The U.S. Boundary Survey trekking the Big Bend country in 1852 encountered this Lipan Apache warrior. His portrait came to adorn the survey report.
Let’s say it’s ten o’clock on a fine fall morning, and you are driving from Rio Grande Village up to the Basin. You find shrub desert all around you at first, with the usual creosotebush, ocotillo, and pricklypear. The only grass you see grows in a buff-colored strip on either side of the road, where runoff from infrequent rains creates a habitat moist enough for grasses to germinate and reach maturity. But after you pass 900 meters (3,000 feet) of elevation you begin to see the first sparse bunches of chino grama spotted here and there across the desert. Somewhere just below the Dugout Wells turnoff you find quite a bit of bunch grass among the bushes. Almost imperceptibly the chino thickens until at 1,000 meters (3,500 feet) the hillsides appear cobbled over with lumps the color of gray rock. It appears that you couldn’t step down without stubbing your toe against a clump of gray-green grass or lechuguilla. Soon all the slopes are patterned yellow and gray-green as solid stands of lechuguilla crowd into the chino grama. The grass is so thick now that scaled quail hunt seeds along the roadside and cottontail rabbits bounce jauntily across in the mid-morning sunlight.
The colors you see owe much to the angle of the sun, but at about 1,200 meters (4,000 feet), near Panther Junction, the plants themselves add a soft new hue, the beautiful silver-blue of ceniza shrubs. Bunches of vivid green grass crop up amid the tawny three-awns by the roadside, and the tops of the tarbush are brushed with yellow. Rock, gravel, grass, and shrub blend together in shades of tan, gray, green, and blue pinpointed by Christmas-red fruits on the guayacan, with once again vast gardens of chartreuse lechuguilla and skeleton-leaf goldeneye shrubs. These rolling grasslands have much less pricklypear and creosotebush, and they have a lower profile than the shrub desert. Here and there the Torrey yucca lifts its shaggy head high, but the whole land surface looks somehow smoother, less hob-nailed than before.
When you start the 11-kilometer (7-mile) climb toward the Basin, chino grama gives way to a variety of grasses, blue, black, hairy, and side oats grama, and the straw-colored grass aptly named tanglehead. The whole color scheme changes with the grass from shades of gray to reddish brown and yellow, and the tops of these good grasses have the heavy headed look of grain. The lechuguilla becomes less obvious. Gradually the moisture-loving mountain shrubs push the grasses back from the roadside, but the golden gramas grow with wonderful abundance on the drier slopes beyond. Still higher, the still good grasslands are studded now with century plant, basket grass, and sotol.
Ancient rock art known as petroglyphs (top) decorate rock faces. The arid climate protects them.
Mortar holes deepened imperceptibly each time the Indians ground seeds or grains in them.
Earlier in this century sotol abounded between Green Gulch and Government Spring, but in the severe drought during World War I, ranchers chopped it out for cattle feed. Today you will find a perfect forest of sotol growing at Sotol Vista on the western flank of the Chisos. As you can see from the overlook, this narrow-bladed plant favors the cooler north-facing exposures. Sotol leaves grow at ground level from a short trunk, and nearly every spring the plant thrusts up a brush-like bloomstalk, 4 to 6 meters (15-20 feet) tall, covered half its length by greenish-white flowers. Prehistoric Indians had many uses for sotol, and later the Chisos Apaches often located their rancherias at solid stands of “desert candle.” They used the fibrous leaves in making mats and ropes, fermented a potent drink from the pineapple-like heart, or roasted it in rock-lined pits as we roast beef. Several crumbling sotol pits are found throughout the Chisos, and sotol still serves as an all-purpose plant along the border.
Sotol is one of those Big Bend plants that has its very own grasshopper. If you look closely, you may find a little fellow feeding high on the bloomstalk and looking for all the world like a bud. He lives his whole life on the sotol plant and knows just how to use it to advantage. If you annoy him he will probably play possum, drawing in his legs and dropping like a stone right down into the thick of the sotol leaves. Few predators come away unscathed from a close encounter with those saw-edged blades.