by John Forsythe
Contributing Writer

After nearly 20 years, Melissa and I will soon retire to the wilds north of Terlingua.  Here’s a short tale about the best job a backpacker could ever have, and about one of my favorite places in the park, in the world....

As the summer of 1991 came to an end, I turned in a stack of paperwork to bid to do a surface water source survey of Big Bend National Park. To my amazement, the bid was accepted, and I gleefully looked forward to months of walking around the desert from one wet spot to the next.    

Walking, there would be lots of walking: back and forth, up and down, over 800,000 acres in an area roughly 70 miles wide and 50 or 60 miles top to bottom, and as wild as creation.   

The National Park Service wanted someone to locate water sources on a map, show the best route to them, and photograph them. If the water came from a spring or a seep, they wanted the flow rate measured. If the water was found in a tinaja, or pool, I’d need to estimate the volume of water it contained.

The Park Service also wanted pictures of any nearby ruins, dams or other works of man and a brief description of the types of trees and vegetation near the water, with particular attention to the numbers and sizes of invasive tamarisk [a.k.a. saltcedar].  Finally, I would record any sign of trespassing livestock and note the signs and types of wildlife using the water.

Visions of sunstroke, hypothermia, hailstorms, lightning strikes and floods, or just plain getting lost in the outback ran through my mind. During the year or so I figured the job would take, I’d share the desert with panthers, bears, rattlesnakes, scorpions, centipedes, skunks and the dread cone nose bug.

I was issued a radio, but who knew if a call would reach anyone during a real emergency? This was in the era before satellite links, and radios were notorious for not working when a caller was down in a canyon or behind a mountain, and even if someone answered a call, it would surely be hours and could be days for help to show up. Hot dog!

Any large water source in Big Bend was almost certainly used during the brief but intense ranching era before the park was established, but in modern times only a handful are visited with any frequency. The old timers in Resource Management warned me that even well-known places such as Ward Spring had been incorrectly located on maps, and that it was anyone’s guess as to how reliable any information would be about routes to the smaller springs, seeps and tinajas which are considered permanent. Also, none of the water sources in the North Rosillos Mountains, an area of over 60,000 acres which had only recently been added to the park, had ever been systematically visited.  

I pored over old photographs and gathered what information there was until I felt I was as ready as I’d ever be and then strode forth to begin, reminding myself of the old proverb that “The longest journey begins with just one step.”  

That one step turned into several hundred miles of hiking and led to over 300 water sources and 43 nights when I camped wherever it got dark, usually in the bug-eyed middle of extreme nowhere and usually alone.

For the first day of fieldwork, I went to two sites in the foothills of the Dead Horse Mountains. Since neither of the sites are shown on any map, I was surprised to learn about them, having walked through the area several times with no idea there was water anywhere nearby.

First I went to Dickey Well, where a wooden windmill tower at the junction of two large arroyos was still erect, temporarily winning the fight against relentless gravity, sun and wind.  The tower and a rusted engine block lying close by were evidence of the effort put forth to reach the liquid more precious than gold. The ground was trampled with javelina tracks and the well at the base of the windmill held crystal clear water only a foot below ground level.

Along the south bank of the arroyo, a broad area was littered with mounds of soil mixed with ashes and flecks of charcoal. Fragments of wire, a cast iron door hinge, a skillet handle, a harness buckle and other small pieces of metal were the only signs of the heavy use Dickey Well must have had during the few decades of the ranchers’ daily fight for survival.  The well had been the only source of precious water for miles in a dry, brutal country.  

After stumbling around in the catclaw to photograph Dickey Well from the all points of the compass, I drove on to a low ridge of crumbling grey rock where the trace of an old ranch road led toward my next destination, Leopold Tinaja. GPS units weren’t used at the time and getting lost was a whole lot easier, so I kept close watch on my topographic map while I walked along the faint road, but I needn’t have bothered since it disappeared within a quarter mile into a sandy arroyo.  From that point it was “shoe leather navigation” up and around a maze of limestone ridges and eroded gullies with steep, crumbling banks of clay studded with cactus, sotol, lechuguilla, acacias, and yuccas. Years of wading through these dominant plants of the desert have taught me that they share essential features – the plants are all beautiful when they bloom and they are collectively tougher than boot leather. It seems as though Mother Nature feels a special fondness for desert plants since she designed all of them to tear flesh and inflict pain on anything that comes close. “Keep your distance” is their constant message.

About the time I decided I wasn’t going to find the tinaja and had gotten distracted by the intense brilliant yellow of a patch of desert baileyas, I crested a ridge and looked down into a narrow box canyon to see a large pool of brown water below a pour-off at the canyon’s upper end. Leopold Tinaja was real after all!  

To my amazement, several large turtles were busily swimming and diving, disappearing into the murky water. Very possibly I was the first human to show up since the turtles’ great grandpa was just an egg, and I wondered how great grandpa crossed so many rough, bone-dry miles of desert to reach the tinaja. How could they survive the long spells between rains? Unconcerned with my lack of understanding, the turtles went about their business.  

For such a big pool of water, it seemed unusual that there were so few signs of human activity. Almost any other water source in Big Bend has ash piles or flint chips or barbed wire, aluminum cans and old tires, depending on which culture used the water.  But the only sign that anyone had been in this canyon was a rickety ladder made from the thin sticks of desert shrubs tied together with rusted bailing wire. When I had climbed down and gotten closer, I realized the ladder was placed against the north wall of the canyon below a small hole in the rock where a constant, thick stream of honeybees flew in and out.  I climbed back out of the canyon to enjoy what little breeze there was in the shade of a giant dagger yucca before starting back to my truck.  

While I sat in the shade, I dug a lechuguilla thorn from my leg and tried to judge how long the ladder had stood below the beehive, protected from the rain and sun by the shadow of a bend in the canyon wall.  It couldn’t be prehistoric since it was tied with wire, but it may have stood there since there were ranchers in the area and the wagon traffic on the nearby Ore Road was flourishing in the early 1900’s.

I noticed that the ends of the branches used to make the ladder weren’t cut with a knife or axe – they’d been pounded and twisted and broken off.  Was the ladder made by someone lost and starving?  Had desperation inspired someone to make the flimsy thing and to risk their neck climbing for the honey? I decided that whoever had made the ladder was undoubtedly very small, maybe even a child, or the ladder simply wouldn’t have supported them while they held on with one hand and fought clouds of bees to reach into the hole for the honeycombs.

While paddling a canoe through San Vicente Canyon years later, I was surprised to notice an identical, flimsy hand-made ladder leaned against a cliff.  It was also beneath a beehive in a hole in the rock.

There were a lot of other surprises while I worked on the survey. A huge one came when the rocks slid out from under my feet while I was carrying a heavy pack halfway down a cliff near Punta de la Sierra, and it was really surprising to find three sets of fresh footprints outside the tent after a hard rain during a night I was camped near Onion Spring.  I was never able to find out who made the tracks.

Today when I go past the turn off to Paint Gap, I always remember what a surprise it was when it rained so hard and so fast that I finally had to abandon my truck on high ground and swim across several arroyos and walk back to the pavement. Maybe I’m the only person who’s ever done the breast stroke up part of Paint Gap Road.

And again it was a surprise when I lived through the Mother of All Lightning and Hail Storms one morning on the wide open flats between Burro Mesa Pouroff and the Chimneys. My only shelter was a metal-framed backpack and a spiral binder of field notes.

In the dry year of 1997, an Ameri-Corps group did another spring survey. When they went to Leopold Tinaja to duplicate the photographs I had taken, their pictures showed only an empty depression lined with cracked dirt where there had been the deep pool of brown water.  And their report made no mention of a ladder standing against the canyon wall so I was disappointed to think the flimsy desert wood had disintegrated or the ladder had been swept away during a cloudburst or that someone had simply taken it.  And the turtles – who could say what their fate had been? Did they die whenever the pool dried up or had they developed a strategy to survive until the next rain?

I thought about the tinaja a lot, and remembered it as one of the most interesting places in the entire park.  But I didn’t go back until a beautiful fall afternoon in 2004 when my wife, Melissa, and I were backpacking from Persimmon Gap to Rio Grande Village. Part of our route would follow an abandoned road along the foothills of the Dead Horse Mountains, so it was a good time to visit the tinaja again, like dropping in on an old friend.

I had told Melissa about the turtles and the ladder several times, and we decided to walk an extra mile or two to camp there. When we dropped our packs and looked down into the canyon, the ladder was still intact, leaned against the rock wall in exactly the same place, and the late summer rains had filled the tinaja once again. The turtles were diving in the pool and the clouds of bees were flying in and out of their hole in the rock as if they’d never been interrupted…and they probably hadn’t.

It seemed reasonable to think that no one but the Ameri-Corps group had been there in the thirteen years since my first visit. I smiled to think that in only one summer there could easily be more people who will reach the summit of Mount Everest than will ever visit the timeless, unspoiled little canyon brimful of honeybees and turtles, named after one of America’s greatest conservationists, Aldo Leopold.  

Melissa Forsythe, the author’s wife, in Leopold Tinaja, in the remote Dead Horse Mountains on the east side of Big Bend National Park. The author was amazed to find turtles in the water both times he visited - and no trace of new human activity in the area in decades. (John Forsythe, photo)

The ladder -- still there for inspection by Melissa. (John Forsythe, photo)