MANY OF THE MOST ICONIC IMAGES OF BIG BEND National Park feature the jagged outline of the Sierra del Carmen, a towering range of pine- and fir-studded mountains in the Mexican state of Coahuila. These isolated peaks possess an almost magnetic mystique—nearly everyone I’ve spoken to who has spent time in this part of West Texas talks about gazing across the border and imagining what it must be like to stand among the tall trees and cool wind, looking out in the opposite direction at the desert below.
Rick LoBello first came to Big Bend in 1974 and spent the next six years working as a park ranger, looking up at the Carmens and dreaming about their secrets. Then, in 1988, he joined a delegation invited to discuss prospects for binational conservation. After the Americans crossed the river to meet the governor of Coahuila, the two groups ascended the sierra. “I got to a high point where I could look over and see the Chisos Mountains and Big Bend,” LoBello recalls, “and I said to myself, ‘Wow, this is even more beautiful than the Texas side. This has got to be a national park someday.’ ” The Mexicans and Americans camped together on a mountaintop, and LoBello watched as the governor sat with Big Bend’s superintendent over a table strewn with maps, discussing the potential for protection and collaboration. It seemed, he tells me, like witnessing history in the making.
Ever since, LoBello has dedicated his career to the idea of a vast binational preserve spanning the Rio Grande, using his positions at the El Paso Zoo, Rotary International, and various wilderness coalitions to promote it. The dream is a longstanding one: When President Franklin D. Roosevelt designated Big Bend in 1944, he declared that it would be incomplete until “one great international park” reached across the border, uniting the region’s deep-cut canyons and towering sky islands, its desert grasslands and teeming forests. In recent years, talk of cross-boundary conservation op-ed headline, “Let’s Build F.D.R.’s International Park.”
