Lost and Found in Big Bend National Park
By Chris Ryan, Freelance Writer

Deserts get a bad rap.  They’re hot, dry, and empty – except, of course, for the rattlesnakes and prickly pear.  At least that’s the standard image of deserts, reinforced through countless spaghetti westerns and the outdated idea that only forestlands are worthy of protection and a week spent exploring.

These days we’re a bit wiser.  We know that deserts can host hundreds of species of birds, teem with wildflowers, fill key ecological roles, and inspire insight and reflection.

But other thoughts weighed on my mind as two friends and I pressed deeper into the Chihuahuan desert of Big Bend, Texas – thoughts closer to what a movie cowboy has after his horse abandons him under a relentless desert sun.

Big Bend is an 800,000-acre chunk of southwest Texas in one of the most sparsely-populated corners of the country.  Back in 1935, a government report called it “the last great wilderness area of Texas.”  It straddles the Rio Grande where the river cuts sharply northeast, giving the southern border its familiar shape.  It has no spectacular waterfalls, grandiose monuments, or erupting geysers; its appeal is more subtle, and can’t be grasped in a single afternoon.

Big Bend is also a national park, but don’t take this to mean that if you get lost there you’ll soon stumble across a campsite or ranger station.  If you park at a trailhead and start walking, you’ll soon be as exposed to the desert as that cowboy without his horse.

Which is how we found ourselves on day two.  We weren’t lost, but we didn’t really know where we were, either.  All around us, countless steep, narrow canyons and sandy arroyos cut through the landscape like veins; lining them up with the tiny squiggles on the map was futile.

The problem wasn’t that we couldn’t place ourselves on the map, but that we therefore couldn’t use the map to find water.  We hadn’t packed enough for our three-day trip.  This was deliberate – water is heavy and we wanted to stay mobile.  We had decided to rely on the natural springs marked on our map for drinking and cooking.

So we faced a choice.  If we pushed deeper into the desert, the water we carried would last us to the next day.  Or, it could get us back to the car.  But it wasn’t enough for both.

If we didn’t turn around then – if we pressed on, hoping that, eventually, the lines in the landscape would start to resemble the marks on the map – we would sleep restlessly that night knowing we’d need to find a water source soon.  In the morning, if we couldn’t find ourselves on the map, or if we couldn’t find a spring, or if we found a spring but it was dry – our canteens would run empty long before we made it back to the car.

Our dilemma was simple:  do we chance it?

The answer was decided by default.  We discussed it as we hiked further up a meandering arroyo, and then we just weren’t discussing it at all.

I could say we continued on out of a youthful sense of invincibility, or to match our will to survive against the inhospitable desert.  But the truth is less dramatic. We had driven across Texas (and two other states) to spend some long hours in the Chihuahuan desert; heading back to the inside of a car so soon wasn’t in our plans.  At the same time, the apparently endless desert and its simple, stripped-down beauty was drawing us in deeper.

We followed the arroyo for several miles.  I gradually felt smaller and smaller as the steep walls on either side of us rose higher.  From time to time they parted and opened into vast “rooms,” with floors of sand, walls of limestone, and ceilings composed of the darkening sky.  As the light changed and evening set in, the rooms and passageways assumed the aura of another world.

Knowing I was still on this world, today, filled me with a new appreciation for what one can still stumble upon in the wilderness when slightly lost.

We continued walking, sharing fewer and fewer words.  The dusk seemed to last for hours.  The thought of my absolute dependency on something as simple as water lingered in the back of my mind.  It’s true that life is more vivid when you’re not sure where you’re going to find tomorrow’s sustenance.

The silence was striking and the air impossibly still.  It seeped into my head, pushing out the usual background noise and heightening my senses.  I was starting to feel less like a visitor and more like just another creature eking it out in the desert.  The foreign felt familiar, and the odd felt foreign.  I hadn’t suddenly achieved enlightenment.  But I was beginning to slip into sync with the desert around me.

My notion of time, for instance, began to harmonize with natural rhythms.  It can be hard – if not impossible – to conceive of the thousands or millions of years that passed between volcanic eruptions at Big Bend, let alone the hundreds of millions of years it took to shape the mountains and outcroppings seen there today.  But standing in the middle of it all, with no motion around me but the odd bird, it became a little easier to wrap my head around the invisible, slow pace of geologic time, and to appreciate how a landscape so complex could possibly take so long to form.

We climbed out of the canyon by the evening’s last light and spent the night on the mesa under a sky packed tight with countless stars.  As my eye followed a satellite moving across the sky, indistinguishable from a star but for its slow, deliberate orbit, I knew it would not be a restless night.  My deep contentment at that moment went deeper than the uncertainty over water.  In retrospect, I know why.

Since entering the desert and losing the trail two days before, we had seen no trace of man – heard no nearby freeway or distant rumble of an airplane, seen no encroaching tract houses or swimming pools, no orange glow of city light at night.  Nothing but an old horseshoe earlier in the day and this tiny, man-made moon flying silently miles above.  We had experienced what John Muir called the “great fresh unblighted, unredeemed wilderness.”

He was writing about the heavily-forested Sierra Nevadas, but he could just as easily have penned those words about Big Bend and the desert Southwest.  Thanks to the foresight of the Park Service 70 years ago, Texas still boasts a “last great wilderness area” in which cowboys and city folk alike can lose themselves.

And find themselves.

Whether we found water the next day was up to us, but also the desert.  And that was fine by me.

**All photos by Chris Ryan

If You Go

Big Bend National Park

P.O. Box 129
Big Bend National Park, TX 79834

http://www.nps.gov/bibe/

Headquarters:  432-477-2251

Weather Information Hotline :  432-477-1183

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