W ITNESSES T RACK THE F ORGOTTEN R EACH
by Richard Mark Glover
I
watched my connection to the out-
side world disappear as the blue of
my wife’s VW crested a hill and van-
ished. The moment hung in the
Chihuahua Desert sun, fragile, as if
something was about to crack. What if I
didn’t come back this time, would I be
forgotten like this stretch of the river?
Was it worth the risks: mountain lions,
coked-up smugglers, death by dehydra-
tion, rifle-toting ranchers?
My hiking companions, Dr. Brad
Butler and Bill McNamara, cinched
their backpacks and looked in the oppo-
site direction, toward the Rio Grande.
Casting long morning shadows, we
stood there on the dirt
road 30 miles south of
Sierra Blanca and the
Interstate in this most
remote, and yet well-traf-
ficked of areas—rife with
drug and human smug-
gling along the Texas-
Mexican border.
“Let’s take the road as
far as we can,” Butler
said, adjusting the bill on
his cap.
The river road repre-
sented good walking and
a chance to improve our
one mile-per-hour aver-
age, the standard we had set for the first
75 miles of our hike. Our goal on this
segment was to reach the halfway point
of the Forgotten Reach of the Rio
Grande, 100 miles downriver from the
recently-constructed
Homeland
Security steel border fence at Neely
Crossing, where we had started the first
leg last December.
From Neely Crossing just below El
Paso-Juarez, to Presidio-Ojinaga, where
the Rio Grande is resurrected by the
Rio Conchos, the Forgotten Reach runs
nearly 200 miles. Surface water occa-
sionally pools in the channel. It is
sourced from springs bleeding from
buried aquifers and ephemeral surges,
run-off from summer storms that drain
the 66 arroyos along the reach. But for
the most part, the river is not a river.
We passed Guerra Farm across from
10
Cajonitos, a nearly-deserted Mexican
town. As we walked toward the river
rusting hulks of tractors and combines,
hay bailers, flatbeds and other farm
implements suggested a time gone by. A
time when cotton and alfalfa grew green
and plentiful along the river flats; when
the river flowed and wells pumped fresh
water rather than brine.
“Check it out,” McNamara called.
He had hurried ahead to the end of the
road and now stood on a grassy knoll
just above a pool of green Rio Grande
water.
“Springs,” Butler said as we stepped
up to join him. itself didn’t need water, to wash down
the silt and sediment or to sustain the
clams, coots, catfish and cottonwoods.
We hacked through the jungle and
straightaway came upon a canteen
hanging on a limb, then a red marker, a
green marker, a machete-cleared
stretch, then a neatly arranged pair of
boots at a trail head coming across from
Mexico.
Ahead a rocky protrusion blocked
the trail.
“Dead
End,”
McNamara
announced as his eyes followed the gray
bluff down its jagged sprawl and into the
river.
In January, Butler and I had walked
the reach for three days in the snow.
Springs had perked just enough water to
make it hard to hike in the river bottom.
So we hiked on the banks, between steep
canyons, following wild burro trails. At
times we were crawling on our hands
and knees lugging 50-pound packs
through the salt cedar desert jungle.
Water in the river was good and bad
news.
The bad meant we would be slicing
through the salt cedar again. The good,
of course, was clean water, and although
at the time we didn’t know it, we’d be
drinking it soon enough.
The Forgotten Reach is forgotten
because the people and the water are
gone. During the last century power
brokers dealt the river away for farms
and ranches and cities. As if the river “No, look, wires,” Butler said.
Two lengths of barbed wire hung
from a mesquite growing on the side of
the cliff. Butler grabbed the wires and
pulled. He leaned his full weight against
the anchor, testing its purchase in the
rock above. He set a boot along a thin
ledge as bits of rock crumbled into a
deep pool of river water below. Then
slowly he rappelled around the jagged
outcrop to the trail. He smiled and
swung the wires back to me.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“It’s part of the system,” Butler said.
The smugglers’ system, I thought to
myself.
We crabbed around another ledge
and landed in a meadow: lush, green,
cat-o-nine tails, gurgling water and
stench.
Suddenly Russian Boar charged,
Cenizo
Fourth Quarter 2013
snarling and squealing across the river
into Mexico.
We continued along the narrow spit
of bottomland, stepping over sporadic
collections of bones from cows, pigs and
deer calcified in the afternoon sun.
"Let’s camp,” I yelled ahead.
“Too early but soon,” Captain Butler
said in beat with his long-legged gait.
Two feral calves rustled out of the
mesquite. With a thump and the sound
of thrashing limbs, leaping across the
gray stone of the cliff, a mountain lion
powered uphill, muscles bulging as its
long body stretched, the spinal cord arc-
ing, de-arcing rhythmically as the hind
legs propelled him for-
ward in long taut ribbo-
neous strides. Sure-foot-
ed, the cat motored diag-
onally across and up the
canyon rock, gaining alti-
tude like some beast
about to fly. Its gold coat
was marled with rem-
nants of a darker, longer
winter coat. The big cat
disappeared over a crest
then reappeared, rocks
spraying as it neared the
top of the mountain.
Slowing only slightly after
a most brutal 100 yard
pure ascent it reached the top of the rock
face and vanished.
We camped that night, a little further
down river, at Eagle Canyon. For a
while we stared at the stars from our
bedrolls, not peacefully, but as witnesses
along the Forgotten Reach.