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Startling Solitude and Stunning Scenery

Getting away from it all is easy in Big Bend

By Lisa Mann

I’m not a city person. Don’t get me wrong: Paris is beautiful, London rich in culture, and New York is invigorating. But after a couple days, I’m eyeing the trains out of town. When I’m on vacation, I want to get away from it all. When I discovered Lajitas, Texas, I found a place farther away from “it all” than you can find anywhere in the US. 

It is 100 miles to the nearest interstate highway, 608 miles from Dallas, 350 miles to El Paso, and 244 miles to Odessa/Midland. Until relatively recently, high school kids in the Terlinga/Lajitas area bused 87 miles each way to go to school. In other words, Lajitas (la-HEE-tahs), near the magnificent Big Bend National Park, is remote with a capital R.

The scenery—millions of acres stretching to the horizon—is rugged, stark, and amazingly beautiful. Somewhere between here and the horizon, the United States ends, and Mexico begins. I’d had it with noise and lines, incessant telemarketers, road rage, glaring lights—and yes, even cell phone service—so the Big Bend region in the far southwestern corner of Texas was just what I was looking for.

I found the solitude I was looking for in the Big Bend region, but there’s also plenty to do. Here in the land of Black Jack Pershing, Pancho Villa, and the Comanche Indians, you can play out every cowboy fantasy you’ve had since childhood. I rode a horse up an ocotillo studded mesa that was surely the setting for a Louis L’Amour novel. Lajitas Stables’ owner, Linda Walker, told enticing tales of a several day ride though “Old” Mexico, but I needed to work up to that kind of time in a saddle.

I spent a couple days drifting lazily down the Rio Grande in a raft. This isn’t white water rafting; the water level is so low here that the current is sometimes hard to detect. I managed “lazy” because the good natured guide from Texas River Expeditions was doing most of the paddling.

I spent another afternoon jeeping in the Chihuahua desert, and hiking the stunning Chisos Mountains was a special—and surprisingly green—treat. Hundreds of miles from the nearest city lights, stargazing is truly exceptional here—explaining the McDonald Observatory in nearby Fort Davis that attracts astronomers from around the world. Western Texas is also a Mecca for rockhounds who come for unique agates and fossils. A couple local ranches are open to rockhunting and provide instructions and tools. And there are even classes in “Cowboy Action Shooting” to help complete your cowboy fantasies.

Alas, living out my cowgirl fantasies included very real dust, saddle sores, and the occasional rattlesnake sighting. The antidote was a brief stay at the 4-star western themed Lajitas Resort, a place that bills itself as the “Ultimate Hideout” and offers an oxymoronic promise: rugged luxury.

Clearly, rugged is in the eye of the beholder. Big Bend’s vistas are rugged. Lajitas itself is no longer rugged. Lajitas once boasted a low-end motel, a nine-hole golf course, a fake old western boardwalk, an RV park, a deteriorating gravel airplane runway, canoe access to a neighboring Mexican village of Paso Lajitas, and beer-drinking goat named Clay Henry that was also the town's elected mayor.

But times have changed, and so has Lajitas, Texas businessman Steve Smith purchased the town, sight unseen, in an auction in 2000, and has invested millions of dollars attempting to build a world-class resort here. Canoe access to Mexico was halted after 9/11, a controversial move that separated kids in Paso Lajitas from their school in Terlingua and cost their parents jobs. Smith succeeded in making Lajitas comfortable, but he didn’t (or couldn’t) erase its quirkiness. The original Clay Henry has died, but a friendly new beer-drinking goat named Clay Henry III–now recovered from a kidnapping and castration (that’s politics on this part of Texas)—is the town’s current elected mayor.

Lajitas Resort now has 2 restaurants, a spa, a golf course, a hunting lodge, a runway for private jets, and tennis courts. The rooms are luxurious, but pricy, ranging from $165 in the low season (this is snowbird territory; summer temps can get as high as 120 Fahrenheit) up to $365 for a suite in peak season (Dec –April).  I also found less opulent and more affordable accommodations in the Big Bend National Park itself, and in nearby Terlingua/Study Butte and Alpine. Whether or not Smith succeeds in drawing the rich and famous to his rebuilt Lajitas remains to be seen, but for those of us not-so-rich and mostly unknown, it’s still well worth the trip.

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