by John Forsythe
As I stare out the window on a cold gray December day, watching snowflakes drift past, it’s hard to believe the power of the sun that will come back the instant the clouds lift. Can this really be the same place where I’ve spent so many days walking so many miles under the sun, literally staggering from the heat?
The uncustomary gloom of days like this one can drive even the hard
core desert rats indoors. Mostly they can’t tolerate the dark overcast
sky and tend to go into hiding in a hurry when the rare cold and rain
and the razor-sharp north wind show up. While the change to an indoor
life may be briefly enjoyable, very soon the novelty of daytime
television and being housebound disappears and the desire for the usual
bright sunshine, wide open spaces, and the warmth of the desert takes
hold. Daydreaming during these brief periods of confinement brings
memories of more agreeable days wandering the vast and mostly empty,
always fascinating Chihuahuan Desert.
It was a mild morning in early April and spring was in full sway. There
had been several good rains the previous few weeks and the plants and
wildlife were all following their ancient mandates to sprout and
blossom, to nest and recreate before the dry summer winds scorched away
the moisture that allow for these possibilities. As we loaded our
mountain bikes into the back of our pickup truck in Panther Junction we
were serenaded with the whistling of quail, the harsh calling of cactus
wrens and the cluck cluck of a lovesick roadrunner calling from its
perch in the branches of a dead mesquite.
Our friend and co-worker, Raymond Skiles, a wildlife biologist and lifelong resident of the Texas border region, had called the night before to invite my wife Melissa and me to join him on a trip across the Rio Grande into Mexico and then on a bike ride some eight or ten miles to the base of the Sierra del Carmen mountains – to an abandoned mine known as the Mina Puerto Rico. We’d been hearing about the mines since we’d moved to Big Bend and were very interested in seeing them, so we jumped at the chance to go.
Not only would the trip take us to the mountains and the abandoned mines, but on the way we’d ride our bikes through the isolated, end-of-the-road Mexican village of Boquillas and past the Terminál, the anchor point for a miles-long cable which had been used to carry buckets laden with ore from the mines in Mexico across the river to Texas. After watching the limestone cliffs turn rosy pink and fade into darkness at sunset nearly every day for several years, we were very curious to see the del Carmens up close.
The heights of the Sierra del Carmens reach above 7,000 feet. The cliffs forming the west slopes of the mountains rise vertically almost 5,000 feet from their base, so the view of the range dominates the entire eastern half of Big Bend National Park.
From 30 miles away (as the raven flies) at Panther Junction, the mountains appear as a very long, flat-topped ridge with thick horizontal bands of bare rock, and a stumpy column on top known as El Pico, a famous landmark. They are the northernmost mountains of the Sierra Madre Orientes which stretch hundreds of miles further south into Mexico.
The range is enormously important as a wildlife sanctuary and corridor because of its comparatively well-protected higher elevations.
After the drive from Panther Junction we parked on the U.S. side of the river at the Boquillas overlook, then carried and rode our bikes down the steep gravel hill to the riverbank and waded across the hip-deep water, carrying our bikes on our shoulders.
Expecting this to be a relatively easy day trip in mild weather, we carried only a half gallon of water apiece and a lunch. In Boquillas we visited with friends, then pedaled on along a goat path through dense mesquite near the river before turning south into a broad valley past the adobe ruins of Boquillas Viejo, the old town site abandoned after several floods.
An hour or so later we had reached the base of the steep ridge which has El Terminál at its top. Soon wee soon gave up trying to pedal up the loose rocks on the narrow trail and oncea gain carried our bikes on our shoulders; we even took the pedals off to make it easier to fight our way up through dense thickets of brush, between huge boulders. Occaionally, a wild burro brayed and bellowed as we passed.
At the top we marveled at the view of the river below us and discussed the man-killing labor that must have gone into building the enormous concrete reinforcements and stringing the wrist-thick steel cable some eight miles across the river and beyond to the terminal on the Texas side. The silver and lead ore from the mines, which were still about six miles further across several shallow, rocky canyons, was brought to the Terminál via mule-drawn wagons and then loaded into buckets attached to the cable for the trip across to the Texas terminal. After being unloaded in Texas, the ore was then crushed and re-loaded onto mule-drawn wagons for the trip to Alpine, over 100 miles away on primitive roads.
After a short rest we headed on toward the mines. Soon we could see the ruins of the worker’s houses and several larger buildings, 4 or 5 miles away across the valley, shimmering in the gathering heat. For an hour or more we bounced and struggled along the rough, rocky road overgrown with cactus and yuccas. By now – mid day – the bottom of the valley had become a furnace. Plainly visible on the road’s surface was scarred by mule shoes and the metal-clad wheels of heavily-loaded ore wagons.
At last we reached the buildings below the mines and explored them for a while; there were a surprising number of buildings and warehouses at the site, some of them having dates as early as 1903 written into the cement walls. We sat down to take advantage of the shade and admire the view of Big Bend’s Chisos Mountains in the distance, seemingly another world.
The mountainside was honeycombed with open shafts, some horizontal and some vertical with openings 20 or 30 feet in diameter and hundreds of feet deep, invitations to disaster. I followed a pair of iron rails into one of the horizontal shafts until the light became too faint to see, and then turned back to the opening to wait for Melissa and Raymond, who carried flashlights. When they arrived we went back into the shaft to explore further, but we were soon stopped by a strange noise, a powerful, vibrating hum. In the beam of the flashlights we were able to see a gigantic beehive hanging down like a thick icefall several feet from the rock in the top of the shaft, no more than a yard beyond the point where I had stopped. If I hadn’t waited for them and had kept walking just a few more steps into the shaft I would have hit the nest face first in the pitch black! We quickly left.
I thought of a white-haired old man we had talked to on the way through Boquillas, 9 or t10 miles away across several cliffs and canyons, mostly composed of sharp limestone bedrock studded with mesquite and cactus. When the man was young, he told us, he would work at the mines every day straight through for a month or two, as long as he could stand it. When he was too exhausted to work any longer, he would quit his job and go to town to see his wife and friends and visit and rest.
On one trip to town, he got very drunk at a birthday celebration with his friends and spent all his hard-earned money. When he woke up he had no shoes. The money he didn’t care about, it was just money. “No mas que dinero, no me importa.” But having no shoes meant he had to walk the entire distance barefoot back to the mines, where he could buy work boots against his future wages. After sixty-odd years of a very rough life he still shook his head at the memory of the pain of that walk.
While we were poking around in one of the ruins we found a treasure. A friend who occasionally guided horsepack trips to the mines had told us the treasure might still be where he hid it on his last trip, and we were very lucky it was: a 5-gallon plastic bucket full of clean water.
We had begun dreading the ride back toward the river, wondering if we should even try to return the way we came, given how rough it was and knowing it was going to get dark before we could get back down through the deepest of the canyons. As we waited for the worst of the day’s heat to pass, we realized we had badly underestimated both how hard the trip was going to be and how long it would take. Between the 3 of us, we had only about a quart of water left to get back to Boquillas; this additional water from the 5 gallon bucket literally saved us.
We decided not to return via the way we came, but to follow a faint old road to the village of La Noria (The Well) which we estimated was another 8 miles to the south. From there we could take the main gravel highway back to the river at Boquillas. Again we badly underestimated the difficulty of bicycle travel in the backcountry; we didn’t reach La Noria until well after dark.
Entering a rural village in Mexico is not always easy. Typically, a network of trails will intersect and divide and come to barbed wire fences with no gates or go around fields out into the desert and simply stop. Which one actually goes into town?
On other trips we’d had trouble finding our way into a village in broad daylight, even from within shouting distance and we weren’t about to start shouting for help in English in the dead of night. Finally we roused a dog barking louder than the rest and were relieved when his owner came out to see what was causing the uproar. This gentleman, don Timoteo as we came to know him during later visits to La Noria, took us under his wing and led us into to the village, then to the home of the mayor, where he quickly and skillfully handed us off and disappeared back into the night.
At the home of Señor Aurelio Oñate we were greeted warmly; he acted as if three exhausted gringoes routinely showed up on his doorstep in the dead of night. What did we need, water? Were we hungry? We were offered a fresh dipper full of cool, clear water from the well in his front yard, but even in our thirst we were afraid to drink the water given the number of goats, chickens and other livestock running loose. With true gratitude for the offer, we declined as tactfully as we were able and asked if we could buy soft drinks instead.
Aurelio told us we could in fact buy sodas and bean tacos from Señora Oñate, only the drinks would be hot and the tacos would be cold. Each of us drank four sodas in about 5 minutes. And the cold bean tacos – how delicious they were! Raymond is a big person with an appetite to match his size, so after we’d eaten all the tacos in the Oñate’s household the disappointed look on Raymond’s face encouraged our host to send next door for another half dozen, which we devoured along with yet another warm soda for dessert.
Literally full of beans, we took stock of our situation. At La Noria we were at least 18 dirt-road miles south of the border and it was past 11 o’clock in a pitch-black night. We had no lights since the bulbs in both flashlights had broken, and we were exhausted, still dehydrated, and wired on sugar and caffeine from the sodas. Also there was now a strong north wind blowing, which we’d have to pedal against all the way back to the river.
To our amazement, Aurelio volunteered to take us to Boquillas in his truck, probably realizing it was the quickest way to get rid of us. Even now, 13 years later, I still feel humbled with thanks to him. To leave his home and carry three foreign strangers down a bad and even dangerous road in the middle of the night is no small thing, but the much greater consideration for our host was gasoline. He would have to burn a weeks’ supply of the precious fuel on the trip, and although we were delighted to pay for the gas it would by no means be a simple thing for him to replace it.
We tossed our bikes into the truck and began the trip, bouncing and jerking down the rocky road, finally pulling into Boquillas an hour and a half later. We said our thanks and farewells to Aurelio, who left in a dense cloud of dust blown up by the howling north wind. We have seen this gentleman several times in the years since, and he has never failed to greet us warmly and laugh as though the inconvenience we caused him was nothing. Thankfully, we have since been able to repay a small part of his kindness.
Thinking we’d simply wade across the Rio Grande and finally go home to a warm soft bed, we rode our bikes through town into the darkness of the riverbank, only to find the water had risen two feet or more since we had crossed it during the day. It was now impossible to cross back to Texas until morning. We were stranded, it had gotten bitter cold, the village dogs were barking, and even the local burros tethered near the river crossing were braying at us for waking them up. We gathered under a mesquite bush while we decided what to do.
Raymond mentioned he had seen a door open at the church when we rode through town, and he thought there might be someone there who could let us spend the night. This was a great idea – in fact it was our only hope for any sort of shelter – so we rode back through the inky black night toward town, wanting nothing more than to collapse somewhere, anywhere out of the wind. We found the church door open, and there was no one there. We decided that we were desperate enough to go in without permission, hoping the people of Boquillas would understand since they were probably used to the antics of us gringoes.
Stretched out on the hard, narrow pews, we tried to sleep. The chill blustery wind periodically threw clouds of dust through the windowless openings in the walls. The door was open, we learned, because the hinges were broken and it would not shut, so the local dogs joyfully took the opportunity to stick their heads in and bark at us. Sleep was simply impossible. But we were back in civilization, or at least close to it, and we had walls around us and by now sunrise was only a couple of hours away. We were very happy to be where we were.
The next morning we had a wonderful breakfast of tacos and eggs at Falcón’s restaurant before we loaded our bikes into the chalupa (small flat-bottomed boat) and crossed the river. I know now that we were lucky to have survived, having made several basic mistakes that back country travelers should not have made.
1) Never, ever, ever travel without extra water.
2) Even if it’s broad daylight and 100°, never leave home without warm clothes and a dependable flashlight.
3) Distances in rural Mexico are measured in hours, not miles.
The modern era has slowly brought changes even into the desert. Perhaps the most obvious example of this change is the strict closure of the U.S./Mexican border. Although the Rio Grande was officially the border at the time of the trip described here, people from both sides of the river would routinely cross to and from villages such as Boquillas, Lajitas or San Vicente without thought of breaking the law. The river was just that: a river, no more or less. To the profound disappointment of many border residents, it is no longer possible to simply cross the Rio Grande and return.
This is dedicated to the residents of La Noria, Coahuila, Mexico.
