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of fog unrolled like flame tips into the bluish sky
above, but we could not see the mountains on
either side through the dense grayness. In a sub-
dued mood, we turned the car around and head-
ed quietly home.
On a drive down Highway 17 from a friend’s
cabin at Lake Balmorhea a few years ago, two
motorcyclists pulled around me coming into the
pass. A minute later I saw one of them standing
on the roadside next to his bike waving me down.
His nephew had driven off the road and was
lying twisted and broken in the ditch among the
scattered parts of his wrecked bike. With no cell
signal, I flagged down the next several vehicles
looking for a doctor or anyone with a signal.
Among the travelers were a nurse and an EMT
who worked on the young man until help
arrived. The ambulance came too late. He died.
And I was struck with a sudden awareness that
this place was indeed remote, and that remote
can mean dangerous. I had that same feeling just
after the Rock House Fire swept through the
pass, and I saw the charred grassland and cotton-
wood trees along the creek still smoking from
their bases. I felt a longing to see beauty in Wild
Rose Pass again.
When I asked about the roses, many old-
timers said they had never seen them blooming.
My vision from 1986 began to take on a
Brigadoon-like quality. I know that my mind is as
capable of anyone’s of playing tricks, but I’m
certain that it was not a mirage. An internet
search yielded several stories on official Texas
historic sites all saying pretty much the same
thing: that the pass was named by a Lt. Whiting
in 1849 for the Demaree rose growing there. I
found nothing about a Demaree rose.
A friend searched through her botany books
one morning over coffee. She suddenly turned
one of the books around to me, tapping the
page, and said, “There’s your rose!” According
to Dr. A. Michael Powell, author of numerous
books and articles on the flora of the Trans-
Pecos region, the rose I was looking for was rosa
woodsii, a native that is quite common through-
out the western United States.
Okay, it’s common, but does it still bloom in
Wild Rose Pass? I consulted Dr. Martin Terry, a
botanist at Sul Ross State University. He found
the tales of the internet search to be “some
admixture of puzzling and sad.” But he con-
firmed my rose to be rosa woodsii, a small, pink
wild rose, and he suggested that I consult the
great Dr. Powell directly.
I also talked to Jeff Keeling, a botanist work-
ing on his master’s degree at Sul Ross, who had
recently completed a botanical survey of over
4,000 plants found on Mount Livermore, one
of which is rosa woodsii. He agreed to drive with
me to Wild Rose Pass to search for it, but lack-
ing access to the land, we found nothing to indi-
cate that the rose still exists there. Jeff suggested
that perhaps I had seen glandularia pubera, a plant
with tiny clusters of flowers in shades of pink to
mauve to fuchsia. He showed me one. Nope.
Too low to the ground. Then he suggested that
perhaps I had seen a plant called Apache
Plume whose bloom is sometimes confused
with the McCartney rose. That, too, was a big
nope. Too white.
It was clearly time to consult the master, the
famous Dr. Powell. I found him in the herbari-
um in the basement of the Warnock Building
on the Sul Ross campus. When I told him my
story, he walked to one of the tall gray metal
cabinets that stand in rows in the herbarium
and pulled out a book of pressings of speci-
mens. There it was. This flattened sprig of a
rose, the only rosa woodsii specimen in the col-
lection documented as having actually been col-
lected in the pass, was donated by Dr. Barton
Warnock in 1956, but it was collected by Barry
Scobee around 1935. Dr. Powell says that many
botanists have looked for the rose in the pass,
but there were always access problems. The
famous Dr. Barton Warnock had access but
never found it.
So there I was – looking over the shoulder of
a brilliant botanist pondering a humble, desic-
cated rose specimen donated by the fellow for
whom the very building in which we stood was
named – a rose collected by the fellow for
whom Scobee Mountain was named. I felt
connected, if only for a moment, to these great
men, past and present, through a little flower
pressed between yellowing pages.
And I felt connected to Wild Rose Pass, this
haunting, frustrating place where I have seen
love and death, beauty and destruction, hope
and disappointment. Did I see what I think I
saw? Can a wild rose that hasn’t been docu-
mented in over 75 years still exist? Does it?
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Cenizo
First Quarter 2013
27