
On the last day of August 1894, a young U.S. customs inspector named Everett E. Townsend was tracking stolen mules in trans-Pecos Texas. The mules and their rustlers led him into the green and majestic Chisos Mountains inside the great looping arc of the Rio Grande. In years to come, Townsend liked to tell people that what he experienced in the glorious isolation of the Chisos made him “see God as he had never seen Him before.”
Townsend, who grew up near Wharton, was 23 when he ventured into the mountains of the Big Bend. He had already been a cowboy, a Texas Ranger and a deputy U.S. marshal before he signed on to track smugglers and intercept contraband as a customs agent in the most remote and inaccessible corner of the Texas border country. In decades to come, he would serve three terms as Brewster County sheriff and a term in Austin as a state representative, but all those years, whatever his position, his lifelong aim was to protect the vast expanse of wildlands and distant vistas of the Big Bend.
Ninety years ago this spring, in 1933, Townsend got his chance when he managed to corral enough of his fellow lawmakers to pass a bill establishing Texas Canyons State Park. With Texas deep in the throes of the Depression, Gov. Miriam “Ma” Ferguson surprised almost everyone when she signed the bill into law. During a special session later that year, Townsend successfully passed legislation that changed the name to Big Bend State Park and expanded the park’s holdings to more than 100,000 acres.

At Townsend’s urging in 1935, U.S. Rep. R.E. Thomason of El Paso and U.S. Sen. Tom Connally of Texas sponsored legislation establishing Big Bend National Park. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed their bill into law on Sept. 5, 1943. On June 11, 1944, the nation’s 27th national park and the first in the Lone Star State opened to visitors.
“The Father of the Big Bend” died in 1948 at age 77, having lived long enough to see his dream fulfilled. Were Townsend alive today, we suspect he would be pleased that the splendid isolation that transformed his life is having the same soul-stirring effect on more visitors than ever before. And he would be concerned that Big Bend’s spike in popularity in recent years, particularly since the pandemic, threatens to upset the delicate balance between the alluring beauty of undeveloped lands and the ever-diminishing opportunity for people to experience untrammeled wilderness.
It’s hard to believe that a national park that’s always been one of the most inaccessible and least visited — nine hours and 563 miles from Houston, for example — may have to require reservations at some point. More than 500,000 visitors to the park in each of the last two years are creating traffic jams and fully booked campgrounds at certain times of the year — this in an 801,000-acre national park that lures those yearning to get away from it all.
The land, which supported humans as far back as 10,000 years, can sustain more visitors while maintaining a feeling of wildness and isolation, but only if the park is managed carefully.
Park Superintendent Bob Krumenaker, a 41-year veteran of the National Park Service, working alongside the Big Bend Conservancy and a loosely organized coalition of park lovers called Keep Big Bend Wild (www.keepbigbendwild.org), has been holding town hall-style meetings in communities throughout the Big Bend region, providing information and responding to questions and concerns about an initiative Congress can take to help maintain the balance. It’s called the Big Bend National Park Wilderness Act. The nation’s highest level of conservation protection, its purpose is to assure that future infrastructure development is confined to already developed areas, thereby permanently protecting those vast swaths of wilderness that draw visitors to the park. They would still have the opportunity to experience the wilderness from the park’s network of roads or hiking trails.

The wilderness designation would prevent new infrastructure from marring pristine areas while still accommodating needed improvements. The park, for example, will embark next year on a $75 million upgrade to the Chisos Mountain Lodge on the same site where it was constructed in 1964. More visitor services are likely to be needed, but under the Wilderness Act, they would be confined to already developed areas. Additional hotels or restaurants or RV parks would be located outside the park, thus providing an economic boon for Lajitas, Terlingua and other gateway communities.
Fifty of our national park service areas, including Texas’s Guadalupe Mountains National Park, Yosemite National Park and Rocky Mountain National Park, as well as other federal lands administered by the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are protected by the 1964 Wilderness Act, approved overwhelmingly by Congress on a bipartisan basis and signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson. In 1978, the National Park Service submitted a recommendation to Congress to designate much of Big Bend National Park as wilderness, but nothing ever came of the recommendation.
As Superintendent Krumenaker explained to a town-hall gathering in Alpine recently, he and his predecessors have operated the park as if the 1978 recommendation had been adopted, but there are no guarantees that one of his successors or a future administration in Washington might decide otherwise. Krumenaker believes the park needs guarantees to prevent, say, a snack bar at Balanced Rock or a sprawling lodge at the base of majestic Santa Elena Canyon.
“Formally designating wilderness for the undeveloped portions of Big Bend National Park is the best thing our generation can do to ensure that the experiences Texans love today in their favorite national park would be available to their grandchildren without adversely affecting any existing developments, public uses, border security or private rights in any way,” Krumenaker told the editorial board in an email last week.
“We really feel like it creates a framework for future management,” said Lauren Reimer, executive director of Big Bend Conservancy, in an interview with the Chronicle editorial board. The Conservancy is working with elected officials who will need to sponsor legislation to make a wilderness designation a reality. They include U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales, the San Antonio Republican whose sprawling district includes the park, and U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, who, in Reimer’s words, “has been an incredible partner on conservation efforts related to the park.”
Krumenaker, who’s retiring later this month and leaving Texas, calls Big Bend “Texas’ gift to the nation.” His description is a timely reminder for a rapidly urbanizing state that desperately needs parkland and wilderness areas, a reminder that we have an obligation to protect and preserve that precious gift. The man for whom Townsend Peak is named, the man who saw God in the Chisos, is a worthy model for our efforts.

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