October 2000
Travel
Bigger Bend
Mexico's Museo Maderas del Carmen nature reserve, just south of Boquillas, has mapped out a new kind of outdoor adventure.
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 Web site (www.maderas.org.mx) and swapping e-mails 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 who says he was born to rappel, first learned of the Maderas when he flew over the del Carmens a decade ago, and he took particular note of the forests, exposed peaks, and waterfalls. He 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 whitetail 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.
