A ghost mining town booms and a four-star resort hopes to strike it rich
in West Texas on the border with Mexico -
With a slight breeze cooling our faces and the morning sun warming our backs, my horse gives a little spurt and powers up the rocky slope. The woody stalks of lechugilla – or "lechu-get'cha" as locals call the spiny plant – cast long shadows across the hardscrabble landscape. Prickly pears and creosote bushes dot the sandy arroyos and worn-down hills. In the distance, the Chisos Mountains in Big Bend National Park float on the horizon like a purple cloud.
"This country was made for horseback riding," Richard Hill, our wrangler, says when we catch up. "I fell in love with it when my wife and I first visited back in the seventies. When I retired, I ask her where she wanted to live. 'Big Bend,' she said without hesitating. The first thing we did was get horses."
Similarly, the first thing my wife and I did when we got to Lajitas was sign up for a horseback ride. This landscape begs to be explored. Arroyos dissect the desert flats and sheer mesas and mountains rise like petrified waves from the Cretaceous seabed. Besides, we had spent three days in the Big Bend National Park hiking 35 miles of trails, so riding a horse for a change was particularly appealing.
Lajitas, historically a trading post and fort, stands at the site of a ford where a branch of the Comanche War Trail crossed the Rio Grande. Today, the tiny community rubs shoulders with Big Bend National Park, with almost a million acres of desert, mountains and canyons to the east, and with Big Bend Ranch State Park, with 280,000 acres of wilderness to the west. The Rio Grande and the sparsely populated Mexico borderlands lie to the south. We could ride for days without crossing a paved road.
When Pancho Villa started raiding border communities in 1914, the U. S. Cavalry built a post in Lajitas and put it under the command of General "Black Jack" Pershing. Today, the post’s 26-room barracks is part of the Lajitas Ultimate Hideout Resort with a golf course, a spa, fine dinning and an equestrian center. Austin, Texas, real estate visonary, Steve Smith, bought the 23,000-acre "town" from its previous owner and rebuilt the resort, making it a four-star facility. He subdivided 400 lots. So far about 35 have sold.
The solitude of the desert sets well with certain souls. Terlingua Ranch, on the highway to Alpine, sold its ten-acre ranchettes a decade ago, and Study Butte, a crossroads town at the park entrance, has grown to include motels, RV parks, cafes and rock and craft shops. Still, Big Bend National Park remains one of the most remote and least visited parks in the country.
West Texas has a history of attracting adventurers, fortune hunters, dreamers and people just wanting to escape the constraints of an eight-to-five society. Those who buy home sites in Lajitas will have for neighbors the rattlesnakes, jackrabbits and javelinas along with about 267 people in the booming ghost town of Terlingua. That's up from 25 people in 1990.
Terlingua, once the richest mercury-mining district in North America, boasted a population of 1,500 back in 1936. The quicksilver played out and the miners moved on to richer claims. New settlers renovated some of the rock and adobe houses scattered across the hills, but weather and time have reduced most to rubble.
To learn more about the glory days of the mining era, we book a Jeep tour with Texas River and Jeep Expeditions. Angie Miller, a middle-aged woman with shoulder-length silver hair, picks us up in Lajitas. We turn off the pavement and head down a pair of ruts to the old Lonestar Mine. Angie shifts into four-wheel drive and grinds up a boulder-strewn switchback to the top of a narrow mesa.
"This is Terlingua Ridge," she tells us. "The limestone rocks are filled with
ammonites and other fossils. The mercury-bearing ore, or cinnabar, runs in red veins between the strata." We walk over to a vertical shaft, covered with a metal grate, wide enough to swallow a half-dozen SUVs. "This ridge is honeycombed with tunnels," she says. "We have 23 miles of shafts underneath Terlingua."
A little farther along the ridge, we stop at a sprawling stone building with no roof. Several long-abandoned vehicles lie to the side. Clumps of cacti decorate the rusted hulk of an International pickup. Dozens of bullet holes riddle a late 1940s era Plymouth sedan. "That's Bonnie and Clyde's car," Angie jests.
The mountainside view from the stone building stretches deep into Mexico. "This was the machine shop for Lonestar Mine," Angie says. "Don't you think it would make a great dance hall? I love to dance. I'm going to buy it when I win the lottery."
For some reason, dreams, whether by prospectors, real estate developers or dance queens, come easy in the desert. Maybe the expansive vistas and the uninterrupted silence free the mind from constraining notions.
We gaze out across the vista. Rows of mountains reach to the horizon. "We have about 85 miles of visibility, today," Angie says. "On good days you can see 150 miles, but we don't get that very often any more. Too much pollution drifting up from petrochemical plants on the Texas coast and power plants in Mexico."
Angie points out the Christmas Mountains and Black Mesa. "That triangular peak over there is Hen Egg Mountain. One of the local strange-and-crazies believes it's a UFO base. The top lifts up so the spaceships can go in and out. He says they've given him a ride twice."
I ask her about the "chupa cabra," a mythical desert creature I've heard about. "It's the size of a dog and sucks blood from goats, or any other creature," she says. "It looks like a black dog, but when it turns just right you can see its wings."
She pauses when I ask her if she has ever seen one. "Once or twice, I think, in my headlights."
On our last day, we take the cutoff into Terlingua and stop at the old store, which now carries high-end Southwest silver jewelry and pottery. Two musicians on the front porch jam away the afternoon. Tony, a bearded 30-something local, picks his guitar while Tom, a visitor from Lawrence, Kansas, harmonizes with a bow and saw. Tonight is happy hour for the hamburgers-and-beer crowd next door at the Starlight Theater. The gang is already gathering.
The view across the bleached slopes gives little hint of the present century. Weathered wooden crosses stand askew in the old cemetery, and the scars from mine tailings on Terlingua Ridge seem as fresh today as they must have a century ago. The dusty, rutted streets and cactus-studded landscape hold tightly to the ghost-town aura. Come night, it wouldn't take much imagination to see a chupa cabra ducking behind one of the crumbling walls.
More Information
For jeep and canoe trips, contact Texas River and Jeep Expeditions at 1-800-839-RAFT, www.texasriver.com. For information on Big Bend National Park, see www.nps.gov/bibe, 1-432-477-2251.
Lajitas is located on Highway 170, 17 miles from Study Butte and the western entrance to Big Bend National Park, or 60 miles southeast of Presidio on Highway 170. The closest city is Alpine, 95 miles to the north, on Highway 118.
Hotels/Motels
