In the October 2000 issue of Texas Monthly, journalist Joe Nick Patoski explores the stunning Maderas del Carmen reserve in Coahuila, Mexico, in his article A Bigger Bend This captivating piece details the region's natural beauty, diverse ecosystems, and the visionary efforts of Alberto Garza Santos and Mauricio M. Brittingham to create an ecotourist haven. Read on to experience Patoski's journey and discover the wonders of Maderas del Carmen.
A Bigger Bend
By Joe Nick Patoski – Texas Monthly, October 2000
If I could dream up the perfect nature park, it would be somewhere in Texas. Its base camp would be nestled high in an alpine valley 7,500 feet above sea level so that it would be cool year-round. It would be surrounded by granite peaks and blessed with sheer faces and deep canyons. A network of, say, eighty miles of abandoned logging roads would be nice, making it easy to hike and bike. Above all, it would be pure wilderness—no RV hookups or concession stands—a place where black bears and mountain lions roamed. Access would be restricted to no more than fifteen people at a time.
The Museo Maderas del Carmen, literally the Museum of the Carmen Forest, comes pretty close. The only strike against it is that it’s not in Texas, but it is just on the other side of Big Bend, in Coahuila, Mexico. And if it happens to be rather difficult to get to, that inaccessibility is one reason why this sky island reserve feels like it is a world away, instead of just across the border.
I’ve known about the Del Carmens ever since I first laid eyes on Big Bend National Park as a kid. They’re kind of hard to miss since the front face of the range, a massive limestone wall that rises dramatically behind the Mexican border village of Boquillas, put the bend in the Big Bend, forcing the Rio Grande to change its course. For the past ten years or so, rumor had it that the Del Carmens were to be the southern half of a proposed International Peace Park and biosphere reserve, the Mexican complement to Big Bend National Park, Big Bend Ranch State Park, and the Black Gap Wildlife Management Area. But it mainly existed as a green spot on maps, even after the Mexican government formally declared the Maderas a protected area in 1994.
That changed four years ago when a wealthy industrialist from Monterrey named Alberto Garza Santos and his business partner, Mauricio M. Brittingham, bought a 50,000-acre ranch in the park’s high country with the intention of turning it into an ecotourist’s dream destination. Earlier this year, the reserve began taking its first guests. After checking out the website (www.maderas.org.mx) and swapping emails with the rangers, I showed up at the appointed time one July morning at the Boquillas crossing, where I met four other people who had signed up for a three-night stay in the Del Carmens. We each paid a boatman a $2 round-trip fee to row us across the Rio Grande, and we paid a driver another $2 each to haul our luggage as we walked into town. It used to be that Boquillas was the end of the line for my Big Bend adventures. This time it was only the start.
Before long, José Angel Garcia, one of the reserve’s five rangers, and Pedro Pietro Villarreal, the reserve’s manager, picked us up in a weathered Suburban at Falcon’s Cafe. After stopping to buy supplies before the fifty-mile trip, José drove south onto the Chihuahuan plateau, a harsh stretch of empty desert. We pressed on for three hours, passing through several ranch gates and two military checkpoints manned by teenagers brandishing weapons before we reached Santa Salomé, a small quarters built for biologists on the low flank of the Del Carmens. We cooled off with drinks and “magic towels,” which were soaked in eucalyptus oil and refrigerated, then headed off again for two more hours on an even rougher, sometimes barely visible one-lane road until we reached our base camp, El Dos.
We finally arrived shortly before sunset, and I was feeling exceptionally weary after spending most of the day sitting in the Suburban. We threw our gear into a big canvas tent and set up our sleeping bags and liners. I noticed that the screen right by my cot had a tear in it. Pedro explained that a bear had clawed it but said it was nothing to worry about. I smiled nervously. If it was wild I wanted, it was wild I was getting. After settling in, we walked to a solar-powered log cabin that serves as camp headquarters, a communal kitchen, and the rangers’ bedrooms. A few minutes later, the Museo’s owner Alberto and his wife, Gaby, arrived with Luis Brunicardi, who’d spent the previous year preparing the reserve’s facilities, and his wife, Luisa. During our meal of campfire-grilled steaks, salad, pico de gallo, beer, wine, and sodas, Alberto mapped out a monster hike for the next day, a route that would take us down a remote canyon and conclude with some rappelling, the prospect of which gave me some pause since I could hardly scurry up a rope in gym class back in junior high. Blame it on too much wine, the unusually crisp sleeping weather, or a leisurely breakfast, but we got off to such a late start the next morning that Alberto decided that a big hike wasn’t the best idea. Rather, he led us down the creek by the campsite into Cañón del Moreno, a twisting, well-shaded crevice that eventually led to a place called Las Ranas (the Frogs), a series of pools with steep pour-offs that required ropes to climb down.
As we trekked alongside the creek, jumping crystalline pools and dropping 2,500 feet in elevation, the 36-year-old Alberto explained how he came to purchase the property. His father had owned a hunting ranch in the Burros, a forested mountain range to the east. Alberto, a self-described ecologist, found that logging had been done there for most of the twentieth century but had stopped in the early nineties. Since there had been little clear-cutting, the land showed practically no evidence of human impact. It has since been reclaimed by wildlife, as the frequent flashes of white-tail in the thickets and the presence of bear and cat scat along the old roads attested. It was fresh scat too—like, this-morning-or-the-night-before fresh.
We hugged the creek for two hours, winding down through the pine and oak canopy that was loaded with wild grape, Indian paintbrush, and columbine until we reached El Uno, the ruins of a logging camp. This was the planned site for the second set of tent cabins, Alberto told us. In the meantime, hikers can camp at El Uno and get picked up in the morning or continue hiking to the reserve’s second base camp, El Club, an old hunting lodge with two cabins and a solar-powered kitchen.
The four-wheeler shuttled Luis back to Santa Salomé and then to Alberto’s private plane, which flew him to Monterrey for stitches. His fall underscored the fact that a place as remote as this is not where you want to have an accident, something we acknowledged in advance by signing a liability waiver. But those risks were easily outweighed by the nightly serenade of swift water rushing over rocks on the creek, air so cool and sweet I had to curl up in my sleeping bag even though the thermometer was breaking 110 degrees down in Rio Grande Village, and the sensation of waking up nestled in the tall pines.
During dinner that night, Alberto promised that the Museo would never be a big-time tourist destination. “I want the impact to be next to nonexistent,” he said over his meal of carne guisada and guacamole. “Conservation comes first, then educational research, then tourists.” To stay true to those goals, the facilities will be kept simple and basic. He won’t allow cattle to run on the property, and he has banned hunting. He figures he can make the project work with a maximum of one thousand visitors a year.
The next morning, Alberto and his party left for Monterrey, leaving Pedro to guide us on a more sedate hike around the high country along with Rogelio Castiñeda, a ranger who had been exploring these mountains for more than ten years. We marched an hour and a half from El Dos up a steep, densely forested slope to an overlook with a sweeping view of Meseta Imposible, an eroded island uplift accessible only by helicopter; several canyons; and the desert floor beyond. While taking in the view, Rogelio discovered an irritated rattlesnake under the rock he was sitting on. That was it for wildlife, though. We lunched at another former logging site called Mesa Bonita, a grassy alpine meadow with charred trees that had been dubbed Mesa Siesta after we all napped there. We continued on to El Tres, the forest’s abandoned mill and the center of the most intense logging activity in the Del Carmens. Piles of logs, sawdust, and cut lumber, some stacked up to fifty feet high, rendered the picturesque setting almost obscene and suggested that the logging activity had ceased suddenly.
On the last day of my visit, we broke camp after breakfast and hiked almost an hour and a half to the Del Carmen’s highest point, La Antena, the radio transmitter for the Museo’s communication systems that sits on a peak almost nine thousand feet high—higher than any point in Texas. The payoff for the climb was a million-dollar view. Santa Salomé, the base station, lay at our feet. The desert sprawled for miles beyond, fading into ridgeline after ridgeline. Off to the north rose the Chisos, the centerpiece of Big Bend National Park. Behind us was Mesa El Jardín, a broad verdant highland upwelling with several exposed canyons cracking through the flat surface. Unfortunately, the view was too big and broad. I could easily make out a white haze as thick as one that might cover the Houston Ship Channel on an ozone-action day. It was crawling up the valley from the southeast—the precise location of the coal-fired power plants southwest of Piedras Negras, just across from Eagle Pass. Here it was plain to see: Big Bend was paying an extravagant price for its remoteness. For industrial Mexico, which long denied that power plants were affecting air quality, it’s an ideal place to park dirty air.
As we piled back into our vehicle to make our way down the mountain (sixteen miles in two hours!), Kilian called out the transitional vegetation zones—the alpine zone with fir and pine, then pine-oak, oak forests, pinion-juniper giving way to weeping junipers, scrub oak, thorn scrub, yucca, and mixed grassland, acacia desert, and finally pure creosote. Clearly, altitude, not latitude, defines the land.
I decided that Alberto still had plenty of kinks to work out. That tear in my tent makes me wonder how the park will deal with any unplanned encounters between man and beast. But he is certainly onto something. Kilian confirmed that when he read a publication I’d picked up called the Vegetative Map of the Sierra del Carmen. Its contents were too technical for me to understand, so I asked Kilian to interpret. “It says there’s a lot more diversity on the Mexican side than the Texas side,” he said. His words were clear: Big Bend has just officially gotten a whole lot bigger. And a whole lot better too!.
