At the start of the tour
Welcome to Ross Maxwell Scenic Drive
Welcome to Big Bend National Park, and to the Ross Maxwell Scenic Drive. This tour follows the road for about twenty-two miles, from an old homestead to Castolon, near the Rio Grande, with Mexico on the far bank. I'll tell you a story on the way to each stop, and another when you get there.
The road is named for the park's first superintendent. Ross Maxwell was a geologist. He earned his doctorate in 1936 and came to the Big Bend that same year, to help survey the region's rocks for the National Park Service. When the park was established, he was the logical choice to run it. He started in July 1945, with four employees and a budget of fifteen thousand dollars a year. The park had no paved roads, no electricity, and the nearest telephone was a hundred miles away. While he was superintendent, Maxwell laid out this road to show off the most spectacular geology on the west side of the park. So think of it as a geologist's tour, in pavement.
The mountains at the heart of the park are the Chisos. They rise nearly a mile above the desert floor and sprawl across forty square miles, and the park calls them the only mountain range completely contained within a national park. They're volcanic, built mostly of rhyolite, from eruptions so violent they sent red-hot avalanches of rock and gas racing across the land. The range is named for a people Spanish priests found living in the high mountains, a small nomadic group they called the Chizo.
The park itself took a while to arrive. Texas created Texas Canyons State Park in 1933. Congress passed a law for a national park in 1935, the state deeded the land over, and on June 12, 1944, Big Bend National Park became a reality.
Point 1 · At the stop
Sam Nail Ranch
This is the Sam Nail Ranch. In 1916, Sam Nail built a two-room adobe house here, on the banks of Cottonwood Creek. He soon married, and he and his wife raised a family on this spot.
An easy loop trail, half a mile long, wanders down through the homestead. Look for what's left of the house, its adobe walls slowly melting back into the desert. There's an old orchard, traces of the garden, and a chicken coop shaded by soapberry trees. And there's the windmill. In the Nails' day, the old wooden windmill pumped water up to a tank on top of Burro Mesa for their cattle. A windmill still brings water to the surface, and it spills onto the ground in the shade of giant pecan, walnut, willow and soapberry trees.
That little oasis is a magnet for life. Sit quietly on the bench and you might hear javelinas moving through the brush, or spot painted buntings, green-tailed towhees and mockingbirds.
The orchard has a story of its own. When Texas governor Jim Hogg died in 1906, he didn't want a headstone. He asked for a pecan tree at his head and a walnut at his feet, and for their descendants to be handed out across the state, so that Texas would become a land of trees. A state representative, E. E. Townsend, gave Sam Nail one of those Hogg pecans to plant in his orchard.
So a governor's last wish travelled all the way out here, to a little patch of shade at the edge of the desert.
History, on the way there
On the way: Homer Wilson Ranch Overlook
Next, we're heading to the Homer Wilson Ranch Overlook, and the story of one of the largest ranches in this country before it became a park.
Homer Wilson was born in Del Rio, Texas, in 1892. He studied mining and petroleum engineering at the Missouri School of Mines, served in Europe in the First World War, and came back to the Rio Grande country afterward. In the late 1920s, he bought land in the foothills of the mountains for a sheep and goat operation. In time, the ranch grew to about forty-five thousand acres.
His headquarters stayed at Oak Canyon, but Blue Creek became the heart of the ranch, where most of the work was done. A National Register nomination calls it, without doubt, the best example of ranching within what is now the park.
At Blue Creek, Wilson built a second, very substantial ranch house with a long screened porch. Nearly everything in it came from close by: stone, sand and gravel from Blue Creek Canyon, timber from the mountains, and reeds from the Rio Grande.
The story goes that Mrs. Wilson wanted a ceiling of reeds with adobe mud on top, the way people along the river had built for centuries. A mud roof would leak. So her husband laid the reeds, put a layer of concrete on them instead of mud, and a metal roof above that. The air space in between kept the house cooler in summer and warmer in winter. Everybody got what they wanted.
Homer Wilson died suddenly in 1943. The next year, Big Bend became a national park.
Point 2 · At the stop
Homer Wilson Ranch Overlook
This is the Homer Wilson Ranch Overlook. The buildings in the valley below are the ranch's Blue Creek line camp, built for the ranch foreman, Lott Felts, at the base of a peak called Signal, or Carousel, Mountain. The ranch is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
A trail follows the old road down the hill to the camp, about a mile round trip, with a couple of hundred feet to climb on the way back. It crosses two drainages that can flood in the rainy season, then climbs the bank of Blue Creek to the ranch house and its shady porch. Hidden in the brush nearby are the rest of the camp: a circular corral with a snubbing post in the middle, where young horses were trained, a dipping vat for the sheep and goats, and an old chicken coop.
The Blue Creek Trail starts at the ranch and keeps going, five and a half miles up into the mountains, through open grassland and into pine woodland. For a shorter walk, the park suggests following the Blue Creek drainage up to the red rocks and back, about three miles round trip. It's a good one for birders, butterflies and wildflowers.
From up here you can take in the whole place at once: a working ranch tucked in at the foot of the mountains, built from what the land around it offered.
History, on the way there
On the way: Sotol Vista
Next, we're heading to Sotol Vista, named for one of the most useful plants in this desert.
The plant grows as a cluster of long, flat, ribbon-like leaves, each edged with small curved teeth, and every spring it sends up a tall flower stalk. It likes the middle elevations, where a little more rain falls, and grows in a band of grassland that surrounds the park's higher mountains.
For the people who lived here, it was pantry and hardware store in one. They baked its heart in stone-lined pits for days, along with agave hearts. They ate the young flower stalks and the seeds, wove baskets from the leaves, and used the tall stalks for shelters, roofs, corrals and walking sticks.
Point 3 · At the stop
Sotol Vista
This is Sotol Vista. From here, the whole western side of the park sprawls out below you.
Far off, look for a small gap in the long wall of a distant mesa. That gap is Santa Elena Canyon. The Rio Grande has sliced a vertical chasm there, fifteen hundred feet deep, through solid limestone. As you look down the canyon, its left wall is in Mexico and its right wall is in Texas. The canyon runs for about seven miles.
For thousands of years, that notch has been a signpost. Long before maps, people crossing this rugged country found their way by landmarks that could be seen from almost anywhere: the abrupt chasm of the canyon, the twin points of the Mule Ears, and the solitary summit of Emory Peak. In 1901, the naturalist Vernon Bailey described looking into the canyon as it opens its mouth, a narrow cut in the great escarpment running across the river valley.
This overlook is far from any artificial light, so it's a fine place for sunrise, for sunset, and for the stars after dark.
A whole corner of a national park in one look, and a gap on the horizon that has been showing people the way for thousands of years.
History, on the way there
On the way: Lower Burro Mesa Pouroff
Next, we're heading to the Lower Burro Mesa Pouroff, at the foot of Burro Mesa.
The mesa belongs to the same fiery story as the rest of this road. Around twenty-nine million years ago, volcanoes dominated the ancient Big Bend. Some eruptions came as pyroclastic flows: avalanches of superheated gas, ash and broken rock that raced across the land. Where that ash settled while it was still glowing hot, heat and pressure welded it into a rock called tuff. The light-colored ash-flow deposits at Lower Burro Mesa are that kind of rock. You'll meet more of it later, at Tuff Canyon.
The mesa has already come up once on this tour. Sam Nail's old windmill pumped water up to a tank on top of it, for his cattle.
At the pouroff, the shaping is done by water. Most of the year the channel is dry. When a storm hits the mesa, the rain gathers on top and pours off the edge through a vertical chute about a hundred feet tall, then races down the wash below. In the rainy season, flash floods can come down that wash with very little warning.
That rain comes mostly in summer. The Chihuahuan Desert gets more summer monsoon rain and colder winters than the Sonoran or Mojave deserts, and much of its rain falls in summer thunderstorms. Flash floods carve many of the washes in Big Bend. The pouroff is one of the best places to see what they leave behind.
Point 4 · At the stop
Lower Burro Mesa Pouroff
This is the Lower Burro Mesa Pouroff trailhead. The pouroff itself is about half a mile up the trail: an easy walk, a mile round trip, with about a hundred and twenty feet of climbing.
The path starts out fairly flat, then drops into the wash on a series of uneven steps. From there you walk up a gravel wash lined with Mexican persimmon, Mexican buckeye and desert hackberry trees. The hills on both sides are volcanic, layered with yellow and orange ash-flow tuffs, and big conglomerate boulders lie scattered along the valley floor.
The trail ends in a hidden box canyon, at the foot of the pouroff: a vertical channel about a hundred feet tall, carved into the rock, that funnels water off the mesa above. Most of the year it's dry, so you can stand right where a waterfall would be. If storm clouds are building, though, stay out of the wash. Flash floods can race down it.
The park calls this a worthwhile roadside stop, with desert plants and superb geology all around. It's a quiet canyon where you can see the work of water, in a place that is almost always dry.
History, on the way there
On the way: Goat Mountain
Next, we're heading to Goat Mountain, where the park has rewritten its own story.
For decades, the standard account of this park's rocks came from Ross Maxwell himself. He and three colleagues, John Lonsdale, Roy Hazzard and John Wilson, worked on the area's geology through the 1940s, '50s and '60s, and published their report in 1967. The park still calls it the preeminent geologic report on Big Bend.
But they worked under a handicap. There were no good topographic maps of the area at the time, so their geologic map has distortions that can't be corrected. And geology itself has moved on, with new techniques and new ideas about how the earth works.
So the U.S. Geological Survey led a project to make a new geologic map of the park, with dozens of scientists from the Survey, the Park Service and universities, some of whom had studied these rocks for decades. A fresh look changes some of the interpretations Maxwell and others suggested, and the park has been putting up new wayside exhibits to match. Goat Mountain's is one of them.
Maxwell built this road to show people the rocks. It's fitting that the rocks are still teaching geologists something new.
Point 5 · At the stop
Goat Mountain
This is Goat Mountain. The exhibit here tells the mountain's newer story, and it starts with a bang.
About twenty-nine million years ago, a large explosion blasted a crater into older, layered volcanic rock. It may have happened when rising magma met water trapped in the older lava and flashed it into steam. Then silica-rich magma kept surging upward in repeated pyroclastic eruptions, partly filling the crater and building a collar of steaming volcanic material around the vents.
Over time, the magma lost its gas. The last eruptions pushed out thick, slow-moving lava that piled up into domes, higher than the crater walls and spreading over them. A dozen or so domes like this once dotted the land between Burro Mesa and Castolon.
About twenty-seven million years ago, the region was uplifted and faulted, and erosion went to work. The hard lava on top resisted, and it stands today as steep, jointed cliffs. The weaker material underneath is wearing away, exposing a dike that may be part of the original plumbing that fed the volcano.
So this view looks right into the heart of an old volcano, from the cliffs at the top down to the pipes that fed it.
Point 6 · At the stop
Mule Ears Viewpoint
This is the Mule Ears Viewpoint. The two spires are the Mule Ears. They're the remains of volcanic dikes, sheets of magma that squeezed up through cracks in the rock and later eroded into these two points. According to the exhibit here, they stand about two and a half miles away and rise more than a thousand feet above the desert floor.
Look across the valley floor for white volcanic tuff eroding from the slopes, and at the hard lavas capping the mountains. The park calls it a landscape of violence and desert beauty.
The exhibit also carries a story from 1934. Lorene Green, the niece of a rancher named Elmo Johnson, flew with a pilot, First Lieutenant Thad Foster. They buzzed Castolon, flew right between the two peaks, and went back to the landing strip at her uncle's ranch. That airstrip had a reason to be there: after a Mexican rebellion in 1929, the Army Air Corps set up a landing field at Johnson's Ranch.
If you have a couple of hours, the Mule Ears Spring Trail leaves from this area. It's just under four miles round trip across rolling desert, past a big rock corral, to a small spring where maidenhair ferns cover a cool, shaded slope and leopard frogs hop into the water.
This is also a fine spot to watch the morning sun greet the desert.
History, on the way there
On the way: Tuff Canyon
Next, we're heading to Tuff Canyon, a canyon cut through compressed volcanic ash.
About thirty million years ago, ash and particles blasted from a nearby volcanic vent piled up here while they were still glowing hot. Heat and pressure welded the light ash into a rock called tuff. Pebbles, rocks and even large boulders were flying through the air too. They landed in the hot ash, and they're still embedded in the canyon walls.
The water that cut the canyon is an old friend from this tour. It's Blue Creek, the same creek that runs past Homer Wilson's ranch house, fed by rains in the distant mountains. Most of the time the creek bed is dry. After a summer thunderstorm, runoff churns through and cuts the canyon a little deeper.
So why is this canyon so narrow and deep, when most desert washes are broad and shallow? The park's answer is in the rock. Washes framed by gravel or shale spread wide, because those materials wear away easily from the sides. This light gray tuff is relatively cohesive. Fast floodwater will cut down through any kind of bedrock, but the tuff is better at resisting being widened. So the water goes down, instead of out.
Point 7 · At the stop
Tuff Canyon
This is Tuff Canyon. Two short paths lead out from the parking area to three viewing platforms on the rim, about half a mile round trip in all. An exhibit at the east overlook explains how the canyon's sheer walls formed.
From the platforms, look straight down the walls. The light gray rock is the tuff, welded volcanic ash. Look for the pebbles and boulders stuck in it; they were once airborne too. On the canyon floor, the older, darker rock is basalt, exposed as the creek cut down through the layers of tuff. In the rainy season, the canyon can hold pools of water.
Please enjoy it from the platforms. The tuff at the rim is soft and erodes easily, the canyon has regular rockfalls, and there may be hikers down below, so stay back from the edge and never throw anything in. If you'd like to walk the gorge itself, the park allows it, but keep in mind that this is a flood channel.
Thirty million years of ash, and a creek that's usually dry, made this.
History, on the way there
On the way: Castolon Historic District
Next, we're heading to the Castolon Historic District, the final stop of this tour, and a place where two countries met.
When Anglo settlers began arriving in the 1800s, they found Mexican families who had been farming the floodplains of the Rio Grande since the late 1700s. In the early 1900s, more families settled along the river downstream from Santa Elena Canyon, raising corn, beans, wheat, squash, tomatoes and melons.
Then came the Mexican Revolution. Bandits took advantage of the chaos to raid small border communities, and many Mexican families moved north of the river to escape the bloodshed. In 1916, a raid on a settlement called Glenn Springs convinced the War Department that the border needed federal protection, and thousands of soldiers were sent into the Big Bend.
On the bluffs above the river, troops of the Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Cavalry set up Camp Santa Helena. At first it was a camp of tents. Work on a permanent post began in 1919, and the first buildings were finished in 1920. But by then the Revolution was over. The soldiers were ordered to roll up their tents and take new assignments, and the new buildings were most likely never occupied by troops.
So the Army built itself a post, then left before it could move in. What happened to those empty buildings is the better story.
Point 8 · At the stop
Castolon Historic District
This is Castolon. The buildings on the bluff were the Army's, and in the early 1920s a trading post moved into the empty barracks: La Harmonia.
Its founders were Howard Perry, who owned the mining company in Terlingua, and his partner Wayne Cartledge, who ran the store. Cartledge chose the name knowing full well that life here wasn't always harmonious. He spoke both Spanish and English fluently, and he settled disputes, translated letters and kept money and valuables for his neighbors on both sides of the river. For the remote villages of northern Mexico, the store was the most accessible wholesaler. Over the years it served as consulate, sheriff's office, notary, bank and post office, and it traded in candelilla wax and furs. The company also farmed cotton here for two decades, not very profitably.
Below the bluff stands the oldest intact adobe in the park. Cipriano Hernandez built it around the turn of the century and opened the area's first store in one end of it. It's known today by the name of the man who lived there for nearly forty years, Alvino Ybarra, who raised six children in it with his wife, Teofila. In 1994, adobe masons from Santa Helena, Mexico, restored it with bricks made right on the site.
In May 2019, on a hot, windy evening, a fire in Mexico jumped the river. Embers set the old store and the latrine alight, and both were badly damaged, though firefighters saved many other buildings. Today the visitor center is in the historic Garlick House.
That's the end of the tour, and thank you for riding along with me today on Ross Maxwell's road.