West Texas Dust

I’ve heard so many things about West Texas over the years, opinions seem to vary between indifference to outright vehement bashing, but I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for wide open places and huge skies. I hitched up my britches and Hubsand and I decided to do a mini driving vacation to Marfa, Terlingua and Big Bend.

We drove the long way, off the highway taking 90 once out of San Antonio and going through Uvalde and Del Rio. That long lonely stretch of road going to Del Rio and right after was a little unnerving though. I had horrible visions of breaking down there and then dying of dessication on the side of the road, nothing but a bag of leather and bones with my hands still on the wheel of the vehicle on the side of the road. I’m sure I shouldn’t have been surprised, but the Mexican/American border is surprisingly undramatic and innocuous looking. The Rio Grande is little more than a large creek, far from the images I had in my head of this mighty raging river that would surely keep people on one side or the other by sheer force. There’s no fences that I saw, but neither was there any people. In the span of several hours, we passed three or four border patrol trucks, but other than that you wouldn’t know that it’s another country right over on the far bank.

We arrived in Marfa just after sunset, and immediately upon entering town got a speeding ticket in their very clever trap where the speed limit goes from 75 to 55 to 40 in the span of only a couple hundred feet. We later discovered they were camping out there, pulling people over one after another after another. As we sat outside the Pizza Foundation, we saw them pull over no less than a half a dozen people in the span of thirty minutes. Not the best way to enter a town your going to for vacation, but I shrugged it off and figured I’d just worry about it later.

We made our way to El Cosmico, where we were set to stay in a 1950s era Branstrator Airstream-type trailer for the night. It was bitter cold when we got there but we hauled our stuff to the trailer with a wagon (!), and once we got the heaters turned up to full blast and came back from dinner at the Cochineal, it was fairly toasty in there. There was a draft coming off the windows and doors, but still quite homey and ridiculously cute. I had brought along one of my cowskins, which turned out to be the exact thing that was needed to keep toasty all night; that was probably the best I had for packing.

The trailer park backed up to a Border Patrol station, which made it difficult to get pictures that weren’t full of towers and lights, but I was able to snap a few that were pretty great.

Our Branstrator

The inside was this beautiful honey-colored paneling with an adorable kitchen with a little metal tea kettle. There was a large claw foot style tub outside on the porch behind a screen, but it was a little too chilly to take advantage of bathing under the stars that night.

While I absolutely loved El Cosmico, my impression of Marfa was soured by the speeding ticket while coming into town, the hour plus wait to get in to eat anywhere, and then once sat to eat the ridiculous, elitist hipsters that seemed to permeate every spare inch, complaining about how their coffee wasn’t hot enough and they didn’t have the right vintage of a specific wine in their 350 bottle wine selection. I think perhaps I’ll skip Marfa next time in favor of more friendly places like Alpine or Fort Davis. All that aside, I do recommend El Cosmico and Pizza Foundation (for good east coast style pizza) if you are heading to the area.

Tuesday we drove up through Fort Davis to the McDonald Observatory for their daytime tour and sunspot viewing program, their twilight planets program and the evening star party.

It was a fantastic program, seeing the countryside from atop the hill, getting to check out the telescopes, learning how they worked, seeing real-time sunspots and learning more about constellations and how they relate to one another (something I keep trying to teach myself and not doing so well at).

After the star party, where we saw Jupiter and it’s moons casting shadows on it’s face, the Andromeda galaxy, the Orion nebula and the Pleiades, we drove south to Terlingua. Let me tell you, it’s PITCH BLACK out there, and those roads are windy and kind of scary in the dark. You can’t see if there are hills to your left or right, and there are so many blind hills and curves that I ended up going well under the speed limit just to prevent careening off into the brush.

We arrived at Upstairs at the Mansion, the old ruins of the Perry Mansion from the town’s mining days that Kaci Fullwood has turned into a two room retreat on the top of the hill.

It doesn’t look like much from the outside, in fact, most of the house is falling in on itself, pieces of it rattling off of the metal roof on the porch, but the rooms are large, wonderfully decorated and very interesting. The tower on the building came from the pirate radio station that they ran out of the mansion some years back, furthering it’s interesting history.

She uses found objects, like driftwood and flower stalks from yucca plants for decoration. We decided the driftwood sculpture in the upper right looked like a cat wearing an egyptian headdress

The porch is really the place you want to be. Texas Country Reporter did a spot on the Mansion, and Kaci referred to a guest that described staying there as being like, “extreme porching” which is entirely accurate. The porch is really where it’s at. Great views, cozy seats, it just invites you to come and sit and eat and relax.

At night, she’s got lights up under the arches and it is just the perfect amount of light for sitting and talking in the evening. We sat out there for a while, looking at the lights of Terlingua, watching all the neon and the cars go by, listening to the band playing at the joint down the hill.

Wednesday morning, we stopped in at the Ghosttown Cafe for breakfast and headed into Big Bend National Park. I didn’t realize that it was just so huge. It took us almost and hour and a half to get across the park! We stopped at the visitor’s center first, where they had a really fantastic 3D relief map of the park on a table, and we got our tchotchkes and maps. We headed first down to Rio Grande Village for another view of the river and Mexico, and again, it was nothing like I expected. No fence, no men with guns, just a gently flowing river and tall reed grass.

We hiked out to the Ernst Tinaja (water hole) which was a long, “improved” (I say with a wink) dirt road and a short hike. It was really gorgeous, but the light was middle-of-the-day with harsh shadows, so almost none of the shots turned out well. I managed to snap a fairly decent shot of Hubsand and I there, but it was still blown out and not as good as I would have liked.

We drove out (without losing any pieces of our car) and hiked out to the hot springs on the edge of the Rio Grande. There were quite a few people there, and lots of children, much to our chagrin but the water was warm and inviting and I sat and soaked in there, taking photographs until the sun started getting sliding to far down the hillside.

We drove back to Terlingua in the setting sun and stopped for obligatory sunset shots along the way.

We got back to Terlingua just in time to catch the most stunning sunset over the cemetery (where most of the people there died from the 1918 flu pandemic).

We stopped in at La Kiva for dinner and drinks and I do have to say it is definitely one of the most interesting bars I’ve been to. You walk through the front door (that’s canted down and away from you and opens more like a storm shelter door) and walk down stairs into almost a cave. The bar and tabletops are made of redwood, the walls are local stones mortared in place and the drinks are stiff. We had some Oban 14 while we waited for our steaks and ogled the dark, smokey decor. There were a slew of regulars, some that I recognized from some of the videos I’ve seen on youtube expounding the virtues of the area and it’s colorful citizenry.

We walked around Terlingua after dinner, up to the top of the hill behind La Posada Milagro staring agog at the sky that was so dark and so huge. We get pretty dark skies out in our patch of country, but the darkness out there just beats all, hands down. No horizon glow from anything, nothing really getting in the way. I read that Big Bend area is one of the top places in the country for the darkest skies, perhaps next trip I’ll camp out in the middle of Big Bend and try to get some shots of that magnificence.

We were going to go checkout the band at Starlight Theatre later that evening, but made the mistake of going up to the room first and we just never made it back out. We slept in the next morning, packed up, hula hooped on the front porch with Kaci and then headed off for breakfast at the Lajitas resort up the road and driving back through Big Bend Ranch State Park (which requires MUCH more investigation including hiking the slot canyons, playing in/near the river and ogling the beautiful scenery. The drive between Lajitas and Presidio is supposed to be one of the most scenic drives in the country, and it’s easy to see why. I wasn’t able to get pictures of it since I was driving, but it’s in the mountains, up and down, right next to the river and simply amazing. Here’s a great link to another photographer’s view of some of those spots.