This is my favorite scene in all of Big Bend National Park. The road you see in this painting is named the Green Gulch Road. It is the road that you take to come up out of the desert to go up several thousand feet to The Basin in The Chisos Mountains. That is where the camping grounds, restaurant and cabins are located in the park. 

The peaks to the left are the Lost Mine Peaks. The square topped mountain in the distance is Casa Grande. To the right are the foothills of Pulliam Peak. The “saddle” just to the right of Casa Grande is called Panther Pass. So the name of this painting is The Road to Panther Pass. 

Nobody has ever found a mine up there on the Lost Mine Peaks. It is a legend that an old Spanish gold and silver mine does exist up there somewhere. Part of that legend is that the first rays of sunlight on Easter morning will fall on the mine entrance and can be seen if a person stands at that instant in the doorway to the old Spanish Presidio that used to be on the other side of the mountain and a number of miles down Juniper Canyon. A lot of people have tried over the years to determine where that doorway probably was and have tried to be there on Easter morning waiting for sunrise with visions of gold and silver on their minds and grand hopes of being rich and maybe get out of debt.  

The Green Gulch Road snakes back and forth as it climbs up the canyon to Panther Pass. At the pass there is a parking area for the hikers that want to climb The Lost Mine Trail. We have seen bears several times at this parking area. The last time we were there, just before sunset, there was a mother bear and three half-grown cubs there that were hunting berries under a juniper tree. There has been a severe drought at the park for the last year so all the wild animals are having a hard time trying to survive.  

This past summer, I have tried to watch the weather reports hoping for rain in Big Bend. The good news is that over the last several weeks, it has rained some up in The Basin and around over the park, so maybe the bears and the other wild animals there will have a chance to survive.