Note: Agave Fest — a celebration and educational event for all things agave — starts today and runs through Sunday at numerous locations throughout the area. The festival includes tastings, lectures, hikes, art exhibits and film. For the full schedule, see agavemarfa.com.
MARFA — Big Bend Sentinel reporter Sam Karas will speak on the human history of Santa Elena Canyon at an Agave Fest presentation today (Thursday, June 5) at the Crowley Theater, 98 South Austin Street, from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. Her talk will track historical explorations of the canyon and use them as a lens to explore topics like the militarization of the border and contentious water politics between the U.S. and Mexico.
Karas, also a river guide, will recount the U.S. military expedition that mapped the southern border in the 1850s, some rather unusual early Border Patrol expeditions, her personal canyon hike during the drought, and what the future may hold for the canyon in an environment of militarization and international tensions. Some 560,000 people visited Big Bend National Park in 2024, and Santa Elena Canyon is one of the top attractions for visitors.
Can you briefly outline your history as a river guide and when you first went through the canyon? What were your impressions?
I saw Santa Elena Canyon for the first time while I was in grad school at the Michener Center for Writers at UT-Austin. I hiked upstream about a mile and a half on a park trail –– the way the vast majority of people who see the canyon experience it. It quickly became one of my favorite places on earth.
In a boat, that world opens up. You can go a few more miles upstream when the water’s low, and above a certain point you can boat downstream from Lajitas to just below the canyon’s mouth. I became a river guide during a sort of aimless period of my life where all I knew was that I wanted to be close to the parks.
I have a friend who’s been a river guide for decades who says that a one-day downstream trip in a raft through Santa Elena is the premiere Big Bend trip. It’s mesmerizing, but it also includes some of the park’s most challenging rapids, including the Rock Slide, which can be a class 4 on a scale that goes to 6 in terms of trickiness and potential hazards.
Considering Brewster and Presidio counties have now gone from an “Extreme Drought” to an “Exceptional Drought” — the most severe level of drought according to the U.S. government — what’s the state of the river in general and the canyon?
I started running trips in 2020, which I consider to be a pivotal year for the river. The United States and Mexico signed a treaty in 1944 that allocates certain amounts of water from the Rio Conchos –– the river that meets up with the Rio Grande in Ojinaga –– which you might have seen mentioned on the news over the past year or so. The water debts come and go in five year cycles, and 2020 was the tail end of the last cycle.
I remember all of a sudden one day the water was up, and it stayed more or less the same (around 500 cfs, if that means anything to you) for a few months. Mexico was making its water payments from dams on the Conchos. Meanwhile, there were protests in OJ and all up and down the Conchos –– the reservoirs had been very low and many people felt that the government was giving away water they couldn’t afford to lose.
Now we’re at the end of the next cycle. To attempt to save agriculture in the Rio Grande Valley, they’ve shifted the terms of the treaty a bit to allow water payments from different tributaries of the Rio Grande. We won’t see any of that.
There are canyons on the Rio Grande that I’ve seen hundreds of times, and I take basically any opportunity to float the river when it’s physically possible. Because of the drought I’ve seen Santa Elena top to bottom in a boat six times. It still feels mysterious and unknowable and challenging to me, and there’s some grief in there too –– that I may never know it as well as some folks who called it their office every day for decades.
The canyon is awe-inspiring today, and it must have been a spectacle for the first expeditions that traversed its 20 miles in early times. Can you tell us a bit about some of those expeditions and how they fared?
Long river trips still feel like adventures in 2025, and that’s with self-inflating sleeping pads and Yeti coolers. I’ve been trying to get a sense of what these early folks used for gear and also about the world that they lived in –– what was going on along the riverbanks while they traveled?
The first attempt was in 1852 by M.T. Chandler of the United States Boundary Survey. In 1848, the United States set the boundary between the U.S. and Mexico at the Rio Grande in what we now call Texas, but they had no idea what most of the Southwest looked like. I think more established historians would agree with my lay assessment that the U.S. Boundary Survey was a sh–– show. At the end of it, Lt. William Emory –– for whom Emory Peak is named –– ordered all records beyond the final reports destroyed to try cut down on infighting and disputes down the line.
The Chandler party reached the entrance of Santa Elena Canyon and said, “No thanks.” They had heard about the Rock Slide –– which they called “the falls of the Cañon of San Carlos” –– from local people and decided to take a 20-mile side quest through Mexico to avoid it.
There was another survey by a Texas Ranger of the canyon in the 1880s, but most people who know about this topic at all probably know Robert T. Hill, a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey who ran the canyon in a six-man party in 1899. The Hill party opted to carry their big wooden boats around the Rock Slide over the course of three days, a process so awful the spot is still called “Camp Misery” by boatmen today.
We know the canyon is one of the top spots for visitors at the park, with photos of the towering canyon walls shared across the globe. But how is it seen from the perspective of Mexicans?
The view of the mouth of Santa Elena Canyon as we know it from postcards and calendars is virtually inaccessible to Mexican citizens. It’s kind of ironic because their government has its version of a national park straddling the border, too –– the Área Protegida de Santa Elena. You used to be able to cross the border at the village of Santa Elena, which is a few miles downstream from the canyon mouth.
The area near the canyon entrance is still home to farmers and ranchers. Almost every time I’ve done a river trip or hiked the canyon I’ve gotten to stop and chat with the people who work cattle over there. The canyon is much taller at the mouth than the entrance, but it’s still a really impressive and otherworldly place.
Big Bend National Park started out as “Texas Canyons State Park,” with Santa Elena as the crown jewel. The original boosters of the park wanted to see a cooperative international park run jointly by the Mexican and American governments –– an idea that persisted until the late 20th century and has all but faded away. A lot of the park’s earliest leaders saw this idea as essential to its identity and I think would be mortified by how impossible that dream seems today.
There has always been political power in the image of two countries joined by this massive canyon. So many Texans experience the border for the first time in Big Bend, and instead of drones and concertina wire –– which has been the reality of much of the border for decades –– they see eagles and beavers and aoudad and an unimaginable variety of cactus. “Where are they going to put the wall?” is a sentiment I hear from tourists all the time. It’s so massive that it makes our typical methods of border security seem silly.
The U.S. military recently arrived in the Big Bend — about 500 troops. What kinds of changes, if any, have you seen to the park and the reactions from local communities?
So far I’ve only seen military personnel on a handful of trips to the park. It has not had a major impact on my personal experience of using the park, but I do have a deep paranoia that sections of the river could become part of a “national defense area” that is slowly consuming the border and making it illegal for civilians to access the border itself. The park is in a moment of major transition, and I think local communities are having as difficult a time wrapping their heads around this deployment as the courts seem to be.
I’m sure you’d rather be in a canoe or raft in the canyon, but tell us about your recent excursion on foot, why you did it and what the experience was like. And do you see a future in hiking the canyon in times of drought?
It wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be! I had been curious about hiking the canyon all the way through for a few years but this was Charlie Gandy’s idea. Charlie is the fundraising brain behind the xTx trail, a thru-hiking route that will hopefully run east-west across Texas within the next few years.
Charlie was thinking about offering an alternate route through the park using the dry riverbed. I was immediately skeptical –– flash floods are a constant concern, even in the middle of a drought –– and even where the water is gone, nasty mud still persists for months after the river dries up. There are numerous historical accounts of people attempting to swim the canyon when the water’s high and they all make me break out in hives as a person who thinks a lot about whitewater safety.
Hiking from Lajitas to the canyon mouth, I was mostly surprised by how much water was still there. It had been a couple of weeks since measurable flow below the canyon had ceased, and there were super long lakey sections that still had very deep water. I ended up swimming about two of the seven miles –– which was lucky because I lost one of my shoes in the mud just below the Rock Slide.
I haven’t really decided if I officially recommend that people do this hike –– I still retain a healthy fear of the river’s ability to resurrect itself out of nowhere –– but I can absolutely say that I learned new things about the canyon.