When you start the 11-kilometer (7-mile) climb toward the Basin, chino grama gives way to a variety of grasses, blue, black, hairy, and side oats grama, and the straw-colored grass aptly named tanglehead. The whole color scheme changes with the grass from shades of gray to reddish brown and yellow, and the tops of these good grasses have the heavy headed look of grain. The lechuguilla becomes less obvious. Gradually the moisture-loving mountain shrubs push the grasses back from the roadside, but the golden gramas grow with wonderful abundance on the drier slopes beyond. Still higher, the still good grasslands are studded now with century plant, basket grass, and sotol.
[Illustration: Ancient rock art known as petroglyphs (top) decorate rock faces. The arid climate protects them.]
[Illustration: Mortar holes deepened imperceptibly each time the Indians ground seeds or grains in them.]
Earlier in this century sotol abounded between Green Gulch and Government Spring, but in the severe drought during World War I, ranchers chopped it out for cattle feed. Today you will find a perfect forest of sotol growing at Sotol Vista on the western flank of the Chisos. As you can see from the overlook, this narrow-bladed plant favors the cooler north-facing exposures. Sotol leaves grow at ground level from a short trunk, and nearly every spring the plant thrusts up a brush-like bloomstalk, 4 to 6 meters (15-20 feet) tall, covered half its length by greenish-white flowers. Prehistoric Indians had many uses for sotol, and later the Chisos Apaches often located their rancherias at solid stands of “desert candle.” They used the fibrous leaves in making mats and ropes, fermented a potent drink from the pineapple-like heart, or roasted it in rock-lined pits as we roast beef. Several crumbling sotol pits are found throughout the Chisos, and sotol still serves as an all-purpose plant along the border.
Sotol is one of those Big Bend plants that has its very own grasshopper. If you look closely, you may find a little fellow feeding high on the bloomstalk and looking for all the world like a bud. He lives his whole life on the sotol plant and knows just how to use it to advantage. If you annoy him he will probably play possum, drawing in his legs and dropping like a stone right down into the thick of the sotol leaves. Few predators come away unscathed from a close encounter with those saw-edged blades.