River Ranches of the Big Bend!

Alpine, TX → Big Bend National Park
191.0 mi (307.4 km)

Bend your ear this way, y’all!

I’m spending a couple of days in Texas’ largest national park: Big Bend! It gets its name for the big bend in the Rio Grande that has carved two magnificent canyons on either end. My goal for today was to see this neat park from canyon to canyon!

I drifted in at the Santa Elena Canyon end! This canyon with its towering walls is part of both Big Bend and Cañon de Santa Elena National Parks, and in fact, Mexico was on the other side of the river from here! I had originally wanted to go swimming in the Rio Grande, but it was so muddy! I just didn’t feel like starting the day covered in mud, so I floated around a bit before heading inland. I could have done a full-day float trip, but I would have had to be traveling with a group!

The mud might not have been great on my toes, but it sure did make the soil nice and rich for farming! That’s what James L. Sublett thought when he moved here in 1914 to help with an alfalfa operation. He developed the area’s first pump irrigation system and brought the first wheat-threshing machine!

Following the stock market crash off 1929, Albert Dorgan accepted an Army assignment in the area and teamed up with Mr. Dorgan to form the Grand Canyon Company! Together, they grew cotton, experimented with new machinery, and ran a trading post at nearby Castolón! It was Mr. Dorgan’s idea to create an international peace park at the border with Mexico, and though he couldn’t get the international support he originally sought, he was one of the driving forces making Big Bend into the national park it is today!

From the old porch of Mr. Dorgan’s home, I spotted a really neat rock formation on the horizon called the Mule Ears, and I wanted to check them out! It turned out that there was a trail leading to a spring by the Mule Ears, which sounded just perfect on a hot day like today!

Along the way, there were giant caterpillars everywhere! The white-lined sphinx moth has two hatches a year, one in late winter and another in early fall. These fat grubbers covered the roads and the plants on all sides of those roads, eating and eating to prepare for the next stage of their life cycle. I just had to do my best not to bump into one, because these were some bruiser bugs!

The trail itself was about two miles long and relatively flat, but the afternoon heat built while my water supply dwindled. The distant clouds building over the Chisos Mountains were no help at all! Still, I expected there would be a really lovely spring in the shadow of the Mule Ears to cool me off!

Not much further, I found the Mule Ears, the giant, eroded plug of an ancient volcano! They were super neat to behold, but there was no spring in sight! Where was that great, relaxing pool to take in the views?!

A quarter mile further, and I reached the spring, a tiny overgrown trickle, scarcely large enough to feed the giant red dragonflies buzzing about or the little tadpoles squirming below. And it was a long way away from those Mule Ears. Oh well! I dipped my feet to cool off a bit, then headed back to the road en route to some more historic ranches!

Around the same time that Albert Dorgan arrived in Big Bend, Homer Wilson was setting up one of the largest ranches of the 20th century at Oak Springs! At its height, the ranch spanned 28,000 acres of pasture dedicated to sheep and goats! Mr. Wilson lived in this house until 1943, and today, the inside has an eerie, just-abandoned feel to it, like the Wilsons could come back at any time! The place started to feel spooky as the clouds rolled in overhead, so I didn’t stay here too long!

Not far away was another eerie place, the Sam Nail Ranch! One of the first ranches in the Big Bend area, it was the project of Sam and Jim Nail, who took advantage of the ranching boom during World War I! They raised cattle, sheep and goats, and installed a windmill to pump water and feed their orchard. Like Homer Wilson, the Nail family cleared out in the mid 40s, leaving behind a single adobe wall and the windmill, which is still pumping water to feed the forgotten plants after all these years!

All this spooky history made me hungry, so I headed toward the other side of the park, where a trip across the Rio Grande promised some tasty tamales in Boquillas del Carmen!

After getting instructions from the border patrol agent, I went down to the riverside, where a ferryman spotted me right away! He rowed across to pick me up and take me back, and I asked him how many times he made these trips in a day. He said in the high season, it could be over a hundred times a day! What a workout!

Once on shore, I hopped in a jeep to go the mile or so into town, then had to check in at the customs office, where the customs agents were playing video games in a back room. It was a pretty easy process, and from there, I set out to get some tamales from the Boquillas restaurant!

There wasn’t a whole lot to see in Boquillas, the last remains of a 19th century mining town. Apart from two restaurants and a closed bar, there were a few houses, an old barn with a mule, and that was about it! It felt like a town lost in the mists of history! In short, I thought I was going to be rushing back to the boat before the last crossing at 6:00, but there ended up being plenty of time!

Back in the states, I punctuated my lowlands visit with a hike into Boquillas Canyon. The trail was very quiet, with abandoned blankets of souvenirs and a note asking visitors to tip Mexican Singing Jesus! The Park Service discouraged giving money to any of these folks, because they were crossing the river illegally to sell to tourists! I saw no vendors, but there were a couple of vaqueros trying to round up a mare and her foal off in the bushes away from the trail!

At last, I beheld Boquillas Canyon, named for the “little mouths” formed in the rock walls by erosion. This is the longest and deepest canyon at Big Bend with walls climbing 7,000 feet in height! The wind was whipping pretty fast, and my hat got flung right into the water. It didn’t sour the experience too much, because the hat was well made and the canyon was so pretty!

The sun set pretty quickly as I made my way to the Chisos Mountain Lodge where I would be staying for the night. That was okay, though, because right after a tasty salad bar with lots of bread sticks, I stepped outside to enjoy the night sky.