Wilderness Wandering

April 20 – April 24, 2025

Easter Sunday was our last day with Linda and David. We began the day with a delicious Texas style breakfast in Hillsboro at The General Store Cafe with Becky, Donna, and their friends Shelly and Suzanne. 

We were in Hatch, NM at lunch time.  As you would expect on Easter, almost everything was closed. Hatch is very famous for their chile peppers.

There is a restaurant that is rumored to be great called Sparkey’s Bar B Que. They have quite a collection of large figures from other businesses. We enjoyed posing with them.

We had lunch in a cute gazebo in a park there. After lunch, our friends headed to Truth or Consequences, NM. After Hatch there were miles and miles of pecan trees. I had no idea that New Mexico was a huge pecan production state! They drench the trees once per month. 

Next day we passed through Van Horn. It was a really nice small town. They had a sculpture and a mural about Blue Origin, the spaceport that Jeff Bezos uses to launch people to the edge of space. The property is 10 miles north of Van Horn. 

I also enjoyed a garden full of art made of recycled items.

We traveled along the Rio Grande quite a bit. In many places, it was completely dry.

There were also many ghost towns along the way. Most of the towns developed along the railroad and when the railroad went away so did the town.

A few days later we were in  Valentine, TX population 76.

We had talked with a guy at a rest stop earlier in the day who said not to miss the Valentine Texas Bar.  So we stopped and went in. What an experience! We ended up spending time with three Tigua cowboys. Their ranch covers 87,000 acres.  They had just finished a round up. 

The bar is a very entertaining dive!!! And they were just featured in Bon Appetit magazine! We thought they were joking until they showed us the issue!

I also stopped by the library. I wanted to know how a town of 67 people was able to have a library. It turns out that the library is sort of a memorial to Kay Johnson, a local woman who loved books. Her husband and daughter funded the library. The daughter is Karen Johnson , who is a prominent Austin specialist in government affairs and wife of Karl Rove, political consultant. 

Right outside Valentine there is a very famous art installation called Prada Marfa. As I was taking a photo, two beautiful young women showed up in a sports car to take their own photos and said they were professional photographers and would I like for them to take my picture? We started talking and they were from Brazil working on a story about the Marfa area. 

Now, to Marfa! We really liked this little town! It is very art centric with more than 20 art galleries. We toured around downtown and ran into my Brazilian girlfriends again! 

We took a tour at The Chinati Foundation, a contemporary art museum founded by artist Donald Judd. Part of the tour that I enjoyed was his 100 Works in Mill Aluminum since I sold a lot of mill aluminum in my career! The exhibit was 100 boxes all the identical same size, but all different in some way. The museum space was very unique.  The art is displayed in two former artillery warehouses that Judd purchased when the military base was closed. 

We stayed at a funky place called El Cosmico. They had canvas sided huts people could rent, or you can tent camp or RV. There were three clothing optional hot tubs and canvas sided outdoor showers. 

We went into Marfa and did laundry and went to dinner at Margaret’s. It looks like a fairly casual restaurant, but the food was extremely high end. We had amazing salmon!! 

Later we drove nine miles east of Marfa to try to see the Marfa Lights. They’re unexplained bright light flashes that occur in the desert after sunset. We didn’t have any luck seeing them. 

There were javelinas running all over the El Cosmico property in the morning when we got up. 

Our next town was Alpine, TX. We also truly enjoyed Alpine. It’s a small college town. It is the home of Sul Ross University. They have around 1200 students at the small state university.  I stopped by the visitor information center. 

The woman said the Museum of The Big Bend on the campus was the highlight of the town. So I decided I had better go. I was glad I did. There were two wings to the museum. One wing featured western artists and the other wing was an excellent museum about the history of the area. As a kid I enjoyed the Bonanza television series about the Cartwright family. Dan Blocker, who played the son Hoss went to Sul Ross University. 

These past few days have been some of my favorites on the trip. I can definitely see returning to Marfa and Alpine and spending more time in the area. 

I almost forgot to tell you about the Blackwell School of Marfa, which is a National Historic Site. This was a school in operation in Marfa from 1889 to 1965 to educate Mexican children separately but “equally” from the white children of the area.

Beautiful mural in Alpine