Big Bend Ranch has a high barrier to entry. It takes 27 miles of off-roading to get to the Sauceda Ranger Station and Bunkhouse in the interior of the park. From there, the back roads to far away places such as Rincon and Gaule are even worse. After a week in the interior, we faced the high barrier to exit, bypassing showers and crawling our way out of the park. An oncoming pair of overlanding buddies were piloting a Jeep and Bronco. They gave us the stink eye in response to our cheerful wave. Many times travelers like to stop when passing, driver door to driver door, to chat about road conditions, destinations and generally pound chests at how rugged we all are. Not this time. It seemed the presence of our little T@G turned the purists off. A full size F250 with towable is an interloper into the hallowed off-roading grounds of the interior of the Ranch. They are not wrong, actually. By off-roading standards, we came up short. Our simple ball hitch should have been an articulating hitch. Our T@G’s torsion axles and knobby tires were sufficient for the Subaru roads, but stay off those roads marked 4WD only.
We went in with a lot of enthusiasm for our new T@G purchase planning on giving it a good shakedown to test it’s capabilities. Looking back, a broken hitch or axle deep into the park was a real possibility with our rig. Fortunately, it was not our first rodeo in the Ranch. So, we made good conservative choices. It was easier to turn around while we could when we knew what was ahead. There was a reason we went with a tent last time when we tackled the road to Rincon. We most likely will not be heading back to the Ranch with a towable but at least we know what we’ve got. We will take our lucky throw of the dice and sweep our winnings off the table.
Once back on paved roads, we seemed to fly across the wide open landscape, except when we stopped at a border checkpoint to be questioned about where we’d been, show IDs and have the T@G sniffed by K-9s. Our destination was the least populated town in the west Texas triangle of Marfa, Alpine, and Fort Davis – Davis Mountain State Park, which had provided welcome hospitality twice before. Unlike Big Bend Ranch State Park, this is luxury camping with bath houses, a power pole and a water spigot. Also – other people.
The site came with six twenty-something neighbors in from the city to blow off some steam in the great outdoors for the long Veteran’s Day weekend. In truth, they were a good group of young people but it still is a shock to the system to hear dogs barking, radios playing and cars coming and going day and night. We were impressed with their resilience, though, as temperatures dropped below freezing at night and all they had were hoodies and Walmart tents. We were proud of them. We cheered them on at their exposed picnic table from the propane heated interior of our Clam shelter.
We hunkered in our Clam shelter version of camping with the extra wall panels installed, and held the cold at bay as best we could. Fort Davis is a top pick, primarily because of the fabulous library in town, but also because a new bar/restaurant opened over the summer, advertising the Holy Grail of entertainment: pickleball and the Eagles on Monday Night Football. The Rendezvous was new since our last visit to Fort Davis, hyping the only public pickleball court in all of west Texas. There are definitely some in Alpine, but it was also definitely the only court in Fort Davis. We stopped in around Happy Hour to reconnoiter the joint prior to the big Eagles-Green Bay game later that evening. True to the advertisement, an absolutely gorgeous outdoor pickleball court sat adjacent to the bar.
Things were looking so promising right up until they weren’t. We passed on ordering food when we saw the once frozen pizza arrive at an adjacent table. The bar staff was not sure if they got Monday Night Football but they were definitely sure that they closed before the night game was expected to end. As for pickleball, not a player to be found. Two ten dollar beers later, we un-Rendezvous’d and provisioned for a tuna casserole at the local grocery store. We tuned into Merill and Mike calling the play-by-play over the Sirius XM app on our iPhone using the Starlink internet access. It’s important to have backup plans in west Texas.
The Rendezvous incident, as we like to call it, is reflective of life in rural west Texas. There of lots of good intentions but no guarantees. It’s complicated and nuanced, just like the actual town of Fort Davis. Named after Jefferson Davis when he was Secretary of War after the Mexican-American War, it’s the same Davis who would become the President of the Confederate States of America during the U.S. Civil War. No worries, there are no J.Davis statues in town to replace and then re-replace back again as Confederate statues go in and out of fashion. The Fort became famous for its regiment of Buffalo Soldiers who were stationed there in the later 1800s. The Buffalo Soldiers were the all-black infantry regiments formed after the Civil War whose exploits in the west are the stuff of legends. Of course, the exploits out of Fort Davis were largely the removal of the indigenous Indian people from their tribal lands, so there’s that wrinkle to ponder.
Fort Davis in particular and west Texas in general unapologetically embraces its complicated past. While it has been at the nexus of Spanish conquest, American manifest destiny, occupation by Union and Confederate troops, the Indian Wars, and cycles of oil boom and bust, you would never know that from driving along its main street. It’s population is only about a thousand, but the flow of RV traffic heading to the National Park give the specialty shops enough business to stay alive. Most local commerce flows through the small grocery store and Family Dollar. If you cannot afford Marfa’s recent real estate price hikes, take a shot at your new west Texas business idea in Fort Davis.
Far from an interstate, airport, and Costco, hardy locals are here for personal reasons that we cannot explain. Most times, we are here for reasons that we cannot explain. Marfa, TX can boast to being a world-class artist enclave now, but that is a relatively recent phenomenon. Big Bend National Park was one of the least visited National Parks until it made Outdoor Magazines best-of list. Big bend State Park still remains virtually untraveled. Who knows, maybe Fort Davis will become the pickleball Mecca of west Texas. Stranger things have happened.
