Part 3 Guide and Adviser 110

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

[Illustration: Indians held that after making the Earth the Great

Spirit dumped leftover rocks on the Big Bend. “The unknown land,”

Spanish explorers labeled it. Its mythic topography inspired quests

for lost mines and instant wealth in gold and silver. A rainbow over

Cerro Castellan implies its own pot of gold.]

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.

[Illustration: Inside the gorgeous gorges of the Big Bend of the Rio

Grande, the river’s flow determines real time. Canoeists in fast

water work the Eternal Now.]

[Illustration: Other moods abound. Changing light conditions paint

Santa Elena Canyon with subdued hues (opposite), then splash it with

bold and saturated colors (following).]

[Illustration: Santa Elena Canyon.]

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.

[Illustration: Strawberry pitaya cactus blossoms and articulated

spines pose delicate counterpoints to sweeping desert, mountain, and

canyon grandeur.]

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.

[Illustration: Distinctive pads of pricklypear cactus make this most

ubiquitous of cactuses readily recognizable across its extensive

range, which encompasses Southwest deserts and the Potomac River

banks near Washington, D.C.]

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.

[Illustration: The Chisos Mountains loom as an island rising above

an arid Chihuahuan Desert.]

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.

[Illustration: Mule deer graze along the Grapevine Hills Road. As

climate continues drying here, these denizens of the desert range

ever higher into the Chisos Mountains, sole homeland in the United

States for the Sierra del Carmen whitetail deer.]

[Illustration: A gnarled alligator juniper suggests the timeworn

landscape spread below the South Rim of the Chisos.]

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_

[Illustration: Try to make it to the Window in the Chisos for the

archetypal Big Bend sunset!]

[Illustration: Adapting to desert dryness, creosotebushes space

themselves to exploit available moisture. Their roots produce root

toxins that may discourage competition from other plants.]

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.

[Illustration: Broadly speaking there are four North American

deserts: the Great Basin, Mohave, Sonoran, and Chihuahuan. The park

lies within the Chihuahuan. This desert is bordered on three sides

by mountains; the fourth abuts vast semi-arid plains. The Sierra

Madre Oriental (East Mother Range) blocks winds from the Gulf of

Mexico, except as spinoffs of summer hurricanes. The Sierra Madre

Occidental (West Mother Range) blocks the westerlies. How can you

recognize Chihuahuan Desert? By the lechuguilla plant (see page 32),

which grows only in this desert.]

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.

[Illustration: The ocotillo also goes by the name coachwhip because

it so often looks like a bunch of buggy whips stuck in the ground.

However, in the springtime following a wet winter, those

dead-looking stalks are adorned with green leaves and topped by

brilliant red flower clusters. The ocotillo is common throughout

both the Chihuahuan and Sonoran Deserts.]

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

[Illustration: Fish-hook cactus]

[Illustration: Button cactus]

[Illustration: Strawberry pitaya]

[Illustration: Claret cup]

[Illustration: Cholla]

[Illustration: Pricklypear]

[Illustration: Eagle’s claw]

[Illustration: Rainbow cactus]

[Illustration: Coarse strong fibers of the lechuguilla plant (top)

were extracted by machine (bottom) for use in matting, ropes, bags,

and household items.]

[Illustration: Machinery]

[Illustration: The candelilla or wax plant (middle) has been used in

manufacturing waxes, polishes, chewing gum, phonograph records, and

candles. In the rainy season the stem fills with milky sap. In the

dry season this sap coats the stem as wax by evaporation. The wax

protects the plant from drought.]

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.

[Illustration: Whiptail scorpions, which are not true scorpions,

have no stinger. They pursue insects and other invertebrates and

kill them with powerful pincers.]

[Illustration: Eleven species of stinging scorpions live in the

park. Coloration varies from dull-cream through brown to shiny

black.]

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

[Illustration: Collared lizard (male)]

[Illustration: Texas banded gecko (adult)]

[Illustration: Texas alligator lizard]

[Illustration: Twin-spotted spiny lizard]

[Illustration: Collared lizard (pregnant female)]

[Illustration: Texas banded gecko (young)]

[Illustration: Marbled whiptail]

[Illustration: Big Bend gecko]

Snakes

[Illustration: Western hognose snake]

[Illustration: Mexican milk snake]

[Illustration: Blacktail rattlesnake]

[Illustration: Trans-Pecos blind snake]

[Illustration: Western coachwhip snake]

[Illustration: Trans-Pecos rat snake]

[Illustration: Western diamondback rattlesnake]

[Illustration: Blackneck garter snake]

[Illustration: Baird’s rat snake]

[Illustration: Big Bend patchnose snake]

[Illustration: Texas lyre snake]

[Illustration: Glossy snake]

[Illustration: Mohave rattlesnake]

[Illustration: Longnose snake]

[Illustration: Black-hooded snake]

[Illustration: Bullsnake]

Two Non-Drinkers

[Illustration: The kangaroo rat and roadrunner exemplify adaptations

for desert living. Neither drinks water, as a rule. The roadrunner

gets its moisture largely from its omnivorous diet, which includes

lizards and small rattlesnakes. It kills them with stunning blows of

its beak. Its characteristic X-track provides good traction in sand.

Agile and nimble, this 60-centimeter- (2-foot) long bird can fly,

but it prefers to run, at up to 32 kph (20 mph). Mexicans call the

roadrunner _paisano_, “fellow countryman.”

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.

[Illustration: Desert flowering plants adorn a mudflat almost as

metaphors of patience. The secret lies with seeds that have adapted

to remain dormant for years, if necessary, until enough rain falls

to bypass their germination inhibitors.]

[Illustration: When rains raise the water level, animals drink from

natural tanks such as Ernst Tinaja. Tinajas can also be death traps

when the water level falls so low that animals can’t climb back out.

Mountain lion claws have etched desperation into the rims of some.]

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.

[Illustration: Desert amphibians? Leopard frogs live along the river

and near ponds and springs.]

[Illustration: Couch’s spadefoot toad evades drought by burrowing

with specially adapted hind feet (bottom). When rains come, the

toads move to the nearest puddle and mate. Their eggs hatch six

times faster than those of garden toads and the tadpoles quadruple

their birth weight by the second evening of life. With luck some

mature before the puddle evaporates—and dig in to await another wet

spell.]

[Illustration: Hind feet of toad.]

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.

[Illustration: The javelina, or peccary, smells like a skunk. This

nighttime wanderer uses the scent for territorial marking, not

defense. Curious and shortsighted, javelinas might approach a

hiker—not to attack, but to investigate.]

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.

[Illustration: This flash flood (above) washed out a portion of the

Maverick Road. Flash floods can be killers to the unwary. They can

sweep down on you from storms you never saw or heard.]

[Illustration: Cottonwood Creek’s wide bed suggests that it, too,

knows rage. Low water levels favor algae growths whose colors mirror

the cottonwoods’ refreshing verdure overhead.]

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.

[Illustration: Who said the desert’s palette must be dull? Desert

locusts show vivid greens and yellows.]

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.

[Illustration: Branding.]

[Illustration: A cattle drive.]

[Illustration: Longhorns.]

[Illustration: A roped yearling submits to inoculation.]

[Illustration: Imported from the Mediterranean area for use as

windbreaks, tamarisk spread quickly across the Southwest. This water

guzzler—it loses five times more water to the atmosphere than an

apple tree does—can actually lower the water table.]

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.

Each annual and perennial species has its own preferred blooming season

and favored locale. The long-legged Big Bend bluebonnet may start

flowering in December and keep on blooming until June. Sometimes this

rangy relative of the Texas bluebonnet will bloom in such masses that

the lowlands look like they have been painted blue. The daisy-shaped

nicollet also likes gravelly soils, while the desert verbena does best

in disturbed areas. This lavender-pink sweet william, a spring bloomer

in the lowlands, appears later at higher elevations as springtime

ascends the mountains. As a rule the spring bloom peaks in the lowlands

in April, and species that prefer higher elevations flower a little

later. Thus the bracted paintbrush begins to flaunt its red flags in

June grasslands, and beautiful, deep blue tube-flowers may be seen from

May to July on snapdragon vines in the Chisos woodlands. Usually the

luxuriance of the spring bloom will depend on the amount of rain that

fell during the preceding fall and winter, and the months of June and

July are apt to show few flowers at lower, drier elevations. But with

summer rains in August and September, many springtime flowers bloom

again, sometimes more spectacularly. These rains also produce a bright

first flowering from such summer and fall species as the low-lying,

sweet-smelling limoncillo, and the broomweed that gold-plates Basin

hillsides right through October and November.

Flowers

[Illustration: Orange caltrop]

[Illustration: Desert baileya]

[Illustration: Silverleaf]

[Illustration: Thistle]

[Illustration: Prickly poppy]

[Illustration: Evening primrose]

[Illustration: Dayflower]

[Illustration: Cardinal flower]

Many insects pass the dry months as the seeds do, lying dormant in eggs

or cocoons. The same life-giving rains that waken the seeds quicken the

insects. And as the flowers come into their own there is a mass

emergence of flying, crawling, and creeping creatures. The timing of

this double emergence is no accident. While the plant-eating insects

feed, they also pollinate the flowers.

So beautifully coordinated are these adaptations that specialized

flowers attract the very insects that do them the most good. Bees

perceive color in the range of the spectrum from yellow through

ultraviolet, and you will find them on the many yellow flowers of the

pea family, blue larkspur, and lavender ruellias. Bees don’t distinguish

red and orange, so they pass up the brilliant paintbrush which does

attract hosts of butterflies. Flies, beetles, and other insects

pollinate relatively unspecialized plants like the sunflowers. And

night-flying moths respond to the whites and yellows that almost glow in

the dark. In its caterpillar stage, the sphinx moth eats the leaves of

the night-blooming evening primrose. When it matures the sphinx moth

returns to the primrose and, hovering like a hummingbird, unrolls its

retractable tongue and takes up nectar, thus paying its debt to the

primrose by pollinating the flowers.

Insect-eating and seed-eating birds capitalize on each rain-induced

harvest. The mourning dove, a common park resident, usually nests in the

spring, but it may also nest again later in wet years. The scaled quail

may produce as many as four broods in wet years, and you may see little

brown chicks in mid-October. You may even happen on a young brown towhee

high in the Chisos as late as November. Barn swallows and cliff

swallows, both summer residents, nest as soon as they arrive in the

spring, and breed again in wet years during August. The blackthroated

sparrow may nest in both spring and summer if rains have produced a good

crop of seeds, while the rufous crowned sparrow is actually busier

nesting in wet summers than in dry springs. The black-chinned sparrow

apparently waits for summer’s rainy season to nest.

Some mammal populations also rise and fall with the rains. Ord kangaroo

rats may not breed at all during long periods of drought, but when a

good rainy season produces an abundance of seed, most females soon

become pregnant and produce two litters. Females of the first litter may

even bear young of their own in the same breeding season.

[Illustration: Rock-nettle graces the limestone cliffs along the

river, one of few plants to do so. You may also find it in the lower

mountain canyons. Watch for its blossoms from November through May.]

[Illustration: Ethereal canyon reflections on quiescent waters

beckon you toward the timelessness many experience within these

vault-like Rio Grande gorges.]

As the Wild River Runs

At 3,000 meters (10,000 feet) the golden eagle glides on outspread

wings, his head cocked down so he can watch for signs of life upon that

motionless desert rolled out like a relief map below him. Largest of Big

Bend’s airborne predators, the eagle needs an enormous hunting range,

and riding the warm air currents high above the border, he can see it

all: the flattopped and arched mountains, the sun-bleached lowland, and

the silver Rio Grande disappearing and reappearing as it runs downstairs

through steep canyons and open valleys. Tilting his two-meter (7-foot)

wings, the eagle slipslides for a closer look into a canyon, spots the

wake of a surface-swimming snake, folds his wings, and dives like a

fighter jet. Before the snake even senses its peril, it is snatched

aloft and hangs wriggling in the eagle’s talons as the great bird,

feathered to the toes, lifts and flies up the canyon with mighty,

measured wingbeats.

The waters dripping from the hapless snake’s body come from mountains

far to the south and north. The Rio Grande begins in springs and snows

high in Colorado’s Rockies, but backed into reservoirs and doled out to

irrigate New Mexico and Texas farmlands, it may hardly even flow below

El Paso. What gives the river a new lease on life is the Rio Conchos.

This beautiful stream rises in the western Sierra Madres and flows

northeastward across Mexico, cutting canyons of its own and joining the

Rio Grande at Presidio, 160 river-kilometers (100 river-miles) above the

park. Some geologists say it was the Rio Conchos, and not the Rio

Grande, that cut those gorgeous canyons in the park. No one knows for

sure. But once the river trapped itself, all it could do was dig deeper

and deeper by processes that are still at work today.

A walk along a sandbar will show you that the river functions as a

practical sorting machine. The water rolling by is so laden with

sediment that you cannot even see rocks 13 centimeters (5 inches) below

the surface. On the bar itself a layer of curling and flaking mud lies

on top of the larger stones and gravel, which have fine sand deposited

between them. The heaviest rocks settle out first, then the sand, and

finally the finest particles. Water is a powerful lifting and pushing

tool, but these water-borne abrasives do much of the river’s work,

wearing out the rock, undercutting cliffs, deepening and widening the

canyons. It goes on at normal stages of water where the river runs less

than a meter (2-3 feet) deep, during floods when it crests at more than

6 meters (20 feet), and even during droughts when in many places the

river is too shallow to float a boat. So in the slow course of geologic

time the mountains are worn away, spread across the valleys, and carried

out to sea.

The only streams that have a chance of leaving the desert alive are

those whose water sources lie outside the desert. There are few such

rivers in the world: the Nile, the Indus, the Tigris and Euphrates, the

Colorado, and the Rio Grande. And what a wealth of water-loving life the

wild river brings to the Big Bend desert. You can hang big catfish by

the gills from your saddlehorn and have your horse walk off with

fishtail dragging the ground. So the fishermen tell you.

[Illustration: Cotton and food crops grew during the first half of

this century at Castolon (top) and Rio Grande Village. Both

floodplain settlements are popular stops for park travelers today.]

[Illustration: A third riparian settlement, Hot Springs, offered

resort accommodations in the 1940s.]

Life in this watery world is sustained by a food pyramid based on a

super-abundant supply of tiny bottom organisms. A third-meter (1-foot)

square of riffle bottom has been found to contain more than 100

organisms. Most are larvae of flying insects: stoneflies, mayflies,

dragonflies, damselflies, water and terrestrial bugs, various kinds of

flies, midges, and dobsonflies. These curious little creatures have

evolved ingenious ways of living, breathing, and eating underwater. Some

worm-like caddisfly nymphs build protective cases around themselves,

gluing pebbles, bits of shells, and plants together with saliva. They

have three pairs of legs up front sticking out of the case and a pair of

hooks holding on to it behind, so they can drag their houses with them

as they feed. Damselfly larvae breathe through three leaflike gills that

project from the hind end of the abdomen, and when warm weather comes

they crawl ashore, split their skins, and emerge as gossamer-winged

adults. The gills on stonefly larvae extend from the head and thorax,

while mayfly nymphs have seven pairs of gills standing out like feathers

along the sides of the abdomen. When oxygen is in short supply, mayfly

larvae vibrate their gills rapidly so as to quicken the flow of water

along their bodies. Some aquatic larvae build nets to catch dinner; a

caddisfly nymph may spin a kind of silken windsock that he hangs

underwater with the narrow end downstream, using the pressure of the

current to keep his prey trapped. Some aquatic larvae eat microscopic

plants, some eat insects, and some eat each other. Large dragonfly

nymphs may even catch and eat small fish. Larvae are consumed by fishes,

frogs, and turtles.

[Illustration: A rafter hauls out on a sandbank inside Mariscal

Canyon, the middle—and most sheer-walled—of Big Bend’s big three

canyons. River runners thrill to Tight Squeeze, in Mariscal Canyon,

where a rock slab as big as a car compresses the river into a tricky

gap.]

Probably the best way to get to know the river is to get out on it. An

easy run is through Hot Springs Canyon, by 90-meter (300-foot) cliffs

and over nice little rapids. You put in at the site of the old Hot

Springs spa, and take out at Rio Grande Village, having to paddle only

at riffles.

Suppose it’s early on a fine October morning and you’re floating along

with the current, watching the sky, clouds, cliffs, and river cane

reflecting blue, white, tan, and green on the glossy brown surface of

the water. The river is too muddy for you to see what lives in it, but

you can see the signs: a spreading circle where a fish has snatched an

insect from the surface; mysterious little dimples that look like

miniature whirlpools; the beaked head and long neck of a Texas softshell

poked up like a periscope. This big turtle’s shell is really hard except

along the edges, but it is smooth and doesn’t have the plates you see on

other Rio Grande turtles. The Big Bend slider feeds primarily on plants,

while the yellow mud turtle enjoys water insect larvae. And ready to

oblige is a cloud of mayflies whirling in mad nuptial flight a meter or

two (3-7 feet) above the water. They only live one day and exist as

adults simply to mate, but they will sow the river with numberless eggs.

As you round a bend, a pair of great blue herons lifts from the shallows

where they’ve been standing stilt-legged. Now with necks folded and long

legs dangling they flap across to the farther shore. Ahead of you a

blue-winged teal keeps lifting and settling further downstream. Ducks

are seldom seen on the river in summer, but a dozen different species

put down as migrants, and some even winter on the river. Now a slim pair

of inca doves crosses overhead; you see the flash of rufous wings and

white tail feathers. On a sandbar stands a spotted sandpiper, head low

and tail high. He takes a step, stops, teeters up and down, and then

flies.

The sandbar itself snugs in against the cliffside with greenery growing

in three distinct tiers. River cane and mature salt cedar stand 4.5

meters (15 feet) tall against the flagstones. And stairstepped in front

of these are seepwillows—not a willow at all, but a kind of sunflower

that pioneers sandbars—and a younger, shorter stand of salt cedar. The

canebrakes fairly crackle with wintering birds: black phoebes,

cardinals, brown-headed cowbirds, and a migrating yellow warbler,

perhaps. There is plenty for them to eat in that thicket. You yourself

discover a nursery of orange true bugs beautifully crossed with olive

green, all crowded together in every stage of development on two or

three willow leaves. But the most intriguing thing about that sandbar is

the record left by its visitors: a lizard’s five-toed track with the

long unbroken mark made by its tail, and the great blue heron’s

left-and-right footprints striding along almost in a straight line. You

find the cat-like tracks of the ringtail, the dog-like tracks of the

gray fox, and the flat-footed print of the hog-nosed skunk, pear-shaped

as a bear’s. At the water’s edge honey bees are collecting moisture to

water-cool their hive. One by one they sip and lift off, making a

beeline for a cliff.

In the canyons where water flows from wall to wall, you find shore life

restricted to those few plants and animals that can make a home on a

cliff face. A spindly tamarisk has established a roothold in a

thimble-sized deposit of soil just above waterline, and in cracks and

crevices higher up, ocotillo and pricklypear are working down from the

desert that tops the wall. Empty cliff swallow nests cluster on the

undersides of overhangs. In spring you might see baby birds poking their

heads from the colony’s doorways.

Along the border, people call the Rio Grande by its Mexican name, _Rio

Bravo del Norte_. Nowhere does the river seem more wild, more powerful

than inside Santa Elena, Mariscal, and Boquillas Canyons. To enter one

of these mighty limestone vaults is to understand why mankind has always

had to skirt canyon country, and why to this day, except for its

historic fords, the river is all but impassable. If you go in by boat

the only way out is through. The adventure calls for preparation,

knowledge, hardiness, and considerable skill.

[Illustration: Cliff swallows colonize with as many as 50 nests in

close order. How the adult birds pick out their own condominium from

among such clusters remains a mystery.]

But even a landlubber can stand in the canyon’s primeval presence. All

you must do is make it up the ramps and steps that climb the cliff face

at the mouth of Santa Elena, then follow the foot trail down again into

the canyon. Looking up from the base of these 450-meter (1,500-foot)

walls, you see a vulture and a raven soaring side by side along the

canyon’s rim. To them you must seem small and as foolishly occupied as

the ants drawn up in opposing lines across the sandy path. One step and

you could crush the horde. One rock fallen from that height and you are

gone. One wild storm upstream and you, the ants, and the sandbar are all

washed away forever. Yet you are somehow drawn farther and deeper into

the canyon, into this jungle of dark green tamarisk and emerald bermuda

grass, through this labyrinth of water-polished boulders, to land’s end

and water’s edge, to the very Beginning that laid these fossil oyster

shells in this fierce rock.

Here in the canyon’s deep, vault-like isolation the sense of time, that

ominous, inhuman distance of the Earth’s past, may come over you as the

imagined shadow of the wings of a prehistoric reptile, the Pterosaur,

perhaps, from 65 million years ago. This was the biggest flying animal

ever known to have lived. Picture a 70-kilo (150-pound) flying reptile

with a wing spread of up to 11 meters (36 feet), a foolishly long neck,

and large head with a long, slender, toothless jaw. Add long legs, and

short toes armed with sharp, hooked claws, and a body covered with

fur-like material. And figure that each of those long, narrow,

glider-type wings was a thin membrane supported by a single overgrown

finger, and attached to the body, bat-style, right down to the knee. How

could such a huge, ungainly thing ever lift off or fly?

A species does not survive unless it can compete for food and escape its

predators, and Pterosaurs, both large and small, existed alongside

aggressive, meat-eating dinosaurs for 140 million years. Unlike some

smaller species found elsewhere, the Big Bend Pterosaur does not seem to

have fished the ocean. At that time, Big Bend offered a river and

floodplain environment far from the sea. No one knows how this giant

Pterosaur made its living.

How the Canyons Were Formed

Some 200 million years ago this region lay under a sea whose sediments

formed the structural, limestone bedrock patterns of the Big Bend. The

basic landscape configurations of today’s park were set in motion 75

to 100 million years ago as the landscape emerged, folded, and

faulted. Then erosion set in.

The ancestral river that carved Santa Elena, Mariscal, and Boquillas

Canyons through bedrock was the Rio Conchos. (The present Rio Conchos

contributes most of the water flowing through today’s Big Bend. It

flows into the Rio Grande just upstream of the park.) When the

ancestral river hit the limestone mountain uplifts, it had no

alternative but to cut its way through. Steep-walled, narrow canyons

resulted. Santa Elena Canyon is cut through the Mesa de Anguila.

Mariscal Canyon severs its namesake mountains. Boquillas Canyon, the

longest, cuts through the massive limestone Sierra del Carmen. You can

see how steep these canyons are by taking a river trip (see page 122)

or hiking park trails (see page 119) to the river or to canyon rims.

The region was once much higher in elevation than it is today, but

erosion has taken its toll. Mountains and mesas are landscape

formations whose rock erodes more slowly than surrounding materials

do. Castle-like peaks and high, sharp-rimmed mesas stand as weathered

monuments to earlier times when elevations were higher. Such stranded

vestiges of geologic eras punctuate the stark Chihuahuan Desert

landscape with eerie architecture. Astronauts have used Big Bend

terrain to simulate moonscapes.

The sequence of geologic diagrams shows how the Big Bend canyons

formed and what their future would be if slow processes of erosion

continue.

[Illustration: ① Faulting uplifts bedrock to form the mountain

mass.]

[Illustration: ② Streams erode the mountains and begin to deposit

sediments in the valley.]

[Illustration: ③ Streams continue depositing valley sediments eroded

from the mountain mass.]

[Illustration: ④ Streams have now cut clear through the sharply

eroded mountains and formed steep-walled canyons.]

[Illustration: ⑤ All but isolated mesa remnants of the mountains

have eroded and weathered away. The riverbed rests in the deep layer

of sediments.]

[Illustration: ⑥ In a future stage the bedrock mountain uplift might

be entirely eroded away to become a deep layer of sediments.]

When you think that the Earth is perhaps 4.5 billion years old, that

complex organisms have existed for no more than about 700 million years,

that the oldest rocks exposed in the park are 300 million years old, and

that fossils of backboned animals in the park cover a time span of 70

million years, you can realize how fragmentary the fossil record really

is. You get few glimpses of the relatively recent past, but these are

astonishing.

For example, geologists know that back in the dim dark distances of

Earth time, Big Bend lay repeatedly at the bottom of the sea.

Convulsions within the Earth repeatedly raised these sea floors to the

tops of mountains, and time after time these mountains wore away. One of

the ancient ocean beds can be seen at Persimmon Gap where, in remnants

of the park’s oldest mountains, fossil sponges, brachiopods, and other

simple marine organisms lie exposed. For hundreds of millions of years

the three-lobed trilobite was among the most prolific animals in the

world, but it had long been extinct when the last great ocean, the

so-called Cretaceous sea, washed across Big Bend. Most of Mexico lay

submerged and a sort of mid-continent seaway cut North America in two

about on the line of the Rocky Mountains. In its early stages this sea

harbored ancestral clams, oysters, snails, corals, and a coiled

shellfish called an ammonite. You can see these animals preserved in the

limestone walls of Santa Elena Canyon. Giant clam shells a meter (3

feet) across and fossil fishes preserved in the round between Boquillas

and Mariscal Mountain tell us what lived in later seas. Sea turtles,

sharks, and a 9-meter (30-foot) marine lizard that swam in the open

ocean have left their remains in the yellowish badlands near the park’s

western entrance.

Late in this oceanic period the Rocky Mountains began to rise to the

north of Big Bend, the Sierra Madre to the south. The park’s own

Santiago, del Carmen, and Mariscal ranges, and the first upward thrust

of the Chisos also occurred at this time. As the mountains rose and

started to wear away, delta deposits began to build out farther and

farther into the seaway, forming barrier bars and tidal shelves where

turtles, snails, oysters, and sharks lived and died. Gradually the

near-shore, subtidal environment changed to a tidal flat. This in turn

changed to marsh, to beach, to brackish and freshwater lagoons, and

finally to an estuary and river floodplain environment. Such was the Big

Bend world to which the dinosaurs came. They had been ruling the Earth

for eons, but they did not reach the park until the Cretaceous sea

withdrew.

[Illustration: Ammonite impressions (top) and fossil clams reveal

the era in which the Big Bend area repeatedly lay beneath a shallow

sea. Fossil finds show that today’s mountaintops were once sea

bottoms.]

[Illustration: Fossil clams.]

Sloshing about in the freshwater were amphibious and semi-aquatic

species. Probably commonest was the duckbill dinosaur, an enormous

reptile that walked on huge hind legs. It had as many as 2,000 teeth.

Specially adapted for grubbing up and munching freshwater plants, these

flat grinders occurred in batteries in the duckbill’s jaw. As a tooth

wore out, another popped into place.

Tramping about on all fours and peaceably cropping land plants were

bizarre looking horned dinosaurs with turtle-like beaks. For their

weight they must have had the most powerful jaws of any backboned animal

that ever lived. Armored species included one that looked like a horned

toad the size of a dump truck. Another sported a huge lump of bone on

the end of its tail, still another a thick lump of bone above a brain no

bigger than the end of your little finger. The world’s largest

crocodile, a 15-meter (50-foot) creature with 15-centimeter (6-inch)

teeth, turned up in the park, but remarkably few bones of meat-eating

dinosaurs have ever been found. One of the Earth’s great mysteries is

why, at the top of their terrific form, the dominant dinosaurs died out?

This happened in a geologically short time all around the globe. Perhaps

it was because the highly specialized reptiles couldn’t cope with

changes in their environment as the world climate grew cooler and more

continental. No one really knows.

When the Age of Mammals began some 64 million years ago, Big Bend lay on

an alluvial floodplain where summers were moist and winters were mild.

Shallow rivers meandered between natural levees wooded with flowering

plants, sycamore, stinking cedar, and tree ferns. Garfish swam in rivers

and isolated ponds, while small lakes and swamps lingered on in meander

cutoffs and abandoned river channels. It was a land where seasonal

floods alternated with dry periods and where, during protracted dry

spells, treeless areas invaded the forest.

The Fossil Record

Garfish and turtles in the Rio Grande give us a hint about life here

50 million years ago. Then they swam in waters haunted by crocodiles

and visited by the modern horse’s earliest ancestor, Hyracotherium;

the hippo-like Coryhodon; and Phenacodus, an early species of ungulate

related to both hoofed and clawed mammals.

Fossils of these and other animals belie dry and barren Tornillo

Flat’s earlier Eocene life as a lushly vegetated landscape, as

depicted in this reconstruction.

At the time of this scene the dinosaurs (“terrible lizards”) had been

extinct for 15 million years. Their fossils occur here too. Remains of

the giant Pterosaur have been found. These “winged lizards” were

flying reptiles whose 11-meter (36-foot) wingspan exceeded that of

small jet fighters. The wing was a featherless membrane stretched out

from the reptile’s body to the tip of its greatly enlarged fourth

digit. Fossil remains of Brontosaurus, Allosaurus, Icthyosaur, and

others have been found. Fossil Ammonites (see page 67), related to

today’s sea-dwelling chambered nautilus, represent the even earlier

period when today’s Big Bend was covered by a shallow inland sea.

Sample fossils are displayed in a shelter off the Marathon entrance

road near Tornillo Creek bridge.

[Illustration: Pterosaur]

[Illustration: Extinct mammals.]

With such a wealth of habitats a whole new host of animals took over Big

Bend. Crocodiles and turtles hung on from the Age of Reptiles, but

nature’s evolutionary torch passed to the warm-blooded mammals who

increased rapidly in numbers, size, and diversity. Remains of 29 species

of early, extinct forest-dwelling mammals have been discovered near the

Fossil Bone Exhibit site on Tornillo Flat. This same floodplain later

accommodated a hippo-like plant-eater, a browsing collie-sized mammal, a

panther-like cat, and the little ancestral horse, Eohippus. No bigger

than a fox terrier, Eohippus had not yet developed the typical horse

hoof and still had four toes on his front feet and three on his hind. He

browsed among low forest plants, because nature hadn’t yet invented

grass.

Some 20 million years ago, when we get our next glimpse of the Big Bend,

grasses were well established and the Earth began to witness the rapid

rise of grazing animals. In the park, Castolon had a savanna-type

environment, with a sub-humid to semi-arid climate. Rabbits and camel-

and sheep-like mammals flourished. Plant eaters ranged in size from a

tiny mouse to an enormous rhinoceros. This giant was about 3 meters

(10 feet) long, stood 2 meters (7 feet) high at the shoulder, and had

massive, bony horns on its head. There were also carnivores to fatten on

the herbivores.

In the middle of the Age of Mammals, Big Bend country became the seat of

widespread and repeated volcanic disturbances, with lava flows, ash

falls, and mountains bulging up like blisters as they filled with molten

rock. Here, most of these events centered on the Chisos, where the signs

can be seen in mountain peaks to this day. Much of what happened since

has not even left a shadow; the record and the rocks have both been

erased by millions of years of weathering and erosion. But you can see

“living fossils” in the high Chisos canyons. These are the ponderosa

pines, Arizona cypress, and Douglas-fir trees descended from the moist

woodland species that populated this region during the last Ice Age.

Occasional remains of the great Ice Age mammoths have also come from

gravels in deeply eroded ravines. And you can see all around you the

evidence of two latecomers who seem to have reached Big Bend around the

same time: Man and the Desert. But here, deep in the river’s canyon,

both are apparently as remote from you as your own daily world.

[Illustration: University of Texas paleontologist Wann Langston

excavates the sacrum of an extinct sauropod dinosaur. These bones

were excavated near Tornillo Creek.]

[Illustration: This huge cottonwood tree casts its shade along

Terlingua Creek. Early settlers of Big Bend greenbelts used the

cottonwood for roofbeams. Later, the trunks shored up mine shafts.]

Along the Greenbelt and Among the Grasses

Even in the dead of night it smells green beside the silt pond at Rio

Grande Village. Well, _dusty_ green perhaps, but redolent with reeds and

shrubs, trees and grass, with the very jungle breath of the floodplain.

On the other side of the river a lone cock crows and close at hand

there’s a rustling of leaves, a crackling of reeds, the lap-lap of some

animal drinking. Leopard frogs croak on in unconcerned bass and baritone

burps, sounding like someone’s stomach talking. But all at once

something has a frog for dinner and the unwilling meal keeps pumping out

shrieks, faster and faster and louder and shriller, to the last breath.

Then silence. The frog chorus grumbles on.

In the morning you find the flat-footed tracks, long-fingered as a human

hand, of that nocturnal hunter. The raccoon is an omnivore, an

opportunist with a taste for whatever it can find: amphibians,

shellfish, mesquite beans, acorns, cactus fruits, rodents, garbage. The

little masked bandit can in fact make himself a campground pest. His

dependence on water keeps him a prisoner of the floodplain, but the

river, the springs, the sloughs, and the ponds provide abundance in a

narrow green world unrolled like a ribbon across the desert. Sometimes

this greenbelt, as it is called, is no wider than a bush; in places it

may measure three-quarters of a kilometer (half a mile). And it keeps

changing, widening with floods, narrowing in droughts, altering course

with the river itself.

Just such a change of channels apparently created the bench of

bottomland where Rio Grande Village lies today. People have been camping

here for thousands of years, as shown by the many deep mortar holes

where meal was ground in the limestone ledges near the pumping station.

Certainly the place had much to recommend it: wood and water, abundant

game, rich soils, an agreeable winter climate, and beautiful views of

river and mountains. After the white man came to stay in the early 1900s

most of the native flora changed. Farmers cleared the bottomland to

plant cotton and grains, cut down the lanceleaf cottonwoods for

roofbeams, dredged ponds and ditches, and enclosed springs. Nowadays,

the plants you see are often exotics brought in from outside to create

shade and lawns.

Such are the eastern cottonwoods with their heart-shaped leaves, the

evergreen live oaks and smooth sycamores, the sweet-smelling honey

locust and eucalyptus trees, and that fine green carpet of Bermuda

grass. Like the farmers’ field crops, these interlopers cannot flourish

without irrigation and sometimes even that is not enough. Dozens of

eastern cottonwoods have died in recent years.

A good place to see native plants and animals is along the Rio Grande

Village Nature Trail, which starts at the campground and leads to a hill

above the river. A walk along this trail is doubly interesting because

it shows greenbelt and shrub desert side by side, the two habitats often

separated by less than a vertical or horizontal meter. The jungle starts

at the edge of the clearing and almost at once you come upon a warm

spring run. This may be where the rare little Big Bend mosquitofish,

_Gambusia gaigei_, originated, but all you see today is a larger

relative, _Gambusia affinis_. These five-centimeter (two-inch)

predators, little as they are, soon take over. They apparently are

invaders from the Rio Grande.

In wet weather this whole spring area becomes a swamp and even in dry

times moisture-loving plants crowd the trail. You pick your way beneath

black willow trees and grapevines festooned with wild grapes, stop to

admire the yellow tube-flowers on the tree tobacco, stoop to avoid a

spear slanting from the solid wall of common and giant cane. These two

tall woody grasses stand 4.5 meters (15 feet) high and put out great,

plume-like flowering heads that shine silver in the sun. Indians used

the stems for arrow shafts and ate the roots raw, roasted, or boiled.

Many an early settler roofed and even walled his house with cane. Today

the reeds supply deer and cattle with attractive browse, and the

thickets serve both as home and hunting ground for birds, small mammals,

and reptiles.

Here is the cleverly constructed nest of a gray wood rat. And there,

crouched beneath a bush like some storybook monster is an enormous spiny

lizard. Rosy and gray, he peers back unblinking, still as a stone, then

melts away so quickly he is gone before you see him move.

A little further on the trail climbs a short rise, topping out on

Chihuahuan Desert complete with creosotebush, dog cholla, ocotillo, and

the standard collection of cactuses. If you take the trail in spring or

summer, the mound-building strawberry cactus will be covered with hot

pink blossoms and delicious fruit. By fall the fiercely barbed blades of

the false-agave, or hechtia, will have taken on a reddish tinge. In

wintertime the tasajillo cactus will be dressed like a tiny Christmas

tree in long green spines and bright red fruits. But at any season this

water-starved scene stands in sharp contrast to the marsh, rank with

reeds and bulrushes, that lies just below.

Unlikely as it may seem you are looking at a beaver pond backed up

behind an actual beaver dam hidden in the reeds. The wary, nocturnal

beaver is seldom seen and you will look in vain for the familiar beaver

lodge, because Big Bend beavers make do with what the floodplain has to

offer. Instead of building wooden houses, these rodents dig burrows in

the river bank, foraying from there to feed on willow, cottonwood,

seepwillow, and river cane. Around the turn of the century the Rio

Grande and its main tributaries abounded with beaver, but fur traders

trapped them to the brink of extinction, woodcutters and farmers

destroyed their food supply, and cattle feeding in the canebrakes

trampled their burrows.

It is hard to imagine just what destroying the trees and ground cover

can do to fertile land and to a living stream, but a visit to Terlingua

Abaja shows you. James B. Gillett, foreman of the famous G-4 Ranch,

recalled that in 1885 “the Terlingua was a bold running stream, studded

with cottonwood timber and was alive with beaver.” There was one grove

of trees where he had seen at least 1,000 head of cattle enjoying the

shade. But after the Terlingua mines opened, Mexican farmers established

a community at Terlingua Abaja, a few kilometers up the creek from its

junction with the Rio Grande. All the cottonwoods up and down the creek

fell to construction and hungry mine furnaces and the virgin earth

turned bottom up beneath the plow and grubbing hoe. Today this once

fertile valley is a wasteland.

The Rare Big Bend Mosquitofish