I left Cullowhee for Big Bend National Park, in Texas, on November 7, 2022, with three canoes strapped on top of the truck and drybags of food and camping gear stowed inside. Bobby Simpson and Pat Stone were to be my companions on a nine-day 130-mile trip on the Rio Grande, and I timed the drive to pick them up two days later in Odessa, where they’d be flying in.
Our goal was to paddle the Rio where it forms the boundary between the national park and Mexico. It’s a reach known locally as the Great Unknown. You launch at the Lajitas “throw-in” access upstream of the park and take out below it at Heath Canyon Ranch/La Linda. Between those two points the river flows through the park’s three biggest canyons, Santa Elena, Mariscal, and Boquillas, as well as two smaller but beautiful canyons, San Vicente and Hot Springs. It also winds through long desert stretches between the canyons, with views of distant mountain ranges and of isolated peaks jutting out of the harsh terrain and bearing names like Elephant Tusk, the Mule Ears, Backbone Ridge, and Cow Heaven. Most paddlers limit their trips to overnighters in individual canyons. From what I gather, only a couple of hundred go the distance each year. This would be my fourth time doing it since 2014, when I stopped running Slickrock Expeditions there, and it would be my first with companions, the three previous trips being made alone.
Picking up Bobby and Pat as planned in Odessa, we spent the night at the Marathon Motel in the town of Marathon, north of the park, where we did final packing and ate supper at a restaurant called 12 Gage. The next morning we drove across the Union Pacific railroad tracks on the outskirts of town—said to mark the unofficial entrance to the Big Bend—and headed due south towards the river on US 385.
It was hard to imagine that the modern U.S. highway we cruised on followed what had been originally the Great Comanche Trail. One hundred and fifty years ago the trail was said to have been a mile-wide dusty scar across the landscape cut by the hooves of hundreds of horses ridden by Comanche warriors. Like an unstoppable wind sweeping south from the Great Plains during the full “Comanche” moon of September each year, these fierce horsemen crossed the Rio Grande to raid, plunder and kill anyone in northern Mexico they came across, returning later on the same route with scalps and booty, livestock and slaves. The Big Bend was known then as the Bloody Bend, and the sun-bleached bones of beasts and captives that perished were said to litter the trail.
We met our shuttle driver, Russell Johnson, at Heath Canyon Ranch. The ranch is a cluster of low buildings on a bluff above the Rio Grande. Directly across the river in Mexico is the abandoned mining town of La Linda. The ranch originally served as the living quarters for managers and geologists of DuPont, which mined fluorspar in the mountains outside of La Linda—fluorspar being used by the company in various manufacturing processes. When DuPont closed the mines in the 1980s, Russell’s late grandfather, one of the geologists, bought the ranch and retired there. Russell now lives at the ranch and keeps it up. He also provides a shuttle service for paddlers and lets them use the property’s river access. He would ride with us to Lajitas, then take my truck back to Heath Canyon, where it’d be waiting for us at trip’s end.
“Everything’s big in Texas,” the saying goes, and by the time we’d driven to the ranch, 70 miles, then more than 100 from there across the park to the river access at Lajitas, stopping en route at park headquarters to fill out the required river permit, it was noon. Eager to launch, we unloaded the truck, told Russell we’d see him in nine days, and, after eating sandwiches in a spot of shade under a mesquite tree, slid the loaded canoes down the bank to the river. It was November 10. We were underway at last.
The First Seven Days
We paddled in cool, pleasant weather day after day—not a given on the Rio Grande. Because the river flows through the Chihuahua Desert, daily temperatures, even in November, are often set on “bake.” During my previous solo trips, also in the fall, respite from the sun was as important as my midday repast of jerky, cheese, bread, and fruitcake, so I did not stop to eat until I found shade. But on this trip winds were from the north, sunlight was welcome, and we stopped to eat on any gravel bar that looked inviting. The river flowed steadily too, at a good level. There were no biting bugs, and we did not have to defend our food from bears, which we’d heard had been a problem on the river that year.
As soon as we left Lajitas behind, the sharply-etched cliffs, canyons, mesas, and “creosote flats” that form the Big Bend’s topography opened up and took us in, beneath a cloudless sky. It was easy to understand why the first Spanish explorers to reach such a stark, isolated, and silent region called it El Despoblado, the Uninhabited Land. And the Rio Grande itself, which carries you through it all, is the original “long and lonesome highway” of Texas song. To be in harmony with the place, we spaced out, barely keeping in sight of each other. The river flowed mildly, and, except when we scouted a few rapids in the canyons, or pulled over to take a side hike to some overlook or other feature, there was no reason for us to bunch up. There was time enough to talk in camp.
News reports make it sound as if the Rio Grande is swarming with migrants from Mexico and other countries trying to cross into the United States, and no doubt that’s true along much of the river, but not in the Great Unknown. I saw just one Mexican during our entire trip—a goatherd. He was walking behind a herd of at least 100 goats grazing on the river bank. Mountain lions and coyotes, common along the river, prey on goats, and I noticed the man carried a stout staff. He also had three large guard dogs at the front of the herd. We called to each other in passing, “Buenos dias!”
I also talked twice with other Americans. First, there were the two young women car-camping at the park’s Cottonwood Campground, which we reached on the third day. We had walked up from the river to refill our water jugs there and, seeing them sitting at a picnic table, struck up a conversation. When they learned what we were doing, one exclaimed, “You’re canoeing nine days!”—as if paddling for such a length of time was something unheard of. (Or, seeing that each of our ages topped theirs by 50 years, what she might have said was, “You’re canoeing nine days?” I can’t be sure because I wasn’t wearing my hearing aids.) They offered to drive to the park’s Castolon Store, about a mile off, to get fresh ice for our coolers. We took them up on it, and I christened them the Good Samaritinas.
Four days later, while relaxing our river-worked bodies in the pool at Hot Springs Canyon, where the water boils up out of a vent at 105 degrees, we saw two other women hiking our way on one of the park’s trails. They introduced themselves as Darla and Jill, said they were from Iowa, and asked if they could join us for a soak. “And would you mind if we drank a beer?”” Darla asked—while pulling a bottle out of her daypack.
In short, everything about our trip the first 7 days—river level, weather, scenery, camaraderie, campsites, other people we met—had been cow heavenly. But heaven was not to last. The interlude at Hot Springs was during our longest day of paddling, 21 miles total, and, though we’d already covered 12 of those miles, we had nine more to go. Our destination was the last and longest of the river’s big canyons, Boquillas, and I wanted to camp about a mile inside it that night. It would set us up nicely for our final two days on the river. Actually, we had no choice but to camp in Boquillas. The Park enforces a no-camping zone for paddlers that extends all the way from Hot Springs to the canyon’s entrance. So, chatting and soaking in the hot water with the women for a few minutes, we said goodbye and set off again.
Needing to refill our water jugs once more, three miles downstream we pulled in at the park’s Rio Grande Village, an RV campground.
“Little Mouths”
Getting back in the canoes for our final leg that day, I warned Bobby and Pat that the remaining miles to Boquillas might be tough. Prevailing winds in the Big Bend are from the southwest, and when that’s the case, you can simply cruise along with a following wind while looking up at the stupendous, somewhat intimidating rock walls rising ever higher before you. My three earlier solo trips had following winds.
But on this trip, winds continued out of the north, and that afternoon they’d been building fast. I knew from experience that when cold fronts,“blue northers” as they are called in Texas, sweep down the Comanche Trail, Boquillas Canyon catches and concentrates the flow, funneling the gusts out its entrance with such force they blow for miles up the river. The closer you get to the canyon’s grand portal or entrance, the harder, wilder the winds blow.
Put another way, to paddle to Boquillas Canyon in north winds is to learn the hard way that the name Boquillas, meaning “Little Mouths,” does not do justice to what you are going to encounter when you get there. A gigantic stone maw cracks open in front of you and lets loose with blast after blast.
I first experienced these north-wind blasts in 1996, and, unfortunately, it was at the start of a three-day family trip with Becky and Henry, who was just 6. Setting out from Rio Grande Village, a couple of miles below Hot Springs, we paddled our tandem canoe into chill head winds all the way to Boquillas Canyon. When a gust rocked the canoe and slammed it sideways against a deadhead just as we reached the canyon entrance, I saw Henry grab the gunwales, and I heard my dear wife, up front and digging in for all she was worth against the oncoming wind and spray, cry out with words that have lived ever since in our family: “Why did you bring us to this place?” After we pushed into the canyon about a mile, however, and followed the canyon walls as they turned sharply south, the wind miraculously died, the river grew calm. The unexpected change after such a protracted struggle was dramatic—and so welcome.
When I experienced the sudden calm again a few years later while paddling with a friend into Boquillas Canyon during another blue norther, I named that calming turn Tranquility Bend.
It was Tranquility Bend that Bobby, Pat, and I needed to get around.
We Almost Made It
Right off we were met by head winds so strong that we had to fight for every foot of forward progress. Since it is five miles from Rio Grande Village to the canyon, that came to 26,400 feet of fight. The sun was low and the canyon walls were making deep shade by the time we reached the entrance. Already feeling taxed by the effort I’d expended, I wondered if I had strength enough to push on into the canyon and get around Tranquility Bend. It wasn’t only the in-your-face gales we had to contend with either. Downdrafts coming off the canyon walls on both sides hit the canoes with such force they threatened to bowl us over. We were in the middle of a cyclone, Rio Grande style.
I remembered that on the trip with Becky and Henry we came on a commercial rafting group at the entrance paddling as hard as they could to get into the canyon, only to have side winds push them against the Texas shore and pin them there. As we slowly forced our canoe past the group, they called off their trip and began to carry their gear out to the Boquillas Canyon Trailhead about a mile away.
The crux of the windstorm lies just inside the entrance. There a sandbar on the Texas side as big as a city block crowds the river up against the sheer wall in Mexico. To bolster my spirits as I headed into that narrow channel, I began to chant Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade,” altered to suit the circumstances:
Canyon to the right of us,
Canyon to the left of us,
Canyon in front of us,
Stroked the three boaters.
Head winds and side winds,
Shot with spray and sand,
Boldly we paddled, and well,
Into the maelstrom maw of Boquillas
Stroked the three boaters.
I chanted “the three boaters” but had to take the number on faith. There was no looking back to see if Bobby and Pat were still with me, no way I could turn and shout an encouraging word. To let up with the paddle for a single stroke would have given the wind all the opening it needed to shove me backwards or into the Mexico wall.
It wasn’t until I’d gotten through the perilous pass that I hazarded a glance back. I was relieved to see Bobby not far behind, head down, pushing forward. (Recalling the experience the next day, Bobby said that at one point the wind slammed him against the Mexico side, and he used his hands to pull himself along the rock wall.) But then, farther back, I saw with an inward groan—“Oh no!”— a particularly fierce gust sweep down like a fist and hit the bow of Pat’s canoe, spinning it sideways, immediately followed by another blast that struck him broadside. It was the windstorm’s equivalent of an uppercut followed by roundhouse. Over Pat went, bottom up.
Hoping that Bobby could hear me above the wind, I shouted that Pat was down, then drove my canoe onto shore on the Texas side, pulled it up, then ran back across the sandbar, throw rope in hand. Pat had managed to pull up his canoe by the time I got to him, but, chilled by the swim and now standing soaked in the wind, his body was shaking, his eyes looked shaken. When I pointed to his yellow food box, which was floating back into the current and about to go downstream, Pat yelled, “FUCK THE BOX!” But, after a moment, he waded out and grabbed it.
“Was it just a few hours ago,” I asked myself, “that we were soaking at Hot Springs with Darla and Jill?”
We needed to make camp and get Pat into dry clothes—but not there. Pitching tents on the windswept bar would be hard, keeping them pitched harder.
“Pat, if we can just get around that bend I told you about . . . ” and I pointed into the canyon, “it’s less than a mile.”
Pat was a seasoned canoeist, 73 years tough at the time of our trip. In western North Carolina I’d watched him run rapids that I decided to walk. He’d canoed the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. In the 1960s he boated the Nolichucky Gorge in a Grumman canoe. My river name for him is The Patman.
“I’m still game,” Pat said.
Bobby had joined us by then, and, to avoid the perilous pass, the three of us carried Pat’s canoe and gear across the sandbar to where the other two boats were drawn up, then pushed off again.
Half an hour later we still had not doubled Tranquility Bend. Bursts of wind hurtled up the river. You could see the dark streaks they made on the river’s surface coming towards you. Timing it, I would bend forward just as each gust hit, pushing back against it with the strongest forward stroke I could muster. Glancing behind me from time to time, I saw that when Pat reached a shallow spot, he would get out and slosh forward knee deep, pulling his boat, then he’d get in and take up the paddle again.
Tranquillity Bend was close when darkness joined forces with the wind to stop us cold. There was simply no way we could get around the calming turn in the canyon before night. Making out a beach on the Mexico side with a clump of small trees, I ran my canoe up, the others following. I pointed to the trees and shouted, “They might make a windbreak!” At least we’d have something to tie to.
Pat’s fingers were numb by then, and we thought he was starting to show signs of hypothermia. People trained in wilderness first-aid refer to these signs as “The Umble Family,” as in mumble, grumble, fumble, and stumble. Bobby headed towards the trees with Pat to help him change into dry clothes and to set up his tent. Putting on my headlamp, I started bringing up the gear and boats, Pat’s first. Nearing the trees, and panting with exertion from having dragged the canoe, I let go of it for a moment to catch my breath and walked over to ask the others if they needed help. Bobby said, “We’re good!”
So I turned to tie off Pat’s canoe—and stood dumbfounded. There in my headlamp beam was nothing but sand. The canoe had had several inches of water in it, along with some of Pat’s gear, so it wasn’t light. But all that remained where I’d left the boat was a canoe-sized wet spot darkening the sand. I shined my light back and forth while wondering nonsensically if the other two were playing some kind of joke on me and had moved the canoe.
I know what wind can do to a canoe. In Montana I saw wind send a canoe skidding across a gravel bar like a sled on ice. Two men jumped in to hold it down. In Oregon I saw bursts of wind tumble canoes sideways and then flip them end over end, people scattering to get out of the way. In Idaho I watched a canoe sail 100 feet through the air and land in the middle of a river. “Pull up your boats and tie them” was a refrain everyone on my western trips heard as soon as we got to camp. All I can say in this case is that in Boquillas Canyon Pat’s canoe disappeared at the end of a 21-mile day, in the dark, in a welter of wind and blowing sand, and I was 72 years tired.
Then my light landed on Pat’s red drybag. It lay about 30 feet away from the wet spot and had been in the canoe. When I went to get it, I saw his paddle at about the same distance farther, and, going to pick it up, my headlamp revealed his spare paddle still another 30 feet on. It was lying on the riverbank. At that moment the realization of what must have happened came to me with heart-sinking clarity. When I had walked over to check on the other two, a downdraft had come off the Mexico wall and, like some fierce Commanche warrior mounted on his horse, had simply carried Pat’s canoe away, dumping out the water and gear as it went. Wet spot . . . red bag . . . paddle . . . spare paddle . . . Rio Grande. The trail of abduction towards the river was as clear as day.
But there was nothing clear to me about what had happened next. If the canoe had landed upright in the river, I knew the wind might be blowing it all the way back upstream to spit it out the canyon’s mouth, but if it had landed upside down, the current might be carrying the boat the other way. I ran up and down the sandbar shining my light out across the river. I was still wearing my life jacket and was ready to swim for the boat if that’s what it took. But all the beam revealed was blank Rio Grande.
Back at the trees, I found Pat in his sleeping bag with his tent cockeyed and half-collapsed around him. The flaps were popping in the wind. The only thing holding the tent in place was Pat. And Pat would have to do. I told him about his boat, then stuffed a packet of M&Ms into his hands, yelled over the wind “EAT!”—and then, before the wind could do more mischief, joined with Bobby to haul our canoes up to the trees and tie them. Even so, a few minutes later I found my boat, though tied to a mesquite tree, flipped upside down by the wind, the gear in it dumped out.
Looking for a place to sleep, I hiked up the sandbar to the base of the cliff and came to a copse of mesquite that the downdrafts passed over. The trees stood in a kind of Aeolian eddy. Bobby and I cut out two sleeping places among the thorny branches, then carried our gear there. We’d have made a place for Pat too, but he was warm in his sleeping bag. All he needed, he said, was his yellow food box. So I pushed the box in next to him. While the three of us ate by headlamp in our separate spots, Bobby and I talked through the branches, and, every once in a while we’d shout down through the wind and darkness to check on Pat.
I slept fitfully, in part because of the wind, but chiefly because the thought kept gnawing at me that Pat’s canoe had been lost on my watch. It would have been better had the canoe been my own.
The windstorm was baffling in the way it whirled and buffeted us from different directions, but by the time we settled into our bivouac, I had noted one regularity about it: the downdrafts coming off the Mexico wall nearest us followed the same narrow path over and over again towards the river. And by bad luck, I had left Pat’s canoe—“Millie,” as he calls her—in that very path. All I could figure was that when I walked over to check on the others, a down blast had carried poor Millie away. Meanwhile, the bailer that Pat uses to scoop water out of the boat—a plastic gallon jug with the bottom cut out, and weighing all of one ounce—lay undisturbed not 20 feet away, just out of the downdraft’s path.
Lost Then Found
I woke to a bright sky, still air, and clearing thoughts. Pat was already up, and talking with him and Bobby, we quickly decided on the best course of action. Since I had the biggest canoe, Pat would paddle with me, putting some of his gear in my boat, and Bobby would carry the rest of his things. The solo canoes would be overloaded, and we’d probably have to line them around rapids, but chances were good we’d come on Pat’s canoe. It might be pinned on a rock or caught by the river cane that hangs out over the bank. And if we did not come on it? Well, we had 28 miles and another night to go before we reached the take-out at Heath Canyon Ranch.
Eager to get going, Pat carried his gear to the river. Suddenly I heard him whoop, and then he began to point across the river and dance. I ran down, and, following his finger, what to my wondering eyes did appear but Millie! She was on the opposite side of the canyon, sitting right-side up on a mud bank. Evidently, the same downdraft that had thrown the canoe into the river had blown it all the way across the channel and up onto the far shore; and there it had stayed the whole wild night.
In aerial photographs, the Rio Grande’s canyons show themselves to be great fissures in the earth’s crust. Even though the view is from far overhead, you can sense their immense size. But when you are within one of those canyons looking up, it is hard to grasp just how high the rock walls rise above you, how deep down between them you are. The sight of Pat’s canoe, however, looking so tiny where it lay as the base of the towering wall on the Texas side, brought home the depth of rock that contained us. If you could place a hundred canoes end to end in a straight line up that wall and then climb them from thwart to thwart like rungs on a ladder, you still would not get out.
We paddled across to Millie, and the way Pat examined his beached boat, you’d think a footsore cowboy in the Chihuahua Desert had found his runaway horse.
I tend to name campsites and mark them on the map. It helps me to remember what each place looked like and what happened there. So, after Pat was saddled up and we were riding the watery trail again, I tossed out “Windblown” as a possible name for our emergency night. Pat said “Lost Boat” sounded better to him. But it was Bobby who came up with the name that stuck: “Lost Then Found.”
The Blond and the Desert Sloop
The morning after the windstorm the Little Mouths of Boquillas Canyon held their breath, and we paddled with easy strokes all day. In the afternoon we pulled over to explore a slot canyon on the Mexican side named El Guero. Its narrow opening is dwarfed by the main canyon wall and can be easily missed if you don’t know where to look. According to an online Spanish dictionary, in Mexico “el guero” means the blond, the fair-skinned one, golden boy, or “whitey,” said as a term of endearment, not reproach. I won’t describe the slot canyon except to say that if you are ever lucky enough to stand between its beautiful water-sculpted walls of smooth, white limestone, you’ll know it is aptly named.
Late that afternoon we emerged from Boquillas into the open desert and set up our last night’s camp. What a contrast to the previous campsite, where, hemmed in between stone walls, we had but a constricted, straight-up view of the sky. Now, our view extended in one direction for miles and miles over arroyos and cuestas and shrubby vegas to where solitary purple peaks stuck up above the horizon in Mexico. And in the other direction, two miles away, we watched the vertical fronts of Mexico’s Sierra Del Carmen range and, in Texas, the Deadhorse Mountains, turn golden in the setting sun. Boquillas Canyon lay between.
Cold, starry, and windless nights on the Rio Grande almost always come with heavy dew—heavy enough to soak you if you bed down in the open, as I do in my canoe. Seeing that our last night was likely to be wet, I rigged my canoe-bed with a single mast, then draped a cotton sheet—my “dew rag”—over the fore line, secured it with binder clips, and spread my sleeping bag out under it. My bed looked like a desert sloop. At dawn the thermometer read 28 degrees. I reached out of my warm, dry sleeping bag and touched the sheet above me. It was frozen stiff.
The final miles to Heath Canyon Ranch were a puff. Stepping out of our canoes at the gravel bar take-out in the early afternoon, we shook hands, and Pat danced. It was the fourth river trip we had made together this year, and we agreed it was the best.
Afterblast
Back home in Cullowhee, I wrote my friend Keith Bowden to tell him about the Boquillas Canyon windstorm. In 2004 Keith paddled almost all of the 900 miles of the Rio Grande from El Paso to the Gulf (his Tecate Journals is a great read about that journey), and today he lives beside the river in Langtry, Texas, pop. 13. From Langtry Keith continues to make more paddling trips on the Rio Grande than any other living man. His reply is worth passing on:
“One time not long ago I camped in Boquillas Canyon and the wind came up big and there was nowhere to tie the canoe, so I reloaded it with my twelve days worth of supplies and gear and went to sleep. When I awoke, it was gone. The wind tossed it in the river, where it lay in shallow water upside down. I had to spend all the next day sitting in the loaded canoe on shore. I couldn’t paddle forward. If I left the canoe for a short walk, the wind would toss it back into the river. Finally, early evening I was able to advance a half-mile to a camp with trees where I could tie. An hour after I arrived, the wind utterly died, and I didn’t have even a whisper all the way on to La Linda and beyond.”
Aftershots
River trip facts and figures
Trip dates: Nov. 10-18, 2022.
Put-in: Lajitas; take-out: Heath Canyon Ranch/La Linda. River miles traveled, 130.
River level: an adequate 525 cfs on the USGS Castolon gauge, slowly dropping to 350 cfs during the course of the trip. The ideal level for canoeing the Great Unknown, in my experience, is when the gauge holds steady in the 700-800 range.
Shuttler: Russell Johnson, Heath Canyon Ranch. Ranch # 432-376-2235.
For detailed river guides and maps to the entire Big Bend reach of the Rio Grande, see Louis Aulbach’s three books, The Upper Canyons of the Rio Grande, The Great Unknown, and The Lower Canyons of the Rio Grande. All told, these three book cover more than 250 “wild and scenic” miles of the river.
For a superb travel narrative, read Keith Bowden’s The Tecate Journals, an account of his exploration of the entire Texas stretch of the Rio Grande from El Paso to the Gulf of Mexico.
A word to the wise Rio Grande river tripper: when you fill out the required permit for your trip at the park’s Panther Junction headquarters, the ranger is going to ask if you have the following four things: a spare life-jacket for the group; a firepan (whether you plan on building a fire or not); a portable potty or WAG bags; a spare paddle for each canoe. Say no to any of them and you will not get a permit.