Hi there,
A few weeks ago, I took a drive to visit Travis Dimler on the ranch where he lives and works outside of Alpine.
Pulling off U.S. 67, I drove 13 miles down a dirt road, out into the land, where there were no visible roads other than the one I came in on, no visible buildings other than the cluster of structures that make up the Glass Mountain Ranch headquarters, and the ranch’s namesake mountain range — the ones you can see in the distance to the east when you’re heading north to Fort Stockton.
We set off in a Jeep for a tour. The ranch looks like a state park, the house a sort of visitor center, and a series of drivable trails roughly zigzagging across the property, the total acreage of which Travis shared with me but, for the sake of ranch etiquette, I won’t explicitly disclose here. I will say, it’s large. And it appears, to my eye, largely untouched — rough, rocky, scrubby, and beautiful. But recent years have fundamentally — and perhaps permanently — changed its character. The drought of the last few years has followed ten or twelve years of drier-than-usual conditions, and the composition of the land is changing in a cascading way.
“This was historically more grassland than it is now, with woody cover and brush,” Travis told me. “You had all this brush encroachment due to overgrazing and lack of a normal fire interval and less rain. It's a vicious cycle. Every year it increases exponentially — when you get bare ground, you get more bare ground, you have hotter soil temperature and you have less water infiltration.”
Part of Travis’ job managing the ranch is to figure out how best to work with the land and enrich it, despite the dry circumstances. He’s been experimenting with low-saturation herbicides that encourage grassland growth. He’s implemented a high intensity, low interval rotational grazing program.
“Even last year with the low rainfall we had, it did pretty good,” he said. “It gave a window into possibly being able to manage through low rainfall.”
Despite these glimmers of hope, he’s cautious.
“There’s no silver bullet,” he said. “At some point you just need rain.”
As we drive, there’s scrub everywhere, sotols and rock and no sign of civilization. As we rattled across the ranch, Travis pointed out to me the many areas where, if you knew where to look, a history of human intervention was recorded.
Our first stop was at the top of a hill, next to a large stock tank. While tanks like these are a familiar sight across West Texas, I never thought about how they worked or how much work they required.
“The most important practice on a day-to-day basis out here is keeping water infrastructure running,” he said. “We have many, many miles of underground pipeline buried all over the ranch. It's sourcing from where we have water wells, we pump from underground, up to a high point, like where we're at now. And then that will gravity-flow back across the ranch.”
He explained that elk or cattle could get into the tanks occasionally and knock off a float, causing the whole thing to drain.
“Or you could just have a pipeline break,” he said. “Especially in dry weather. The ground is contracting. You can pull those joints in the pipeline apart.”
“Another drought problem?” I asked.
“Another drought problem,” Travis replied.
Next, Travis took me to a natural spring, which looked like a crawlspace at the bottom of a huge rock wall. There was a sort of gutter in the dirt beneath the wall, a place where you could tell water had once pooled. Now, there was just the empty gutter and the damp crawlspace.
”As man tends to do, they think they can improve on nature,” Travis said. “So we had a nice spring here and somebody decided if they dynamite it, they could make it better, and it apparently had the opposite effect and they mostly shut the spring in. Now it’s a puddle.”
We drove on, through the canyon where a man named Fine Gilliland was supposedly killed by a sheriff’s deputy in a notorious wild west dust-up that became known as the “Murder Steer incident” of 1891. The walls of steep, geometric rock were dotted with prickly pear cactus, likely the byproduct of the days when this land was used for sheep grazing.
Like so much of West Texas, this ranch had once been used to stock sheep and goats. Throughout the world wars, the government needed wool and mohair for military uniforms, so sheep and goat farming was highly subsidized, and for a while, highly profitable.
“It was probably a good thing at the time,” Travis said. “But just like most other things, it encouraged overgrazing and overstocking and it artificially played the market. And so, then the war's over, right? And eventually those subsidies stop.”
Then drought struck the area and most of Texas for almost the entire decade of the 1950s. Land that had been overworked was now highly vulnerable to drought, and just like today, bare ground begot more bare ground.
At one point on the ranch tour, I spotted a rock wall shaped like a wide triangle with the point down, slotted into the bottom of a small valley between two hills.
“What is up with this?” I asked incredulously.
“Well, I can't tell you the whole story on it, but there are a number of these,” Travis said. “We call it a header dam, and this is probably a CCC or WPA-era project. And there's a surprising number of these out on all these ranches out here.”
The dam is maybe 15 feet high, with enough depth for us to walk across the top, and sort of terraced rock on the front. It’s beautifully built — architecturally, it recalls a small outdoor amphitheater that’s been flattened.
“I haven't ever seen one quite like this,” Travis said. “We don't get enough moisture now for it to serve any function. But I suspect there was a spring. You see all those trees up there?” He pointed up the hill to where there was a clutch of green trees, some of the only trees I’d seen since we’d been on our tour.
“There might have been a stream up there that flowed,” he said.
We stared up at the stream that no longer was, standing atop the dam that no longer had a reason for being.
On the return portion of our trip around the ranch, I asked Travis about how properties like this function, financially speaking. There isn’t a major cattle operation here. Theoretically, the owner of this ranch or any other property in the area could lease their land for any number of industrial uses.
“There's no rule that says land has to be profitable,” he said. “It's mostly been profitable for people throughout history to own land and be in agriculture, but that ship has sailed some places, particularly out here.”
The value in owning land these days, Travis said, is in the appreciation of the property value.
“The only people that can afford these ranches now are mega wealthy,” he said. “There's a lot of people that are critical of that, but those are the only people that can afford to do the restoration work, too.”
That’s what the grassland projects and experiments in conservation-oriented grazing have been about, and it’s why water infrastructure that exists mainly for wildlife is, in this context, a worthwhile endeavor. Because unlike in the old days, when there was a straight line from property to agriculture to profit, today the path is more winding. It’s about preserving the landscape itself, for the sake of stewarding the land into the future.
Maybe that future will once again involve profit from farming and ranching, maybe it won’t. And it’s not just drought that threatens to take away that possible future — it’s also the temptation of profit in the form of new types of land use.
”The real wolf at the door for us out here is probably green energy,” Travis said. “I think green energy is great, but it's not great in the last great landscape, you know? The vast majority of the United States is already developed and put into grow crops or otherwise visually degraded. And so there's plenty of opportunity in all those places to put green energy. But to come to the last great place to do it would be really sad.”
“There are some things nature will correct,” he elaborated. “But what nature won't correct is a visual blight on the landscape.”
On the way back to the ranch headquarters, our conversation returned to civilization as well. I first met Travis in Marfa last fall, through our mutual friend Liz Rogers, and I see him in town regularly at art openings, lectures, and dinners. It’s part of what I thought was so interesting about him, when I learned that he lived out on this ranch and worked this job: he’s very much in both the new and the old worlds that exist in West Texas.
“ Marfa is a really cool place,” he said. “And to have that in the same proximity to at least the vestiges of a traditional ranching culture, and a big open landscape, I don't know of anywhere else like that. For me to be able to live out here, to be engaged in landscape and ranching, but be close to Marfa and go to Ballroom [Marfa] and go have great dinner parties and meet fascinating people, and then come back here and wake up here the next morning…I don’t know where else you could do that.”
Still, Travis said the real key to living long-term in a place as remote as the Glass Mountain Ranch is to “really want to be in this geographic place.”
“You can't stack up the list of privations, and think about the things that you don't have and you can't get,” he said. “When you're out here in the quiet in the morning or look at the stars, that has to be enough. And if that's enough, then you'll have a great life here.”
MPR on Marketplace!
Our very own Mitch Borden was featured on the national daily economics program Marketplace! You can read and listen to his feature on the West Odessa Water Warriors HERE.
Nature Notes
If on a West Texas hike you’ve spotted an arrowhead or spearpoint, you know how potent the experience is. Such projectiles are the quintessential artifacts of our region’s ancient Indigenous past. Textiles, wooden implements, campsites and shelters – all give way to the elements. But stone tools endure. And though the insights they provide are partial, these artifacts can also be revelatory.
One such revelatory find came near the town of Plainview, 45 miles north of Lubbock. Here, in 1944, archeologists discovered two dozen examples of a previously unknown spearpoint – the Plainview style – among the bones of at least 100 Ice Age bison. The discovery offers a tantalizing if enigmatic glimpse into the lives of the continent’s first people, the Paleoindians.
Drew Stuart has more on this week's Nature Notes.
Caló
Raite - It’s adopted from the English word ride. But in Caló, its meaning is narrower than how it’s used in English. It means only the act of giving or partaking in a ride, never the vehicle itself. Although it’s a noun and is expressed as el raite or un raite, it’s solely an act, not a material object. You don’t park, sell or even drive your raite, only ask for, accept, give or experience it. Furthermore, it’s a grace, something that’s done for free. So a seat on a bus for which you pay a fare, is not a raite.
Caló is a borderland dialect. You can read and listen to more episodes here.
PSA
The Ellen Noël Art Museum, located at 4919 East University Blvd in Odessa will be hosting a Community Art Day on Saturday, April 12th from 1:30-3:30pm.
The event will feature interactive art stations including origami and chalk art, a talk with artist Baron Batch, and a celebration of the last 40 years of art at the Museum.
For more information, click HERE.
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