On a scorching May afternoon, Dell Dickinson was wearing creased jeans, a faded button-down, and a cowboy hat and boots. He kept a nine-millimeter Beretta in a holster on his hip. “I’m not trying to impress anyone with that,” he said, adding that he hasn’t hunted in nearly sixty years. “I don’t get any thrill out of killing something.” But sheep ranchers such as Dickinson sometimes have to deal with predators—black bears, bobcats, and coyotes. Right now he’s more concerned about another kind of interloper: river enthusiasts.
Dickinson’s property, Skyline Ranch, sits on the Devils River, a turquoise ribbon of water that begins with a trickle from a spring dozens of miles north, in Sutton County, about 200 miles west of Austin, and flows 94 miles south into the Rio Grande’s Amistad Reservoir, near Del Rio. His family has been here a long time. His maternal grandfather purchased the seven-thousand-acre property in 1942, when Val Verde County was still the wool and mohair capital of the country, though the family’s ties to the region extend as far back as 1892. “When I was a kid growing up, the Devils River was in its most pristine form,” he said. It was also virtually inaccessible to everyone else.
The Devils is legally open to the public for boating, fishing, and swimming. In practice, it’s more complicated. For decades, most of the land surrounding the fortyish miles of traversable river was owned by a handful of ranchers, which made getting on tricky. Then, in 1988, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department purchased about 20,000 acres of land called Del Norte, fourteen miles downstream of where the navigable river begins, turning the property into a state natural area and offering public access to the Devils.
Still, getting on the river is complicated. The entrance to Devils River State Natural Area is far from any major city, and getting to the spot where one can launch a canoe requires driving nearly five miles along rough roads. Overnight trips call for a permit, and TPWD issues only twelve each day, which are sold five months in advance.
The agency requires that those who intend to float beyond the boundaries of the state-owned land stay off the river’s privately owned banks. Camping is limited to the small islands that dot the waterway or to designated campsites that require reservations. There’s no shortage of rules: no campfires, no glass, no trespassing, and all waste must be packed out.
Such gatekeeping on the part of private landowners has secured the Devils’ reputation as one of the least spoiled destinations in the state. In many ways this land looks much as it did centuries ago. Dickinson, a member of the Devils River Conservancy, a nonprofit that advocates for the preservation of the area, would like to keep it that way. “Homo sapiens,”he said, “are the only natural enemy of this river.”
And the enemy is at the banks. In 2011 TPWD acquired 18,000 acres thirteen miles downstream from Del Norte. But the agency lacked the capital to develop the acreage, and it sat largely undisturbed for years. Then, five years ago, voters approved a state proposition that would dedicate the sales tax on sporting goods to TPWD and the Texas Historical Commission. In 2023 the Texas Legislature passed two bills that led to another $1 billion being invested in the state parks system. This substantially bulked up the department’s coffers, and plans to develop the land are now underway.
Upon completion, scheduled for this fall, the Dan A. Hughes Unit (named after a businessman who helped raise $10 million toward the land’s purchase) will house a visitors center and provide two improved river-access points, five new campsites, and parking lots for some fifty vehicles. As many as 95 visitors will be allowed to enter the unit each day, four days a week, effectively doubling the current number of patrons.
That’s welcome news for the many Texans who have dreamed of visiting the Devils River but were put off by the scarcity of spots and the lack of public facilities. But the river’s other stakeholders—landowners, DRC members, and concessionaires who provide shuttle service and river guidance—worry that more traffic will create more pollution, more opportunities to get around the permit system, and more uneducated paddlers, who might trash the area or suffer serious injury. The DRC’s annual meeting late last year was tenser than usual as interested parties broadcast their concerns to TPWD. In many ways, the agency’s two primary objectives—conservationism and recreation—are at odds.
“If we’re not very careful,” Dickinson warned, “we’re going to love this river to death.”
Left: Dell Dickinson on his property, in Val Verde County, on May 31, 2024. Photograph by Jordan Vonderhaar
Top: A no trespassing sign at Devils River State Natural Area. Photograph by Jordan Vonderhaar
At the top of Indian Creek rapid, one of several along the Devils, my friends and I steady our canoes and decamp, gingerly stepping across rocks to examine the white water, take stock of the river’s bony contours, and draw up a plan: We’ll circumnavigate a large boulder, hugging its edge, and then follow the fast water to a drop-off that should dump us into a narrow cleft. From there, we’ll steer our boat into the safety of the still water below.
I’m traveling with a group of ten adults, ranging in skill from novice to advanced, in seven canoes, on a four-day trip down the Devils, with hopes of witnessing the full solar eclipse. We’d been warned that cloudy conditions were expected, but a trip on the Devils is worthwhile with or without the occurrence of a significant astronomical event.
As we return to our boats, my gut churns with anxiety at the possibility of a wipeout. My boatmate passes me a small plastic flask of tequila that I take a sip from to quell my nerves. Pushing off, we follow the course: first around the boulder, then along the fast water into the drop-off. Our nose starts to angle, so we jump out to reposition it, then jump back in. It’s too late; we get pegged between the rocks, and our boat lists, filling with water.
At the bottom of the rapid, finally in the clear, and buoyed by life jackets, my friend and I swim our waterlogged canoe to a flat perch of limestone and begin to remove our cargo—coolers, tents, camp chairs, and dry bags. My heart races as we climb ashore and flush the water from our boat, until we’ve removed enough to dump out the rest.
Paddling the Devils’ spring-fed waters is like peering into a glass marble, banded with blues and replete with largemouth and smallmouth bass, carp, catfish, and gar—an angler’s paradise. Overhead, limestone bluffs expose a splash of red—primitive drawings created by prehistoric dwellers. At another outcrop, we spot an eagle’s nest up high with two fledglings inside. The nest, I’m told, is fifteen feet in length—believed to be the biggest eagle’s nest in the country—and has likely been here for decades, maybe longer.
During the spring, a kaleidoscopic array of birds migrates along the waterway from the U.S. to Mexico and points south. Along the banks, quiet canoeists can spot beavers, deer, feral hogs, and the occasional mountain lion. “To be able to stand in one spot and see what the very first humans here saw, and what the Spaniards first saw, and what the first white man saw,” said Randy Nunns, a board member of the Devils River Conservancy, “there’s something primal about that country on the water that relates to being a Texan.”
As our canoe silently carves a V across the mirrored surface, I’m aware that we’re not part of this landscape but rather an imprint upon it. Wherever we go, we displace something: a white egret takes off, its feet skimming the surface; a turtle sunbathing on a rock plunks underwater; a small armadillo shuffles out from the brush at our campsite, then, detecting us, rears back around. Our boats leave streaks of green and red and blue paint on the stones where we drag them through shallower waters.
It’s taken more than a decade for the river’s primary stakeholders—TPWD, the DRC, landowners, shuttle operators, and river outfitters—to reach a consensus on balancing the goals of protecting the river and increasing access to it. They mobilized in 2011, when an uptick in river traffic, caused in part by social media posts that demystified this most hidden of places, led to more litter and trespassing. The Devils River Access Permit, introduced in 2013, limits the number of visitors allowed on the river. Dickinson, who advocated for the permit system, said the trash and trespass issues nearly disappeared, almost overnight. “It was like a miracle,” he said.
TPWD hasn’t indicated whether it will strengthen its protocols to accommodate the coming increase in traffic, which has many locals worried. “We want to make sure that every person who gets on that river is educated,” said Nicki Carr, who owns Amistad Expeditions, a shuttle service that provides drop-offs and pickups. “There’s no cell service. There’s not a lot of camping options. You can trespass easily.” (Of course, by making the river more accessible, TPWD could eliminate the need for a river guide or shuttle driver.)
Though TPWD has said it’s committed to monitoring the increased usage of the river—it plans to add additional staff—several stakeholders, including Carr, Dickinson, and DRC executive director Romey Swanson, have complained that the department has been uncommunicative of late. Many I spoke with attributed this reticence to turnover within the agency, which severed some long-standing relationships. TPWD regional director Adam Jarrett acknowledged that shifts in personnel have caused “continuity issues” but noted that “department representatives have remained in contact with landowners and concessionaires.”
One point of contention involved TPWD moving an access gate in the Del Norte Unit closer to the river’s banks, making it easier for folks to walk down with coolers and other accessories in tow, creating more opportunities for trash to be left behind. Landowners and concessionaires weren’t informed of the change. “That was a signal that seemed to affirm the concern with the new leadership,” said Swanson—though he noted that a recent meeting with TPWD leadership was more constructive.
Dell Dickinson belongs to a dying breed of ranchers in the area who make a living raising livestock. Like a lot of landowners these days, he supplements his revenue by running hunting trips on the land, and this spring, owing to a long-running drought, he moved his sheep herd to a ranch sixty miles northwest where the range grass is better. “If that doesn’t work, we’ll sell them,” he says.
Some heirs aren’t interested in navigating the difficulties of running a ranch. “They want to go off to college, get a plush job sitting in the air-conditioning all day,” says Dickinson, who’s no stranger to that kind of life. He earned his electrical engineering degree from the University of Texas at Austin, in 1968, and worked as an area manager for a company in Houston that makes high-voltage cables before moving back to the ranch, in 2005. Ask Dickinson how many days a week he works now, and he’ll tell you “about eight.”
As a result of these generational shifts, Texas’s landscape is changing. Heirs often break their family ranches into parcels to be sold as “ranchettes,” and each subdivision requires development—water wells and roads, for instance—that affects the land. The DRC is trying to slow this kind of fragmentation by promoting conservation easements, in which a landowner, in concert with a conservation entity, restricts how the property is used. Such deals guarantee that the land will be preserved for generations to come and usually include tax breaks that help offset the decline in value of property that has been placed off-limits to development.
Val Verde County boasts the state’s second-highest amount of acreage that has been conserved in such a manner, trailing only West Texas’s Jeff Davis County. “There’s a culture here,” said Swanson, “where landowners have voluntarily made the ultimate stewardship sacrifice by permanently protecting their ranches so that this river and that landscape can look like it has into the future.”
To the chagrin of some neighbors, Dickinson entered into an agreement with TPWD a few years back to permit the use of two small parcels of his land as campsites. “My philosophy is like my philosophy around sheep,” he jokes. “Let’s corral them at night so at least we have control over them.”
We stop at one of the campsites, where Dickinson fixes a No Trespassing sign that someone knocked down; recent footprints that stray beyond the campsite boundaries indicate that visitors failed to get that highly visible memo. At the other site, someone’s built a campfire ring out of rocks, even though the rules clearly state that no fires are allowed. “It only takes a spark to catch the county on fire,” Dickinson says. Once, someone left a campfire burning that ignited dry brush and grasses. “By the time I got there, fifteen acres had already burned. I spent two days fighting that fire.”
The river, he feels, is just as fragile. “It belongs to the people of the state of Texas,” he says. “We respect your right to use the river. Please respect our rights as property owners.” Dickinson wouldn’t mind TPWD’s latest plans so much if the rules were enforced. But it looks to him like that’s not happening.
“Want to see the most beautiful swimming hole in all of Texas?” he asks me. We bump along in his utility vehicle and reach an outcrop, where a pool of dark blue betrays deeper waters. Just beyond, on the opposite side of the river, white water crashes over a rock. Almost immediately, I recognize it: this is where my friend and I bailed out our boat. It hadn’t occurred to me at the time, riding the rush of adrenaline, that we had trespassed. I confess this to Dickinson.
“Well,” he smirks, “I’m sure you’re not the only one.” I ponder this a while and wonder where else we could have righted our boat. All this, as far as the eye can see, is private land. That arrangement has worked well to keep these waters pure and blue, and many of the landowners have forgone millions of dollars in property value toward that end. Still, it’s tough to shake a certain unease that a relative handful of landowners exert so much control over one of the state’s most beautiful waterways.
For lunch, Dickinson’s brought with him a cooler of cold cuts and bread and cheese along with pickles and onions that he slices paper thin to layer onto our sandwiches. He sets up two camp chairs for us beneath the shade of an oak tree, in sight of the river. “Isn’t this nice?” he says. “You could just let the world go by.” I close my eyes and listen to the river, which sounds like the wind. I open them again and follow the buzzards as they cruise on thermals overhead. It is nice, and I’m one of the few people alive who can say so.
This article originally appeared in the July 2024 issue of Texas Monthly with the headline “Can You Love a River to Death?” Subscribe today.
