Day 4 -- To Terlingua, Texas

I woke up feeling mostly fine. Dad and I made our way to the hotel coffee bar, V6, and after I wolfed down an English muffin sammy with fried egg, sausage and avocado mayo, I was feeling completely fine. 

We lingered over breakfast, vibing with a soundtrack that included songs by Lord Heron, Lana Del Rey and The Wallows. You would have loved this place, Clare!

Before checking out, we explored the Gage Gardens, a 27-acre desert oasis – including walking trails, ponds and a formal rose garden – that is directly adjacent to our casita, wandering among the native plants and shade trees, including Texas elm, Mexican elder and live oak as well as yucca and sage. I’m sure this place is even more lovely when everything’s in bloom. 

Then, we climbed back into the car and drove 42 miles south into Big Bend National Park. At first look, the Chihuahuan desert seems markedly different than the Mojave Desert that we experienced last summer, in Utah. It seems softer. More subtle. If our national parks were works of art, the majesty of the looming red rocks in Capitol Reef and Bryce Canyon national parks would be conveyed in broad, bold strokes of oil paint. But the splendor that is Big Bend – the yucca trees, creosote bushes and prickly pear cacti sprouting from the sandy desert floor in splotches of olive, citrine, seafoam and even lavender and magenta – could be best rendered with a box of pastel crayons.

 

That’s not to say that the landscape at Big Bend isn’t dramatic. The Chisos Mountains – the only mountain range contained entirely within a single national park – erupt out of the surrounding dessert and soar thousands of feet high. The craggy peaks are literally the centerpiece of the park, perched atop the landscape like a crown. And then, of course, there’s the Rio Grande River, a ribbon of green that cuts across the desert and carves deep canyons on its way from southern Colorado to the Gulf of Mexico. The river defines Big Bend National Park’s southern boundary for 118 miles – the “Big Bend” being the sudden left turn that the river takes toward the northeast to make the elbow of West Texas. 

After a quick stop at the Panther Junction visitors center, we drove west through the park until we came to a little turn-off for Old Maverick Road, a primitive track designated for four-wheel-drive and high-clearance vehicles only. There, we detached the Teardrop, left him in a little parking lot and embarked on a bumpy ride 13 miles through the Terlingua Creek badlands to Santa Elena Canyon.

This house, called a jacal, was built from rock, earth and plant fiber by a man named Gilberto Luna, who raised his large family here and irrigated the land he farmed with water diverted from the nearby Alamo Creek. 

 

And here I digress: Right before our trip, Dad and I realized that the 3-inch hitch on the Land Cruiser is too wide to accommodate any of our hitch pins. So, from Amazon, of course, we ordered an amazing, newfangled, monster-strength 3-inch mega-hitch pin that locks into place and can only be removed with a key. Great in theory, right? In practice, though, it’s not so amazing, because the lock gets in the way of the chains. Every time Dad hitches and unhitches the trailer, he has to unlock and remove the hitch pin just to hook or unhook the trailer chains, and then reposition and re-lock the hitch pin in place. And today, six rugged miles down Old Maverick Road, Dad suddenly remembered that, after he had unhitched the trailer, he had left the hitch pin on the bumper of the car. We stopped and looked, but of course that hitch pin had probably jounced off more than five bone-shaking miles ago. 

Not to worry, though. At some point on our drive to Texas from Lafayette, Dad was rifling through the glove compartment and found the factory hitch pin that came with the vehicle when we bought it in September. He stashed in back in the glove box as a back-up, which certainly came in handy today. It’s not a monster-strength lock-on hitch pin. Even better, it’s a hitch pin that we have right now, today.

 

And the end of the dirt road, we parked the car and walked a mile or so up a path to the mouth of Santa Elena Canyon, where the canyon walls loom 1,500 feet over the Rio Grande.

From there, we circled back to the Teardrop via the paved Ross Maxwell Scenic Drive, and after we hooked up the trailer (using the new/old/original hitch pin) we continued west past the park gates and into the tiny settlement called Terlingua Ghost Town, a former mining community-turned-hippy enclave.

 

In the late 1800s, the discovery of cinnabar, from which mercury is extracted, drew miners to the area. The Chisos Mining Company was established in 1903, and over the next three decades it became one of the country’s leading producers of quicksilver – using huge furnaces to heat cinnabar rocks until they released mercury vapor, which was condensed into liquid metal. A key component in ammunition and explosives, quicksilver was in great demand through World Wars I and II. In its heyday in the 1920s and ’30s, more than 2,000 people lived in Terlingua, which had a post office, a company store, a hotel, a school and a dance hall, as well as telephone service and a dependable water supply.

 

By the end of the second World War, though, demand for quicksilver had dwindled. The Chisos Mine closed in the mid-1940s, and the town was eventually abandoned.  

 

Fun fact: The Chili’s restaurant chain has its roots in Terlingua. In the early 1960s, when the town was populated with more goats than people, the renowned racecar driver and automative designer Carroll Shelby bought 200,000 acres of adjacent desert and used it for hunting, dirt-bike riding, drinking and general sausage-festing a few times a year. Eventually the festivities grew to include an annual Championship Chili Cook-off (which is widely recognized as the first organized chili cooking competition). Carroll’s son-in-law, Larry Levine, so captivated by the event and the spirit of camaraderie surrounding it, was inspired to open a chili-themed restaurant in Dallas in 1975. As a lover of chili and an entrepreneur at heart, Shelby provided the seed money. The restaurant expanded regionally before being bought by Brinker International in 1983. Brinker also owns the Maggiano’s Little Italy brand, and today, 50 years after the first restaurant opened, there are 1,672 Chili’s and Maggiano’s in 29 countries and two U.S. territories.

 

Anyway, the people who lived in Terlingua and worked in the mines in its heyday built simple homes of stacked limestone rocks and adobe mortar. The ruins of those structures squat amongst the creosote and cactus bushes on the Terlingua hillside and give the village its rustic architectural style. About 30 years ago, a wave of revival swept through Terlingua. Attracted to the town’s unique charm, artists, dreamers and adventurers built the town back up on some of those crumbling foundations, restoring and expanding them into comfortable guest houses, art galleries and cafes. 

 

But they also left neighboring buildings untouched, and so the town still looks like it’s made up of ancient huts that are being slowly swallowed by the earth. It’s almost impossible to tell an art gallery from an abandoned church, from a makeshift fence, from a pile of rocks on the hillside, because everything is the same shade of sand, made of the same sun-baked stone that stretches for miles into the distance. The dirt-crusted roadways are differentiated from the dusty sidewalks and driveways only by distinct tire-tracks -- and it’s only by following these ruts closely that we are not unwittingly straying into someone’s dirt-crusted “yard.”

We are staying at La Posada Milagro, a collection of stone casitas connected by rock-lined pathways and embellished with rustic tile mosaics, found art and repurposed junk. Like everything else in this town, it looks like the bricks and the doors and the tin roofs and even the décor blew in from the desert and kind of settled in a heap that, over years and years and decades, accidentally grew into this guesthouse.

 

After checking in, I found out that the owner of La Posada Milagro, Mimi Webb Miller, is known in some circles for her romance with the Mexican drug kingpin Pablo Acosta Villareal four decades ago. She is portrayed in the Netflix show “Narcos: Mexico,” which explores the 1980s roots of Mexican drug trafficking, from loose operations to organized empires. Acosta helped run the Juárez Cartel before he was killed in a shoot-out with Mexican and U.S. authorities in 1987.  We are staying in a room called “Mimi’s Guesthouse,” but I don’t think she lives on the property. She spends most of her time in Los Angeles now, where she works as a casting director.

Mimi's Guesthouse

The property looks haphazard from the outside. But our room is charming and comfortable, with a spectacular view down the hillside of the entire Terlingua town.

What a view!

For dinner, we tumbled down the hill to the cultural hub of Terlingua, the Starlight Theater. A century ago, the Starlight was a popular movie house and bustling community gathering spot. After the town was abandoned, the theater languished in neglect for years before it was rediscovered and restored as a restaurant and performance space for locals and visitors alike. These days the Starlight hosts a variety of events, from live music shows and theatrical productions to poetry readings and community gatherings. 

Tonight, the Starlight was so packed with people that guests overflowed onto the broad front porch. I overheard the host tell the group ahead of us that the wait would be “40 minutes.” It turns out, she actually said “an hour and 40 minutes.” So, Dad and I pulled a deck of cards and a cribbage board out of the Teardrop, which was parked in a nearby yard -- I mean, pasture – I mean, gravel pile -- I mean, parking lot -- and passed the time at a table near the outdoor bar. Strangely, I still had an appetite for chips and guac and was able to enjoy a couple of drinks. Yes, I got right back on that horse. 

For 100 minutes, our anticipation mounted as group after group was called up and whisked through the heavy doors behind the hostess stand into the legendary Starlight Theatre space.  When it was finally our turn, we discovered that the inside of the theater is ... just a big room. A band called Blind Squirrel played acoustic country on the stage while tourists and locals, hippies, ranchers and river guides enjoyed their Tex-Mex dinners and guzzled bottles of Shiner Bock. I’m not sure if the experience was as magical as I had hoped it would be. But hey, it’s a landmark in town, and what else was there to do?