sure and call first for permission to land
and to give me time to chase any wild
burros off the runway.”
Nearby lie the handsome adobe ruins of
El Corazón Sagrado de la Iglesia de Jesús,
the Ruidosa community church built in
the early 1900s. As the population de-
clined, so did the church’s condition, but a
renovation was launched to prevent what
remains of it from collapsing. Meanwhile,
roosting bats and free-roaming cattle call
the church home.
Ruidosa offers two detours. One is 8
miles north on adequately maintained
gravel to the Chinati Hot Springs, a des-
ert getaway destination. The other leads to
Marfa along a 52-mile route called Pinto
Canyon Road, a stretch highlighted in In
the Shadow of the Chinatis: A History of
Pinto Canyon in the Big Bend, a new book
by archeologist David Keller. The latter in-
cludes 20 miles of a high-clearance, sin-
gle-track lane featuring deep washouts
prone to flash flooding and precipitous
ascents. In certain conditions, four-wheel
drive is required.
Twelve miles northwest of Ruidosa
along FM 170 lies the community of Can-
delaria. During heavy rains, runoff fills a
resaca—a dried-up river channel—that
occasionally floods the road. FM 170’s
blacktop didn’t reach Candelaria until
- Perhaps because of its delayed con-
nection to the rest of the modern world,
Candelaria still feels like its 19th-century
iteration as a ranching settlement com-
prised of the determined who put down
roots and made a go of it. Candelaria’s
cluster of adobe homes, kitchen windows
illuminated at dusk, and handful of streets
lively with children at play suggest that
the undaunted have remained. It’s only
the pavement that gave up.
OCTOBER 2019 27
Some people say this
stretch of FM 170 leads
to nowhere, but they are
wrong. This has always
been somewhere.
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