Texaswithall: All About Texas

Texas With All: Everything About Texas

West Texas is the stuff of Wild West fantasy: parched deserts, ghost towns, looming mesas, and above all a sense of utter isolation. Although the area south from the Panhandle down to Del Rio on the Rio Grande is, for convenience, also known as West Texas, the fantasy really begins west of the River Pecos; you can drive for hours without a sign of life to El Paso, Texas's shabby westernmost city. Most travelers only venture into the desolation to explore Big Bend National Park, nearly three hundred miles southeast of El Paso in the curve of the Rio Grande.

Minimal rainfall and harsh land were not the only hindrances to settlement. The Apache and Comanche, though accustomed in the 1820s to trading with Mexican comancheros, were infuriated when hapless white pioneers began to trickle in during the 1830s. With their horsemanship and ability to find scarce water supplies, the Native Americans posed a real threat; upon statehood, a string of cavalry forts was set up with the help of federal money to protect Mexican and Anglo settlers from attack. As trading posts and cattle ranges began to spring up after the Civil War, the paramilitary Texas Rangers were sent out on violent vigilante missions. Eventually, as in the Panhandle, a brutal program of buffalo slaughter, supported by the US Army, starved the natives out. Not long afterwards, oil was discovered in West Texas and boom towns appeared, with all the attendant lawlessness, gunslinging and brawling.

 

The Rio Grande river, flowing through 1500 foot gorges, makes a ninety-degree bend south of Marathon to form the southern border of Big Bend National Park - thanks to its isolation one of the least visited of the US national parks, and very much of a kind with the great desert parks of the Southwest.

A breathtaking million-acre expanse of pine-forested mountains and ocotilla-dotted desert, Big Bend has been home to prospectors and smugglers, a last frontier for the true-grit pioneers at the end of the nineteenth century, who took advantage of the rich cinnabar deposits for mercury mining. Today there is camping in specific areas, and some trailer parks, but much of the park remains barely charted territory, the ruins of primitive Mexican and white settlements testament to its power to defeat earlier visitors. Wild animals have fared somewhat better: coyotes, roadrunners and javelinas (an odd-looking bristly black pig with a pointy snout) all roam free. Violent contrasts in topography and temperature result in dramatic juxtapositions of desert and mountain plant and animal life. Despite the dryness, tangles of pretty wild flowers and blossoming cactuses, including peyote, erupt into color each April.

The most interesting route into Big Bend is from the west. You can't follow the river all the way from El Paso, but Hwy-170 - the River Road, reached on Hwy-67 south from Marfa, where James Dean made Giant - runs through spectacular desert scenery for around thirty miles west from Ojinaga, climbing stark buttes from where you can peep down to the river below. Before reaching the park boundary just beyond Study Butte, you pass through the haunting communities of Lajitas and Terlingua.

Once in the park, unless you're prepared to do some strenuous hiking, there are few opportunities to see the river itself; the main road is obliged to run across the desert, north of the outcrop of the Chisos Mountains. A spur road starting west of the headquarters at Panther Junction leads south for six miles, up into the alpine meadows of the Chisos Basin , ringed by dramatic (though not amazingly high) peaks. The one gap in the rocky wall here is the Window , looking out over the deserts and reached by a relatively simple trail. Driving twenty miles southeast of Panther Junction brings you to the riverside Rio Grande Village - unless you choose to detour just before, to bathe in some rather dilapidated natural hot springs that feed into the river. A footbridge crosses from near the village to the Mexican hamlet of Boquillas; or you can pay $1 to be rowed across the river, then ride a donkey into nearby Bouquillas for a meal and a beer.

At three separate stages within the park boundaries the river runs through gigantic canyons. The westernmost, the Santa Elena, is the most common rafting trip, being accessible from a put-in at Lajitas. Although there is virtually no whitewater, it boasts the technically challenging Rock Slide, and two ethereal Mexican side canyons that can be hiked, as well as stretches where the river swirls between awesome high rock walls, striated at an angle that makes it seem like you're plunging into an abyss. It's possible to drive within the park to the eastern end of the canyon, where the towering cliffs suddenly come to an end and the river meanders through marshy fields; a short hike from here shows the gorge in all its splendor.

The ease of crossing the international frontier adds to the thrill of the Big Bend experience, although you can get no further into Mexico than sandbanks populated by browsing burros. This area is so remote that casual traffic across the river is regarded as insignificant; police checks for illegal immigrants take place roughly fifty miles north of Big Bend, on each of the main roads.

Some of the long-abandoned mercury mining communities on the fringes of Big Bend are now stuttering back to life as alternative tourist centers. Terlingua in particular, a strangely appealing little ghost town scattered across the scrubby hills along Hwy-170, is populated by the adventurous types who work for the local rafting companies, along with assorted drifters lured by the solitary desert life. Near its fly-blown cemetery, against a backdrop of evocative ruins, the hugely atmospheric Starlight Theater, Bar and Restaurant, with its postmodern reinterpretation of Southwestern decor, is the perfect place to enjoy a cold beer and soak up the haunting desert view; it also serves food, and puts on evening shows in summer. A mile or so east along the highway is the only other place to eat in the evening: La Kiva, attached to the RV-oriented Big Bend Travel Park, is carved into the rock, and attracts a young crowd to its New Age bar, restaurant and evening gigs. The Chisos Mining Company Motel on Hwy-170 has reasonable rooms.

Allow around $125 for a full day's rafting along Santa Elena Canyon; canyons further out can cost up to $150. Far Flung Adventures, based next door to the Starlight in Terlingua, runs all the Big Bend routes, as well as many other Southwestern rivers, and also does memorable multiday music trips with renowned Texan musicians.

Lajitas, west of Terlingua, is the main put-in for rafting trips, but has largely been taken over by the somewhat ersatz Lajitas on the Rio Grande resort complex, with its five separate hotels. However, it attempts to pull in the tourists with its distinguished political figurehead - Clay Henry III, a beer-drinking goat who beat four other candidates - including a wooden Indian and a real person - for the mayoral post. Look for his pen, littered with empty Lone Star Longneck bottles, outside the adobe Lajitas Trading Post.

Back when Texas was still Tejas, El Paso, the second oldest settlement in the United States, was the main crossing on the Rio Grande. It still plays that role today, its 700,000 residents joining with another 1.7 million across the river in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, to form the largest binational (and bilingual) megalopolis in North America. At first sight, massive railyards fill up much of downtown, the belching smelters of copper mills line the riverfront, and the northern reaches are taken up by the giant Fort Bliss military base, where two museums trace the military history of the city from adobe Spanish outpost to largest air defense center in the western world. Its dramatic setting, however, where the Franklin Mountains meet the Chihuahua desert, gives it a certain bold, rough pioneer edge, bearing more relation to old rather than new Mexico, with little of the pastel softness of the Southwest US. Local legend has it that when Wyatt Earp arrived in sharp-shooting El Paso, he thought it too wild for him, and boarded the first train to Tombstone.

Downtown El Paso holds surprisingly little to see apart from a couple of passable art museums; what character it has continues to be shaped by the US-Mexico border. In times past outlaws and exiles from either side of the border would take refuge across the river, and today's traffic remains considerable and not entirely uncontroversial. The border itself, the Rio Grande, has caused its share of disagreements: the river changed course quite often in the 1800s, and it was not until the 1960s, when it was run through a concrete channel, that it was made permanent. An attractive park, the Chamizal National Memorial (daily 8am-5pm; free), on the east side of downtown off Paisano Drive, was built to commemorate the settling of the border dispute and provides a pleasant place to picnic. The Border Patrol Museum , 4315 Transmountain Rd at Hwy-54 (Tues-Sun 9am-5pm; free), is a small but engrossing museum explaining the work of the patrollers and highlights the ingenuity of smugglers.

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