BIG BEND NATIONAL PARK — For more than 70 years, the idea has persisted to create an international park among the mountains, canyons and desert plains that flank the Rio Grande.
The wait may be coming to an end.
Top Interior Department officials recently toured Big Bend to re-evaluate the vision of a cross-border park and to prepare a proposal for President Barack Obama.
“This creates the opportunity to share an agenda,” Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said about working with Mexico to preserve the unique landscape.
Between the work of the federal governments on both sides of the border, the state of Texas, private landowners and the CEMEX cement company in Mexico, some 3 million acres already are protected and straddle the Rio Grande as it cuts through the Chihuahuan Desert and the southern tip of the Rocky Mountains.
Larger than the states of Rhode Island and Delaware combined, the land is conservation on a scale rarely seen in the lower 48 states since Franklin Roosevelt was president and created Big Bend National Park.
Back then, the understanding was that the park eventually would have to become international to fully protect the wilderness and the plants and animal species that live only there.
Border barrier
Though the region now is mostly protected, the lack of a framework for international management along with the closure of all legal border crossings, including La Linda, after 9-11, have stymied stewardship, research and the economy.
To do any cross-border projects means a 15-hour drive one way.
“Working on just one side of the river makes no sense,” Big Bend National Park Superintendent Bill Wellman said. “And I think we are much more secure when we are friends and working together with the people on the other side of the border.”
Wellman led Salazar, Tom Strickland, assistant secretary of the interior for Fish and Wildlife and Parks, and Jon Jarvis, National Parks Service director, on a tour of Big Bend National Park with U.S. Rep. Ciro Rodriguez, D-San Antonio, an advocate for the international agreement.
The point was to showcase the desert landscape, which had just started to bloom, and demonstrate the challenges the closed border presents.
The U.S. has one international peace park. Created in 1932, the Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park bridges the border between Montana and Alberta.
With two helicopters providing security, the D.C. delegation took canoes down the Rio Grande and joked about the implications of making a pit stop on Mexico's river bank. Their guides lamented not hearing the songs of the cowboys who sometimes sing for tips on the river's south bank.
The presidential appointees listened to a ranger talk about dinosaur bones and 10,000 years of human history and heard a biologist brag about the 450 species of birds that live in or migrate through Big Bend, more than any other national park.
They learned the only reason the national park now has black bears again, after they were hunted to extinction in Texas, is that a small population survived in the mountains of Mexico and re-populated the park.
Similar work is being done by CEMEX on both sides of the border to reintroduce herds of big horn sheep.
Because of projects like those and concern about climate change shifting migration routes and habitats, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is looking to international and private partnerships to do more large-scale ecosystem preservation, the kind the Big Bend region makes possible.
“We can't just buy all the land that needs to be protected,” Strickland said.
On the tour, the Washington delegation saw abandoned homes in shrinking Mexican villages where the residents were once dependent on tourists and learned about the stunted scientific research resulting from the closed border.
The officials nodded, thanked the rangers and biologists for their passion. They stood in silence as they gazed up at the cliffs and mountains. With the broad bends of the river, it was difficult to tell which side of the border the limestone uplifts were on.
Salazar said he was committed to working on the international park proposal with fellow Cabinet members, specifically Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.
His commitment and work is being duplicated in Mexico.
“Ever since Santa Elena Canyon and Maderas del Carmen were designated protected areas, we have been working on projects with our counterparts in Big Bend National Park,” Carlos Alberto Sifuentes, engineer and director of the protected areas south of Big Bend National Park, said in Spanish. But “we have never had a legal marker that strengthens us as one unified area. ... Right now it's in the stage of a proposal developed for the secretaries of the environment of Mexico and of the Department of the Interior of the United States.”
National differences
The politics of creating an international park can be complicated.
Government land control is a sensitive subject in Mexico. Revolutions have been fought over it and private landowners aren't eager to see tourists.
On the U.S. side is the challenge of securing the remote border while allowing comprehensive management and researchers to study the entire region.
Unlike the protected areas in the U.S., in Mexico there are no visitor centers, maintained trails or rangers standing by for search and rescues. The land is mostly privately owned and protected not for public use but for biodiversity. People live a near subsistence existence there as they have for generations.
From the banks of the Rio Grande, those differences are a world away. The mountains in Mexico have the same pine and cypress forests as those in the Chisos Mountains at the heart of Big Bend National Park.
Rodriguez said he hopes that one day, maybe after he's gone, even tourists will again cross the border from Big Bend.
He has a lot of work ahead to make that a reality, but coming off the river he was all smiles. He had invited the Interior Department officials to come see the park and the day had gone without a hitch. The weather was warm, the water cool and clear. The scenery of mesas, mountains and desert expanse slowly drifted by as they floated the river.
He climbed the river bank on the U.S. side to take a photo of the cliffs in Mexico.
The bands of limestone glowed pink and orange in the afternoon light. It was all he needed to make his point to the Washington bureaucrats.
“This is an opportunity to look at an international park,” he said.
Completely agree. They have nearly as much Oil and LNG as the middle east. Also the border between Mexico and Guatemala is much shorter than that between The US and Mexico making a border fence much more sensible.
At least, thats my version of the story.
