajas. And what a pleasant prospect you still find from the sooted rock shelters above Croton Springs as you look out across the grasslands and the tules at the spring, toward the crenelated wall of the Chisos. Rounded red boulders beside the spring contain age-old mortar holes, ground so deep you can stick your arm in up to your elbow.

Before the day of automobiles, all the peoples who traveled through Big Bend routed their trails from water to water. On the way to Oak Spring you can sit in the shade of a Comanche marker tree, a great oak bent in a bow with all its branches growing upright. Comanches marked a good campsite by tying a sapling down; with maturity it naturally assumed a horizontal or bowed position.

As Big Bend opened to ranching, the need for more watering places grew. Ranchers drilled wells, put up windmills, and scraped out stock tanks. Some of these waterholes remain to this day. The wells at Dugout Wells and the Sam Nail Ranch are still maintained. Without regular care such improvements would soon disappear in the desert.

One of man’s inadvertent “improvements,” the tamarisk or salt cedar, has proved an unwelcome water guzzler. The tree is about the size of an ordinary apple tree, but it loses to the atmosphere about five times as much moisture as an apple tree does. In desert country where water is so scarce, tamarisks pose a serious problem. Brought to this country from the Mediterranean area for use as a windbreak, salt cedar escaped cultivation and spread like wildfire across the Southwest, invading river bottoms, drainage ways, and waterholes in unbelievable numbers.

The tamarisk spreads by runners and apparently reaches isolated springs when mammals and birds bring seeds in on their fur and feathers. Growing at the rate of nearly 2 meters (8 feet) in a summer, the deep-rooted tamarisk uses up a disproportionate amount of water and actually lowers the water table. It is useless to man, and wildlife does not browse it because it tastes so salty.

Big Bend National Park conducts a tamarisk eradication program as a water conservation measure centered about the springs. It is hot, dirty, time-consuming work because tamarisks are almost impossible to kill. No known creature can be used for control, and if you leave so much as a root hair, another tree will grow. You have to saw the tree off and paint the stump with a special approved chemical that does not harm other plants or wildlife and will not contaminate the spring. This effort to save the precious amounts of moisture stored in the Big Bend landscape requires constant vigilance and back-breaking effort.

Big Bend Ranching Days

Cattle ranching in the Big Bend began about 1870 when Milton Faver set
himself up as ‘Don’ Milton not far from today’s Marfa. He eventually
built five spreads, including the region’s first sheep ranch. As his
headquarters he built a fort at Cibolo (Buffalo) Creek Ranch. The Army
gave him a cannon for it and even garrisoned soldiers there under his
command. During one difficult period, Indian raids wiped out all
Faver’s livestock except 40 calves confined in the fort. With superb
swapping he rebuilt his herds from the Indians new largesse. By 1880
more and more ranching was pushed west into the Big Bend by range
shortages and overgrazing east of the Pecos River. Formal leasing and
land purchases followed. The much sought-after lands had springs.
Fencing soon put an end to the free range policy, but as late as 1890
cooperative roundups, branding, and drives were still required to sort
out whose stock was whose. Stock was stolen by altering a legitimate
brand. This came to an end with the introduction of barbed wire, which
changed ranching considerably. Most of the grasslands have never
recovered from overgrazing.

Big Bend has five seasons—winter, spring, summer, fall, and that extra blooming season that bursts out any time you have a good rain and other conditions are right. The more rain, the more spectacular the display, with flowers, buzzing insects, croaking toads, and nesting birds in a complete new cycle of regeneration. Imagine the gravel wastes of the Castolon floodplain awash with flowers—solid carpets of little white and yellow and purple blossoms on either side of the road. Running back from it are desert baileyas and grasses, with orange caltrop blowing like orange butterflies in the wind. Picture Cerro Castellan’s red flanks green, with pockets of ochre blossoms amid white heaps of volcanic ash. Imagine Mesa de Anguila’s talus slopes misted with grass, Santa Elena Overlook smelling garden sweet and so matted with little low-lying flowers that you cannot put your foot down without crushing dozens. You have never seen their like before and may not soon again, for this is the floral profusion that follows desert rains.

Most Big Bend rains come during the six warm months from May through October, but the expected rainfall may vary greatly with location and with elevation. Thus the super-dry desert between Mariscal Mountain and Castolon averages only 13 centimeters (5 inches) of rain in a year, while the Chisos mountaintops may get more than 50 centimeters (20 inches). Of course some years see more than the average, some years much less. Falling as it mostly does in torrents, very little rain penetrates the thirsty soil. The water just rolls down the slopes, rumbles through mountain canyons, gushes over a pour-off, roars along dry washes, and spreads out over lowland flats in fast-moving sheets heavy with mud. A flash flood can root up and carry off trees and other plants, animals in their burrows, automobiles and their occupants, rocks, and the very earth itself. Then almost as quickly as it came, it may go, leaving gouged and gullied desolation in its wake. Yet in a matter of days, these cracked and peeling mudflats may blossom like a garden.

The reason is that millions and billions of wildflower seeds lie dormant here, waiting for just the right combination of soil temperature and moisture to germinate and burst into bloom. Desert annuals do not store up water as the cactuses do. They do not put down deep taproots as the creosotebush does. Nor do they dress themselves in thorny, waxy, or woody shields as do the desert shrubs. Desert annuals look for all the world like their counterparts in more temperate country. They are just as colorful, just as lavish with leaves, and just as spendthrift with moisture. They live a brief, gaudy life in a hurry, completing the cycle from germination to seed production in a few, short, water-wasting weeks before the desert dries out once again. Then they pass months or even years in the seed stage, waiting for another rain and another burst of luxuriant life. This system works because the flowers produce so many seeds, and because the seeds themselves are marvelously drought resistant and programmed to sprout only at the right time and in the right place.