Our Texas Wild

Urge Senator Hutchison to support wilderness expansion in Guadalupe Mountains National Park

Send a free fax now!

Currently, the National Park Service is in the final stages of its current General Management plan for Guadalupe Mountains National Park, which seeks to expand current wilderness boundaries. The park has done a suitability study for this area, and public comments were supportive of expanding wilderness boundaries.This plan includes a proposal for 32,500 acres of additional wilderness on the parks west side.

We would like to gain support of Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison’s office, and we need you to take a moment and pledge your support to this action. Please send a FREE FAX to the senator's office! Currently, less than 1 percent of Texas has wilderness protection, making it last in the Western United States in the amount of protected public lands. We need your help to start changing this!

Send a FREE FAX now.

Gone to Texas

By Steve West

Preview from 2012 Wild Guide

The Panic of 1819 was America’s first financial crisis. During the period after the Panic, because of hard economic conditions at home and the draw of free land, a lot of settlers moved to Texas, which wasthen part of the Republic of Mexico. While many people came from theAmerican South, those who left represented most regions of the United States. Abandoning their homes and land, they would mark on their doors or leave a sign on a fence, “Gone to Texas.” The rest is history. After a war of independence from Mexico, Texas emerged as a republic and then ten years later, in 1845, joined the United States as a state.

Today, Texas is the second most populous state, with over twenty-five million people, representing about 8 percent of the U.S. population. For decades now, millionsof people have followed that old adage and moved to Texas. NMWA has followed. We’ve “Gone to Texas.” Our Texas Wild (OTW) was organized to provide a Texas component of the New Mexico Wilderness Alliance to promote environmental education, wildlife corridors, and appreciation of wilderness. There are many other worthy and hard-working environmental groups at work in Texas.

But none of them has placed wilderness and wilderness protection at the top of the list. Texas is different from most states. One area is the history of land ownership. In contrast to most of the West, there are not large tracts of Bureau of Land Management lands or U.S. Forest Service national parklands. Texas retained title to unoccupied lands as part of the negotiations with the United States that resulted in its statehood. Following the Mexican War, in exchange for ceding its claims to the lands in present-day New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, and Wyoming to the United States, Texas retained ownership of all unassigned land within the borders of the state.

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Texas shooting "destructive" donkeys in Big Bend Park, stirring burro backlash

Associated Press, 10/31/11

PRESIDIO, Texas — Unofficially, the state of Texas celebrates donkeys and their historical and cultural significance in shaping the American West.

Officially?

The policy on wild burros out here is shoot to kill.

Texas park rangers are trying to wipe out hundreds of free-roaming donkeys in Big Bend State Park, killing nearly 130 to date with .308-caliber bolt-action rifles on this side of the Rio Grande. But in the process, the shootings are stirring a whole new kind of cross-border controversy, pitting state officials against burro-lovers who believe the animal holds a special place in history and deserves protection.

The state’s stance: wild donkeys wandering over from Mexico simply don’t belong.

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Bill would give border patrol more access to parks

By Julian Aguilar 

The Texas Tribune, 11/3/11

Environmental groups are fighting a proposal that would grant U.S. Customs and Border Protection greater authority to operate in public parks and on environmentally protected land, saying it would circumvent regulations designed to protect natural resources.

The National Security and Federal Lands Protection Act, authored by Utah Republican Rep. Rob Bishop, would prevent the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Secretary of the Interior from enacting environmental regulations that hinder the operations of the CBP on public lands within 100 miles of the U.S. border. It was voted out of the U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources last month — with "yes" votes from Republican Texas Reps.Louie Gohmert and Bill Flores.

The bill, Bishop said, “is a common sense solution that addresses one of the prevailing issues preventing us from gaining full operational control of the border — the U.S. Border Patrol’s lack of sufficient access to millions of acres of federally owned land.”

Environmental groups, however, call the proposal a land grab that would allow the federal government to circumvent environmental regulations whenever it chooses, placing water, fresh air and other natural resources in peril.

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Park volunteer summits Guadalupe Peak for 100th time

NPS Digest

When Guadalupe Mountains National Park volunteer Rob Junell, a federal judge from Midland, Texas, topped Guadalupe Peak late on Veterans Day morning, he accomplished a feat that no one else had ever accomplished – his 100th summit of the 8,749-foot peak, the highest point in Texas, since he began that hike in 2003.

Junell has been a volunteer at Guadalupe Mountains National Park since August 2009, and it is believed he is the first person to reach the summit of Guadalupe Peak 100 times. Junell set off from the Pine Springs Trailhead just after 8 a.m. on a cool, overcast day, accompanied by his wife, Beverly, and friends who came along to help celebrate this milestone.

As a park volunteer, Junell assists park staff, patrolling park trails, assisting park visitors, answering questions, making sure hikers have plenty of water, providing first aid when needed, and serving as the eyes and ears of park rangers on the trail.  One of the things that Junell enjoys most about his volunteer service at

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