Chisos Mountains

The color changes all day depending on what the sun's shining on.

plants and animals that i've never seen like javelinas and uh roadrunners which i was super pumped to see a lot more coyotes than even though i've seen a lot of coyotes coyotes you can see them like broad daylight the bear obviously i saw a bear and then yeah the chisos mountains being the exception within big bend like everything is surrounded by you know desert and then the chisos is uh like this mountain range that has trees.

It's not hammock friendly.

That's important to know before you go.

But, oh my God, just stunning.

Absolutely stunning.

That view from, is it the West Rim on the Chisos Mountains?

No, South Rim, probably.

Um, but there are some places around the Grand Canyon where, um, now that we know where they're foraging there, there are people that work with, uh, larger populations of them.

But they do kind of reach their southernmost edge of their distribution in the Chisos Mountains or in Big Bend.

Um, they've been documented in Mexico, uh, as well but- I think it's just that we're on the edge of the range, and it's the only place in Texas where you could encounter them.

Um, it's just hard to, hard to study them.

Maybe they have to go quite a distance.

And it turns out that we, uh, we put GPS tags on 21 individuals and- They stay close to the cave.

They're staying in the Chisos Mountains.

They're finding plenty of agave blooms to sustain them when they are in the park.

The air is now heavy with the scent of what waits above, a cool, wet forest full of food and entirely devoid of black bears.

She marches higher into the Chisos Mountains, a forested range of peaks marooned in the Chihuahuan Desert and entirely within the boundaries of the national park, and discovers what her keen sense of smell, and perhaps an ancestral instinct, has compelled her to come all this way to find.

She's now in what scientists call a sky island, a geographically isolated habitat high in the Chisos, complete with its own microclimate and a biodiversity that is unique to this part of the region.

Her species used to call this habitat their home until a few decades ago.

You see, this black bear, who crossed into the Chisos sometime in the 1980s, was not the first of her species to ever reach this area.

Instead, she was the first to return, after more than 40 years of extirpation, or the complete removal of her species, from this isolated mountain range.

By the early 1940s, before Big Bend became a national park, local hunters and agricultural producers had entirely wiped out the black bear population in the Chisos Mountains, just one example of the type of predator control that was very common in those days.

The population remained alive and well south of the Mexican border, but it would take four decades for another bear to make its way across the river and back into the range.

Years before the purchase of 1803, he was trading his stolen stock and possibly his slaves to the French traders from the Spanish-French border near old Nacotish, pronounced Nacotish, on the lower Red River.

Or in later times, upon return from a successful raid, he roared out of Mexico and across the Rio Grande into Texas south of the Chisos Mountains.

If short of war paint, he replenished his favorite red color from the outcroppings of cinnabar near Terlingua Creek, then headed through the Badlands and out upon the range country by way of Persimmon Gap.

From the gap, he went to Comanche Springs, present Fort Stockton, crossed the Pecos River at Horsehead Crossing, then rode north to the sand dunes to water a famishing flock, after which he headed east to the sulfur and the big spring.