One of the crown jewels of America’s national park system, Big Bend National Park along the Mexican border in Texas, just turned 76 years old on June 12^th.   For three quarters of a century, the National Park Service has preserved America’s best example of the Chihuahuan Desert.   More than 463,832 visitors travel to this remote park every year to hike the Chisos Mountains, seek out desert solitude, watch the myriad birds and float the Rio Grande. The park used to be the best kept secret in Texas, but over the past 25 years visitation has nearly doubled. 

But few know a curious fact about this great scenic area: half of the originally proposed park is missing. Big Bend Park was not meant to stand by itself where the boundaries of Texas and the Mexican states of Coahuila and Chihuahua come together along the Rio Grande. The original proposal, made by Senator Morris Sheppard (D-Texas) on February 16, 1935, to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, was for an international park shared by the United States and Mexico. It was to be, in President Roosevelt’s words, a “meeting ground for the people of both countries, exemplifying their cultural resources and advancement, and inspiring further, mutually beneficial progress in recreation and science and the industries thereto.”

“The Big Bend International Park will be one of the greatest recreational and educational ventures ever undertaken by the National Park Service,” predicted Conrad L. Wirth, then assistant director and later director of the service, in 1936. “The benefits to the people of Mexico and the United States will be almost unlimited.” And although the Mexican half of the park is not officially protected, the greater Big Bend ecosystem, embracing one of the largest undisturbed wild expanses east of the Rockies, today is still an ideal site for a protected international reserve.   National Parks like the ones we have in the United States do not exist in Mexico so as a result current efforts are calling for the designation of an international transboundary protected area.

The Big Bend border region contains some of the continent’s most spectacular mountain-desert country. More than 1,500 species of plants and 600 species of birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians inhabit the region, including endangered peregrine falcons, Carmen Mountain white-tailed deer, a growing black bear population, a thriving population of mountain lions, Chihuahuan Desert plants such as candelilla and lechuguilla and hundreds of other species more typical of northern Mexico than of the United States.

Mexico’s environmental movement has been slow in developing, but a growing number of Mexican environmentalists are helping to stimulate greater interest in protecting wildlife and the land in general.

The El Paso Zoo has been supportive of conservation efforts on the border for decades supporting transboundary conservation efforts at Big Bend National Park and in hosting a Chihuahuan Desert Conference at the Zoo last year.

To learn more about conservation efforts on our border with Mexico there are a number of organizations you can support including the Center for Biological Diversity, The Texas Wolf Pack and the Greater Big Bend Coalition.

Rick LoBello, Education Curator

Mexican black bears in the Chisos Basin, 2011, Courtesy Christine.