By Scott McMillan
Photographs by Blake Gordon
Most mornings, Warner Glenn is in the saddle by the time the sun rises on his Malpai Ranch, tucked away in Arizona’s southeastern corner. At 79, Glenn stands about 6 feet 5 inches, as straight as an arrow and just about that big around, deeply tanned from a life in the desert. He likes to bring his Walker hounds along so that they can exercise their legs, their lungs, their noses. When he leaves them behind, they put up quite a racket. “They think I forgot something,” Glenn shouts above the howling one March morning, the heat already building.
Glenn points his horse uphill toward the Peloncillo Mountains, picking through the agave and prickly pear, and through the jagged volcanic rock—the malpai that gives his ranch its name. On one hilltop, he points to a rectangle of stones about the size of a coffin where his dogs recently sniffed out a man hiding with binoculars and a cellphone—probably a drug smuggler, he says. Such encounters aren’t unusual in a region known as the Malpai Borderlands, where Arizona and New Mexico bump into each other atop the Mexican border.
It’s a hard place, a land that requires wisdom and strength if a person wants to make a living from it. But it’s also an achingly beautiful place. Two mountain systems and two deserts converge here, funneling vast diversity into roughly a million acres: dozens of butterfly species, 295 kinds of birds, some 4,000 plant species. Glenn has even twice spotted a jaguar—some of the only North American sightings of the animal in decades.
“The fact they’re showing up every once in a while tells us we’re doing something right, here and in Mexico,” he says, adding that he’s hoping to see another jaguar this year. ...
http://www.nature.org/magazine/archives/new-life-in-the-badlands.xml
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