Gregory Jay Finney

Since CBP is carving away at Mariscal Mountain in total secrecy, with no analysis or public process, lets set the record straight on exactly what they are doing to Mariscal Mountain in Big Bend National Park. This excerpt is from a report Glenn Smith put together analyzing CBP's current standards for V.5 patrol roads —and what those standards will mean on the ground as they ramp up their permanent destruction of Mariscal Mountain: If CBP persists with plans to build a road up and over Mariscal Mountain, the road has to climb 1,546 feet. The standards cap the grade at 20 percent. Anything over 15 percent must be concrete, poured on site. That would mean a batch plant and water hauled into the desert. If the terrain won’t allow 20 percent grade, the standards let CBP reclassify the segment as a “maintenance road” with up to a 70 percent grade, roughly the pitch of a standard staircase. Such a maintenance road would be permanently closed to the public. But the grade isn’t the hard part. To build a road across a mountainside you dig into the slope. That leaves a wall of rock standing above the roadway. It has to lean back or it comes down on the road. CBP’s standards cap that lean at one foot back for every two feet of height, a fifty percent face. I measured the east flank of Mariscal against USGS elevation data. It reaches sixty percent. When the mountain rises faster than the wall leans back, the wall never reaches the surface. The digging has no end point. It just goes further into the mountain. To hold any of those grades the road needs switchbacks and, in the standards’ own words, “extensive cut-and-fill operations.” That means tons after tons after tons of rock removed. On steep ground the cheapest way to move rock is to push it over the downhill edge, and the further the road climbs the cheaper that gets. Below Mariscal’s rim there is no bench and no catchment. It’s straight down to the Rio Grande. Which leaves two ways to build it. They could line the road with concrete walls on the mountain side, which their own standards call for and which would mean miles of concrete they have never mentioned. Or they could cut the rock nearly vertical where it rises above the road, which exceeds what the standards allow and requires a filed exception. In that limestone the usual way you do it is with explosives, and CBP says it isn't going to blast the mountain. The patrol roads require a permanent, industrial operation within the park. This is something Big Bend National Park has never suffered. And it is an unnecessary because as the park’s rugged country of high canyon walls, dangerous deserts and well-known law enforcement presence have made it the least likely place in the region for suspect border crossings. No, this isn’t about border security. It is a U.S. president trying to turn the Rio Grande into another reflecting pool for his ego. CBP has refused to make its actual plans and specifications public. But the above gives a picture of what its standards could mean for Big Bend National Park.

More destruction today in Big Bend. Bulldozers and excavators are being trucked into the wildest corner of Texas, preparing to inflict an irreversible scar on the national park. This absurd project is despised by everyone in West Texas. When will Texas leadership step in?