AYN FOUNDATION
(DAS MAXIMUM)
ANDY WARHOL
MARIA ZERRES
THE LAST SUPPER
SEPTEMBER ELEVEN
Brite Building, 107-109 N Highland, Marfa
Open weekends noon to 5pm or by appointment.
Please call 432.729.3315 for more information.
Green Works
ARCHITECTURAL AND CONSTRUCTION PHASE SERVICES
Photo by Carolyn Ohl
Adobe Restoration
Sustainable Architectural Design
Rainwater Catchment Design
Handicapped Accessible Design
Solar/Wind Energy Consulting
Mike Green, AIA, Texas License #10917
LEED Accredited Professional
646-256-8112
mike@greenworks-architecture.com
Box 97, Marfa, TX 79843
located on HWY 118
4 mi. S. of Fort Davis
closed major holidays
Open 9-5, Mon.-Sat.
www.cdri.org
432-364-2499
Butterfly Count—July 1
OPEN JULY
4TH
Desert after Dark Night Hikes—July 9, 16, 23, 30
What’s in a Name? Herpetofauna Lecture on Taxonomy
and Status—July 14
Summer Constellations, Saturn & the Milky Way
Stargazing—July 16, 30
Desert Rat Club Summer Day Camp—July 18–22
Annual BBQ & Benefit Auction—August 6
Change your Perspective: Climb Mt. Livermore
—September 10
Butterfly Count—September 17
Fall Bird Count—September 24
Chihuahuan Desert Research Institute, Est. 1974
P.O. Box 905, Fort Davis, TX 79734
24
The oasis amidst desert scrub.
Building an Oasis in the Desert
by Bill Lindemann
T
ucked away in the
Christmas Mountains
north of Big Bend
National Park is an unusual
grove of native trees located in
the harsh thornbush scrub of
the Chihuahuan Desert. There
are no springs to support these
trees in a rocky landscape that
originated some 40 million
years ago when the Trans-
Pecos region of Texas was an
active volcanic field featuring
fiery vents spewing out lava
flows and hot ash falls. The
rocks have cooled, but the area
is still considered inhospitable,
with less than 10 inches of
annual rainfall and tempera-
tures that reach triple digits for
more than half the year.
This grove of cottonwoods,
willows and mulberry trees
forms a habitat that could be
called an oasis. Normally, we
think of an oasis as a grove of
date palm trees in a sandy
desert where nomads find
water and rest. Replace the
sand with thorny brush, the
date palms with cottonwoods
and the weary nomadic travel-
ers with birds, and you have a
Christmas Mountains oasis.
This oasis is special because it
was built by a middle-aged,
Cenizo
Third Quarter 2011
hard-working woman with no
past engineering experience.
Carolyn Ohl Johnson pur-
chased a section of land and
moved to the Christmas
Mountains from San Antonio
in the late 1970s.
Carolyn’s first engineering
experience came by blasting
out a hole in a small hillside on
her ranch and building a house
in the hole. When the house
was completed, she back-filled
around it with dirt up to a foot
below the second story roof
and built a beautiful courtyard
in the front yard. She married a
retired heavy-machinery con-
tractor named Sherwood Kolb,
who was also an avid gardener.
Both enjoyed gardening, but it
was difficult having sufficient
water to maintain the garden,
especially after the supporting
well went dry.
Carolyn thought of building
a pond to trap and store the
water that came down the dry
arroyo during rainstorms.
Sherwood applied his dirt-mov-
ing skills to building a concreted
pond to hold the water.
Carolyn began planting native
trees in the mid 1990s, while
Sherwood planted his garden.
It quickly became apparent
that the trees alone would need
much more water, so they
increased their water capacity
to a half million gallons by
building an additional concret-
ed pond and downsized the
garden. By placing small dams,
or weirs, in the arroyo, they
could divert enough water to fill
their storage tanks from a thun-
derstorm flash flood bringing
an inch of rain.
Carolyn’s sister-in-law, Dale
Ohl, moved to Alpine in the
mid 1990s and invited her to go
birding; it took only a few trips
for Carolyn to get “hooked.”
Carolyn’s first exposure to bird-
ing came from an uncle while
growing up in Iowa; however,
she dismissed birding as a “kids’
game,” got married and raised
her family. The second expo-
sure to birding stuck with her,
providing her an avocation that
would impact her life. When
Sherwood suddenly died in
2003, Carolyn decided to
abandon the garden and con-
centrate on her oasis for birds.
She came to realize that
planting trees was the easy part;
keeping them alive was much
continued on page 27