I have a confession to make. When I see a new guidebook published about the Big Bend or West Texas, I feel weary. And skeptical that it contains anything terribly new or very worthwhile. And, I note, these books are more often written by people who don't actually live in this region. (Maybe it's just sour grapes on my part? Damn, they beat me to it again!)
Nevertheless, I am very pleased to report that E. Dan Klepper's new guidebook, 100 Classic Hikes in Texas, is chock full of new and worthwhile information about the Big Bend - and about much of Texas, in fact. Clearly, Klepper knows and loves the state, recognizing it as "a vast ecological wonderland," which allows for exploration from "rolling plains to high desert mountains, and from blackland prairies to the subtropics."
Of course, since there is so much public land in West Texas - the "boot heel of the state," as Klepper calls it - a considerable portion of the book is devoted to hikes out here. And some of the West Texas emphasis surely stems from the fact that Klepper, a native of San Antonio and lifelong outdoors enthusiast, chose to settle in Marathon nine years ago.
Reading even just the introduction, I learned a lot, such as: the distances across this enormous state from east to west and north to south; new terms for its different climatic regions; new tricks for determining whether or not wild berries are poisonous; and the comforting fact that if you get lost in the wilderness, stopping to make a cup of tea will help you to keep from panicking. These are just for starters.
This hiking guide has all the usual elements we expect from such books, of course: trail distances and elevation profiles, topographic maps, and a wide variety of hikes, from the ADA-accessible, mile Window View trail in the Chisos Basin, to the 19-mile, multi-day backpack trip along the Rancherias trail loop in Big Bend Ranch State Park, for example.
Yet this hiking guidebook goes beyond the norms of its genre, which is perhaps why I enjoy it so much.
For one, Klepper refrains from blow-by-blow descriptions of every turn in the trail and every stunning view, instead giving us a general idea of what's special about this trail, just enough to intrigue a hiker. (And certainly enough to evoke longing in the most attuned of hikers.)
When I interviewed Klepper, in late August in Alpine, we talked about why he strayed notably from the common trend in hiking guides, preferring to give us a mere gestalt of the hike. "Why give [readers] a lot of expectations?" Klepper responded. "It's going to be different for everybody... Let them have their hike, not mine."
It just makes sense that a guy who started camping as a toddler and whose outdoor adventures go way beyond the bounds of most people's comfort zones would be a proponent of such an approach. This refreshing bent is emphasized early in the book as well: "For the most enjoyable outdoors experience," suggests Klepper in the intro, "you might want to leave all expectations at home."
The same goes for his choice of the book's photographs, all of which are also his. For example, the photos he chose to accompany the two segments of the South Rim loop in the Chisos Mountains [Big Bend National Park] are not taken from the Rim at all. Rather, one image is a view of the Chisos, somewhat enshrouded in haze, taken from way off in the desert flats between the mountains and the Rio Grande. The other is a shot of Toll Mountain and the Pinnacles from Juniper Flats, which is very close to the Basin trailhead. What gives?
"Well, since Laurence Parent and James Evans stole my photo of junipers on the South Rim..." jokes Klepper.
But really? "I didn't want to give people the view."
Still, even if keeping hidden the vistas that await, many of the photos in here are just plain stunning: the image of a red-spotted toad on a log amid gorgeous stones, another of a snorkeler in the Devils River, the McGuirk home ruins along the Contrabando Trail, a shipwreck on Boca Chica Beach on the Gulf... Even the image of the picnic area at Monahans Sand Hills State Park is gorgeous. The photos alone make me want to go wherever they were taken, as soon as I can.
This, too, should be no surprise, as Klepper is also a professional artist, well-versed in several mediums, with a stint at the Art Institute of Chicago under his belt and a slew of exhibitions in North America, Europe, and Japan, over the last few decades. For the past two years, Klepper has showcased his photos, paintings, and other works at his gallery in downtown Marathon, in the back of the Chisos Gallery.
Another advantage of 100 Classic Hikes of Texas is Klepper's sharing of harder-to-come-by tidbits of geology, cultural and natural history, and the background of many place names.
A full three paragraphs of the Contrabando Trail in Big Bend Ranch State Park, for example, are devoted to the biology of the candelilla plant, the process by which people extracted its wax, and the industry that arose around smuggling it and other contraband through the area in the earlier half of the last century. Klepper is clearly an avid student of the natural world and the human one. When asked if he has any formal training in these areas, Klepper admits that "my father was an outdoor writer and journalist. My mother was a biologist. So that's what we did."
However, Klepper notes, his real trick is "research. I research a lot. That's how I approach most stories. Like a fractal, it just continues to expand and expand." In fact, Klepper concedes, one of the hardest parts of writing this guide, over the year and a half he spent on it, was choosing what information to leave out, editing necessary to get each trail synopsis down to 500-600 words a piece.
Reading this book and doing the hikes it suggests might make you turn into a hardcore student of the natural world, too - carrying around piles of guidebooks in your car to reference at the end of each hike, just like Klepper says he does.
My final plug for this book is that even if you're not terribly interested in each hike, the guide is just a pleasure to read. Klepper's strong voice full of wry humor and lots of firsthand outdoors experience combine with his extensive vocabulary and a great love of language and its rhythms, evident throughout:
"Nineteenth and early twentieth century humans had an irritating penchant for attributing a host of wonderful but rugged and remote places to the denizens of hell. Devils Den [in Big Bend National Park] is definitely one of those places. This beautifully eroded limestone slot canyon is home to an interesting selection of desert dwellers, but unless your hiking partner has a tendency to turn ornery on you, demons aren't on the list. While Devils Den may appear from a distance like a hellacious chasm of biblical proportions, it is, in reality, a place of peaceful quietude and heavenly shade."
In discussing Buttrill Spring [also in BBNP], Klepper notes that getting to the trailhead "requires a dusty drive, but is well worth the effort, leading to a deeply shadowed spring below and, above, a perfect perch for glassing the canopy and watching hawks cruise the arroyo for snacks."
While Klepper hopes the book is received well, he's already on to other projects, including his usual freelance writing and contributing to TexasWildNetwork.com.
Klepper is also working on a book that will be a collaboration of his writings and photographs with those of his father's about the same places. Though his father, Dan Klepper, died in 1994, he was a well-known, revered, and prolific outdoors writer and editor for the San Antonio Express News from 1956 to just weeks before his death. Hence, researching and writing this book will be "a long-term process," imparts Klepper. "There's a lot of material to go through. I mean, [my father] wrote a column almost every day. He was a newspaperman, you know?"
Part of the project requires that Klepper retrace some of his father's adventures. For example, the senior Klepper and some friends traversed the entire length of Padre Island just a couple of years before it became a national seashore (in 1962), managed ever since by the National Park Service.
The newspaperman chronicled the Padre Island he experienced. The younger Klepper is looking forward to taking the same journey - "somehow" - and writing about "how it looks today." Nearly 50 years later, "it's a totally different place." And he's eager to see his own "very saturated" color images alongside his father's black and white images of the same places.
In the meantime, I suggest you check out his new book, which will most likely intrigue and inspire you to get out and hike old favorite trails and a host of new ones in this "ecological wonderland" in which we live. As Klepper reminds us in the book's intro: "Average temperatures vary greatly throughout the state due to its size and topographic diversity... In other words, somewhere in Texas every day is a good day to take a hike."
100 Classic Hikes in Texas by E. Dan Klepper. 240 pages, 101 maps, 110 color photos. Paperbound, $21.95. Published by The Mountaineers Books. Available on Amazon.com.
For more information about E. Dan Klepper's writings and art, visit www.edanklepper.com on the web. On most weekends, you can visit him in person at Klepper Gallery, 107a W. US Highway 90 (behind the Chisos Gallery), Marathon. (432) 386-4107.
Marlys Hersey is Editor of the Big Bend Gazette. For more information, visit www.bigbendgazette.com.
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