The Amtrack Sunset Limited route between New Orleans and Los Angeles stops at the homely Alpine depot. Trains come through weekly in each direction on Sunday, Wednesday, Friday and provide a steady flow of visitors to the Big Bend.
One of the most dramatic sections of road in the Big Bend is between Alpine and Marfa in which the highway cuts through the Paisano Volcano and the three-mile diameter Paisano Caldera. The caldera is mapped as chaotic terrain and has sunk about 1,000 feet in its northwest corner and less elsewhere. Volcanoes are terrifyingly violent when erupting and the photograph above shows a fossil mudflow, a lahar as they are known in Indonesia, full of pebbles and rock fragments.
The photograph below, taken from the same road cut 9.7 miles west of Alpine shows a block of red Morrow tuff in a tuffaceous mudstone matrix. For more on the caldera see Davis Mountains Vistas.
This view of Alpine from the north (the Fort Davis road) shows Hancock Hill (4,925 feet) which rises about 500 feet above the flat in front of the camera. Some suspect that the hill has an intrusive core but no evidence has shown up in water wells drilled around the hill. It is most likely a Crossen volcanic fault block - Crossen trachyte and tuff outcrop in road cuts going up the hill. A fault running along the right side of the hill has a displacement of about 1,250 feet down to the right.
The triangular Mount Ord (6,700 feet) on the skyline behind Hancock Hill Mount Ord (6,700 feet) is the highest point in the Del Norte Mountains. The mountains form a 35-mile long ridge from Highway 90 south to the Santiago Mountains. The ridge is tilted up with its west face dipping the west at an angle of 10°.
The dip of the west face is at nearly the same angle as a bed of Crossen lava, 265 feet thick at the Mount Ord summit. In places the lava has been eroded away, exposing underlying soft Pruett tuff.
The lava breaks off at the crest of the ridge, creating a steep escarpment on the east, 600 feet high at Mount Ord. For more see River Road Vistas.
This photograph of Chinati Peak (7,330 feet), taken from the Marfa Lights Viewing Center at dawn and one of my favorites from River Road Vistas, has just been made into a postcard.
The mountain is built up of many trachyte and rhyolite lava flows of the Chinati Mountain Group, erupted from the Chinati Volcano 31.9 +/-0.7 million years ago, and more than 3,500 feet thick. The lavas are similar in composition to those of the Paisano Volcano between Marfa and Alpine although 2.8 million years younger.
The Paisano has a beautiful patio which has been recently renovated with a new fountain and paving stones. It is not easy to photograph; this is one of my better efforts, showing the two-story entrance into the lobby which echoes the front portal.
Another favorite Marfa building is the Hotel El Paisano, designed by the noted El Paso architectural firm of Trost and Trost, which also designed the Gage Hotel in Marathon and the Hotel El Capitan in Van Horn. The Duncan family of Fort Davis, who have been restoring the Paisano over the last several years are now restoring the El Capitan and hope to open it in June of this year.
The El Paisano opened in June, 1930. The main features of the exterior are an elaborate two-story Spanish Baroque portal leading to the lobby. Since the portal is not centered in the street facade, a corner pavilion with elaborately-framed windows and iron balconies was added to bring balance to the facade. The lobby can also be entered from the side street on the left through the patio.
One of my favorite Marfa buildings is the Brite Building, home of Marfa National Bank and of the Ayn Foundation. The building was designed in 1926 by L.G. Knipe, a well-known Phoenix and Los Angeles architect who began his professional career as a structural engineer. He was recruited to Marfa by Luke Brite, rancher and philanthropist, and is said to have died there.
Among his many designs are several buildings in the campus of what is now Arizona State University in Tempe, a suburb of Phoenix. In California, his most famous house is a gem, the Rancho Sombra del Roble (Ranch in the Shade of the Oak), built for the oil pioneer W.W. Orcutt, who, among other things, discovered the fossils in the Brea tar pits. The house and gardens is now the Orcutt Ranch Horticultural Center and is owned by the Los Angeles Recreation and Parks Department.
The courthouse from another angle.
One of the finest buildings in the Big Bend is the Presidio County Courthouse, built in in 1885 at a cost of $60,000, an enormous sum for those days, to a design in the Second Empire style with Italianate flourishes. It was refurbished at a cost of $2.5 million in 2001. By contrast the Jeff Davis Courthouse cost $4,700 to build in 1910, and Brewster County Courthouse and jail, $27,000 in 1887.
Cathedral Mountain is a block of volcanic rocks with the spire on the left created by an intusion coming in from below. Cienega Mountain in mid-skyline is an intrusion that bowed up Cretaceous and Tertiary strata. The mountains are some 15 miles south of Alpine.
This photograph is on our latest postcard.
