Preserve Big Bend’s Wild Character

We’d always joke that the toll for having Big Bend in your backyard was living in Odessa—a small price to pay to endure the flat ground. You load up early on a weekend, head south down Highway 385 through Crane and McCamey, watch the pump jacks give way to mesa country, and by early afternoon, you’re pitching tents at Rio Grande Village Campground—a cherished memory.

When you stand in a place like Big Bend, that feeling of ownership isn’t an abstraction. You own a stake in those canyon walls, that open desert sky, and that silence just as much as anyone else in the country.

In 1941, the Texas Legislature appropriated $1.5 million to purchase over 600 private ranch properties, acreage by acreage. Once consolidated, Texas deeded the 700,000-acre package to the federal government—handing over state land to ensure it belonged to everyone. When a place is held in common trust, an assault on its integrity feels personal. That park doesn’t belong to an agency, a contractor, or a political party. It belongs to every citizen.

The terrain, the sheer distance, and the natural flow of the Rio Grande have served as a self-regulating, formidable boundary for generations. Vertical canyon walls, extreme elevation shifts, and stark desert isolation turn Big Bend into an almost impenetrable natural wall—a physical border written into the earth by rock and water.

While some worry about environmental protection and others clash over immigration policy, my frustration is simpler: it’s the sheer absurdity of the project. Wasting hundreds of millions of dollars to tear up the earth and build a high-dollar fence in front of a free, natural cliff makes no sense.

Carving access roads, clearing staging areas, and running high-intensity lighting through places like Santa Elena or Mariscal Canyon doesn’t solve a security crisis—it invents a massive engineering project at the expense of an irreplaceable national asset.

Big Bend National Park operates on roughly $11 million a year to manage 800,000 acres, staff rangers, run campgrounds, and protect 118 miles of river. Dropping a $1.7 billion construction contract into that same park is the equivalent of handing a single contractor 150 years’ worth of the park’s operational budget all at once. It spends more money tearing up backcountry patrol roads through a quiet wilderness than the park would receive to operate itself from now until the 22nd century. To top it off, environmental and oversight protections were simply sidestepped with the stroke of a pen—waiving federal law and leaving the public with no seat at the table.

Spending over a century’s worth of Big Bend’s operational funds on a wall isn’t security—it’s pure fiscal absurdity. You could secure that border for a fraction of the cost while keeping a pristine, undamaged park intact.

I was lucky to live where we could easily enjoy Big Bend. My stance is simple and may put me at odds with others, but I want the park left alone. It’s a wonderful place, and I want people in the future to enjoy it too.