Texas Proceeding With Plan to Auction Nature Preserve

(Thursday) November 1, 2007   •   The Web Guy

ranch_post.jpgAs a Comanche moon rose one night last week over the West Texas border town of Terlingua, the Christmas Mountains Association convened over Mexican food in the Longhorn Ranch Motel.

“Proceed as if we’re not going out of business,” said Tom Alex, the group’s president.

But he did not sound confident. In Austin, 360 miles east, the state’s general land commissioner was collecting bids to do what conservationists say is all but unheard of — selling a state wildlife preserve to a private buyer.

The property, which could be sold as soon as Tuesday, is the Christmas Mountains Ranch, a 9,270-acre tract abutting Big Bend National Park near the Rio Grande. It was given to the state in 1991 and leased to the nonprofit association of local residents to patrol.

The pending sale of the property, which is limestone hills and Chihuahuan Desert scrublands, has created an uproar.

The dispute pits the donors of the land, the Conservation Fund and the Richard King Mellon Foundation, against a pistol-packing commissioner adamant about preserving hunting and firearms rights on the property, even at the cost of denying the land to the National Park Service, although Texas ranks 44th in park land.

The state has less than 2 percent of its area in protected state and federal land, according to the Trust for Public Land, a conservation group.

“We have never encountered this before,” said the president of the Conservation Fund, Larry Seltzer, voicing hope that Texas would still back off the sale or convey the preserve to the Park Service, which is seeking Congressional authorization to acquire it.

The state’s land commissioner, Jerry Patterson, who has been pushing the sale, promised, “We’re going ahead with the auction.” But Mr. Patterson has called a news conference for Monday to announce the bids and discuss a possible compromise.

The wilderness in dispute is little known to Texans. Even Mr. Patterson said he had never set foot there, although he said he had flown low over it at the controls of his plane.

Named, one legend has it, by long-ago travelers who spent a winter holiday there, the Christmas Mountains — hills, actually — share a storied corner of Texas where Comanches staged moonlight border raids, the Mexican revolution spilled onto American soil in the early 20th century and miners hollowed the desert for quicksilver ore.

Today, the preserve lies largely inaccessible within the 225,000 acres of posted homesteads known as Terlingua Ranch, and sandwiched between the 800,000 acres of Big Bend National Park and the 300,000 acres of nearby Big Bend Ranch State Park.

A permanent conservation easement attached to the property when it was given to the state bars buildings and any development, power or telephone lines, mining, off-road vehicles or any improvement of the unpaved roads. Hunting was allowed, but only to “maintain a sustainable population of healthy native species.”

Over the years, poachers depleted the game. But a drive through the preserve with Mr. Alex, an archaeologist, and his wife, Betty, a wildlife biologist, showed a flourishing desert ecoculture of quail, mule deer, mice and the occasional bobcat and tarantula. The flora include oaks and junipers in the canyons, cactuses and a pharmacoepia of medicinal plants.

Something to say?