including California and
Colorado. “Large-scale,
organized farms use lots
of pesticides and that’s
hard on my bees,” Hae-
feli explains. “But out
here there’s none of that. When the desert
blooms, it’s chemical-free.”
Drive another 21 miles northwest of
Indio and you’ll arrive at Ruidosa, where
a few adobe and timber buildings hug the
roadway. Established in 1824 as a penal
colony, Ruidosa was once occupied by
a group of convicts known as the “Con-
demned Regiment” before the Coman-
che massacred them. By 1872, Ruidosa
had transformed into a farming hamlet,
reaching its highest population of 1,722
residents by 1911. Today, according to Jen-
nifer Weaver, proprietor of a general store
and bar there, “the entire population is
down to about 15 or 20, and that’s within
a 10-mile radius.” Weaver’s operation is
also the office for the Hot Springs Airport,
a dirt landing strip nearby. “The FAA iden-
tifier is 3TangoEcho4,” Weaver says. “Be26 texashighways.comDRIVE | DETOUR
landscape is favored by independent-
minded artists like Rackstraw Downes,
the British-born, New York-based plein-
air painter who renders the area’s natu-
ral sand hills and human-made artifacts,
which consist of a racetrack and a water
tower, in a wistful, mystical palette. The
late Texas painter A. Kelly Pruitt made La
Junta his home, living and creating art in a
hand-fashioned gypsy wagon beneath the
shade of a tin barn that can still be seen
from the road. Pruitt, who died in 2009, is
buried nearby, alongside his dogs.
Twelve miles up from La Junta lies the
settlement of Indio, established by pio-
neer John W. Spencer in 1854. Indio is
now demarcated most clearly by its sur-
viving remnant, the Indio Ranch Ceme-
tery, located on a short bluff just above the
road. Industry once thrived here courtesyPhotos: E. Dan Klepperof pioneer Esteban Ochoa, who imple-
mented an irrigation project to grow cot-
ton in 1917, then built a cotton gin. Little
is left to see of the community, though,
beyond the cemetery’s headstones and
rows of cross-marked rock piles denoting
graves, many unidentified.
Today, seasonal bee-keeping is the
dominant industry in this area. Colorado-
based Haefeli’s Honey Farms places thou-
sands of hives here as well as additional
FM 170 locations so that the high-altitude
bees can winter in a warm climate. Tom
Haefeli, whose family started its Presi-
dio operation in the late 1960s, says the
Big Bend area enhances the honey with
flavors of flowering desert plants. It also
provides a healthy environment in which
his bees can recover after spending most
of the year pollinating crops elsewhere,CLOCKWISE
FROM LEFT:
Graves in Indio
Ranch Cemetery; a
view of the peaks in
Mexico; the late art-
ist A. Kelly Pruitt.