Some Big Bend National Park projects in limbo amid shifting border wall plans

On lists of the most stunning places in Texas, Big Bend National Park is frequently at the top.

Not among the most-visited parks in the country, it’s a rugged and isolated preserve of West Texas desert wilderness. That’s part of the draw — Big Bend is larger than Rhode Island, spanning an 800,000-acre stretch along the Rio Grande, and if you time your visit right, it’s not uncommon to spend hours on a trail without meeting another person.

Yet, once a remote vista lucky to draw 300,000 visitors in a year, the park has seen a more than 40% growth in visitation over the past decade. That’s still far below more accessible staples like Great Smoky Mountains, which draws 23 times the number of visitors as Big Bend in a given year, but it’s on the rise; and as the park’s popularity has grown, so too has its stature.

Big Bend has topped headlines in recent months over shifting plans by the federal government to construct a border barrier along the U.S.-Mexico border.

The park, a central biosphere and ecological crossing for wildlife in the region, was once thought to be safe from that development because of the region’s low illegal crossing numbers. The Border Patrol sector tasked with immigration enforcement in Big Bend has historically seen the lowest number of encounters of any southern border region.

But while public attention has focused on the border, a vital change to infrastructure in the park’s heart has been put on hold.

Through the end of March, more than $75 million in federal funds first approved in 2020 was earmarked to perform repairs in Big Bend’s most popular area, the Chisos Mountain Basin. The oasis of comparative greenery and shade found at the end of a 7-mile narrow, curvy two-lane road houses visitors’ favorite views and trailheads, the sole in-park lodge and a lone food truck — the only hot meal for tens of miles in any direction. 

That lodge, built in 1964, has seen better days. The main building, formerly a restaurant and now closed to the public, has an eroding foundation and guest rooms are nearly universally missing some shingles.

“There’s holes in (the) overhangs. You can tell that the buildings are just smaller and older. The interiors are definitely dated,” said Liz Turner, a first-time visitor to the park and Austin resident.

“You can tell that they’ve done the best that they can. But, you know, you look at the bedspreads and such, and it’s like, is that clean?”

A little wear and tear isn’t uncommon for a national park, and some even find it to be part of the charm, actively seeking a semblance of “national park chic.”

The basin’s infrastructure, however, is beyond that. Serious concerns over structural integrity for key buildings have been raised, and the pipe infrastructure for the basin’s water supply is equally lacking, leaking regularly through exposed pipes that were already used when installed decades ago.

“If you even just look at the back side of the lodge, you can kind of see an area where it looks like it’s just about to fall off the hill,” said Loren Riemer, executive director of the nonprofit Big Bend Conservancy. “We always kind of joke that you could roll a tomato down the floor, it’ll just keep going.”

So, with that federally appropriated money, two separate projects were approved to repair the water infrastructure and the lodge. The repairs would have forced the section of the park to close for up to two years, set to begin May 1 — a small price to pay for crucial renovations, some former park officials said.

Tourists from across the state and country made reservations ahead of the closure, looking to visit the hotspot before it shuttered to the public.

“Big Bend had been on my list for a while, and then it was a combination of hearing about this section going to be closed for two years combined with putting up the wall,” Turner said. “I was like, well, I better hurry up and get out here and see it before all of this stuff happens.”

But in early April, just a month before construction was set to begin, the National Park Service abruptly called off the projects, citing “substantial budget shortfalls.”

No further information was given, and the park’s website still includes the project plans with a May 1 closure date listed, just under a one-line banner announcing the project’s cancellation.

“I don’t think the Park Service at this point knows what it’s going to do,” said Bob Krumenaker, the park’s former superintendent from 2018-2023. He advocated for the planned renovations during his tenure.

“I will say the decision was made by the national office, not by the park, and I think the park is having to now explain it to people and answer questions of, what are you going to do?,” he said. “And frankly, I don’t think they have the control over the answers to those questions right now.”

He says the decision to fund the renovations now was long overdue.

“It was actually a sense of urgency,” Krumenaker said. “It wasn’t necessarily something that I wanted to do. It was something that I thought I had to do.”

According to Krumenaker, the water repairs are particularly vital. He says the infrastructure, which carries water from Oak Spring across 3 miles and up 1,300 feet to the basin, is already decades past its life expectancy, which could prove dire in the face of severe drought should an emergency arise.

“The leakage continues, the need for additional storage continues,” Krumenaker said. “And so hopefully the delay to the water project will not be too long, because the risk is catastrophic failure at some point, and then you may have no water at all. Whatever visitor activity and facilities you have up there will be really in a tremendous bind, and from a fire management perspective and firefighting, that would also be a serious consideration.”

The planned renovations were already a scaled-down version of what park leaders think is needed long-term. The idea was to buy the National Park Service 10 to 20 more years of water access while they found the money for a more permanent fix.

Riemer said the decision to wait was made after the price estimate for lodge renovations came in at nearly double what was originally allocated, and that the water project can hopefully resume as soon as it’s bid back out separate from the lodge restoration.

That process, however, could have its own problems, raising questions over the logistics and cost of separating the two pursuits.

“Ideally, all of this would happen at once, and that’s primarily to avoid having multiple closures in the basin over the years,” Riemer said. “It’s all of those water lines — anything that has a flushing toilet, a running faucet, has a pipe that runs to it under the ground. So renovating those water lines is going to create quite a bit of disruption in the basin, because those things are going to have to be dug up to be replaced.”

Some local residents, however, view the delay as a step in the right direction.

James Evans, a photographer who’s lived near Big Bend for nearly 40 years, believes the area should remain preserved and undeveloped. To Evans, the initial construction in the basin was a negative from the outset, further disturbing the park’s most bio-sensitive area and adding development to one of the nation’s few remaining natural spaces.

He said the restaurant and lodge were built in a time where Big Bend was truly isolated, but now, with towns like 200-resident-Terlingua growing along the outskirts of the park’s borders, inner-park development straining natural resources isn’t necessary.

“When they originally built the restaurant and the rooms, there weren’t any alternatives,” Evans said. “Now, 60 years later, there are hundreds of places to stay just outside the park boundary. There’s plenty of restaurants, even a grocery store, so it’s really not needed at this time.”

He said while the pipe repair may be beneficial to firefighting and conservation efforts, the lodge construction could achieve the opposite.

“The rooms use 4 million gallons of water (annually),” Evans said, referencing figures from a 2004 environmental impact study. “All that water comes from Oak Spring. There’s only one source, and so that really is taken away from all the other wildlife and all the other places where that water source would go, just to give people a shower. To me, that’s misused water … There’s never been enough water in Oak Spring to sustain what’s there, so I think that that’s a bad idea.”

Evans has watched the region boom, growing in development and construction from an area that was largely untouched and pristine to where it is today. He wants people to enjoy the park, but also believes its purpose is preservation, not tourism.

In his view, federal contractors like Aramark, which operates the lodge and NPS concessionaire sites across the country — and other groups benefitting from the rise in visitation — have negatively impacted the isolation he still loves in Big Bend.

“If we can preserve what we have, there’s so much of the world that’s unpreserved,” Evans said. “Just imagine if we could just keep it as natural as it is. I understand that people want to visit the park, I get that, but (you don’t have to) build as much as you possibly could.”

It’s just one example of the broad range of perspectives facing the park today.

This shakeup is the latest in a string of changes for the National Park Service. Big Bend National Park is one of the many NPS sites nationwide facing severe staffing shortages.

Former Superintendent Bob Krumenaker says three of the park’s five division chief positions are currently without a permanent appointment, including the head of maintenance, and the park doesn’t have a deputy superintendent, the second-in-command.

Add in proposed budget cuts that would slash already reduced NPS funding by nearly a quarter as visitation numbers reach record highs nationwide, and advocates say Big Bend is in a difficult spot.

The National Park Service declined to answer specific questions, but a spokesperson said the agency is continuing to evaluate the best path forward for both projects.

Justin Doud reported from Big Bend National Park and Austin for The Texas Standard.

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