Ahhhh Boquillas........ We travel to Big Bend every Thanksgiving and have been doing so for about 20 years now. We have very very fond & hazy memories of lost days & evenings spent playing pool, eating tacos (3/$1), drinking beer and sotol until we saw triple, and then stumbling back to the Rio Grande for a $1 return boat ride back the the good 'ol US of A. Our photo albums chronicle many such episodes including several years where our then toddler son crawled around the bar(s) under beer-bottle filled tables surrounded by smiling/singing gringos. My bookshelves contain many cool fossils and gem samples purchased from the makeshift rock-shops which lined the dirt boulevard through the village. Once, I even slept overnight on the sidewalk outside Falcon's Bar.......the details of this particular excursion have been lost but I suffered no harm.... :-) We often discussed, with stated amazement, how many dollars were spent in Boquillas on those afternoons....conservative estimates ranged from $500-$2000/day given the number of drunken and taco-filled gringos we'd count stumbling north to the river crossing at sundown. I can honestly say we never encountered anyone I considered and threat to national security....except that there were many folk I wouldn't want to see behind the wheel of an automobile immediately upon returning from and afternoon in Falcon's Bar. January 2, 2001 I was part of a group that summited El Pico Cerda (Schott's Tower...the prominent knob visible ESE of Boquillas in the Sierra Del Carmens) and I'm part of a group currently trying to figure a way into the Maderas Preserve currently owned by Cemex........ Ahhhhh Boquillas......sure looks like a dead village these days......very sad, very sad. The rangers at Big Bend say there are just a few families living there these days.... Scott Nicholson Broker/Waterboy Discovery Realty Group 512-947-2688 KW Commercial www.DiscoveryAustin.com
----- Original Message ---- From: "Minton, Mark" <[email protected]> To: Cave Texas <[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, August 21, 2008 11:56:06 AM Subject: [Texascavers] RE: All border crossings to be put into a data base. Mike Gross said: >The crossing at Boquillas had been unstaffed on either side at least since the >early 1970's. The same was true at Lajitas, where one could drive across the Río Grande at low water. Nancy Weaver and I did that one time in the midst of a group of kayakers coming down the river. A similar situation was true for the La Linda bridge, which surprisingly had a Mexican customs station but not one on the U. S. side. None of these great crossings are open anymore. See my Carbide Corner piece in Texas Caver Vol. 53, no. 3 (2007) for an exciting crossing after La Linda had closed. Mark Minton
