Just beyond the northwest side Big Bend is a pit stop of a town called Study Butte and just down the road west of that is the ghost town, Terlingua.
This ghost town apparently plays host to an annual chili cook-off, but otherwise I knew nothing of the place. I imagined it as silent and dusty, with a west wind whispering unspeakable regrets through abandoned adobe homes, empty saloons and deserted barns. Indeed, I looked forward to the echo of creaking signs swinging in the wind, half-hinged doors banging at night and the distance howl of a lone wolf in nearby mountains.
Okay, have you got those images fixed in your mind? Well, allow me to now disabuse you of those notions. While Terlingua has a few buildings proudly preserved in the pristine state of abandoned deterioration, it is not a, “ghost town.” Do not expect something out of a Hollywood backlot movie set. Houses, businesses, gift shops and a wide array of civilized conveniences have built their livelihoods around the myth.
I arrived late at night and after a discussion with a chap who runs a showering facility operated out of a ground-anchored, wheel-less bus (I’m not making this up), I learned that the “ghost town” portion of Terlingua is set off the road in a darkened area easily visible during the day. However, getting to some of the buildings involves a potential fall into a ravine in the dark of night—or detouring by car to a near-by collection of simular buildings. I did manage to find the ravine without ending-up at the bottom of it. The initial group of ghost houses are situated across the road from the showering facility, both of which were just down the road from a nightclub and restaurant in one direction and gift shops in the opposite direction.
Talk about disappointing! At any rate, I took a few quick, uninspiring photos so that I could lay claim to the phrase Julius Caesar reportedly wrote regarding his brief 47 BC war with Pharnaces II of Pontus in the city of Zela: “Veni, Vidi, Vici.”
But, of course, the tourist trade has already conquered Terlingua.
Pictured above is the first of two, “Ghost house” photographs.
The original image is a Tagged Image Format File (TIFF) with a file data size of 35 megabytes (MB).
For display on this web site the TIFF was duplicated and the duplicate re-formatted as a Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPG/JPEG) image with a file data size of 2.64 MB. To approximate detail visible at the time of capture the image was sharpened as necessary and resampled via the Photoshop Bicubic Sharpen algorithm. The re-sampling increases the image resolution from 300 Dots Per Square Inch (DPI) to 360 DPI.
Unless otherwise noted the image was corrected to offset color shift and balance. This restores black (shadows), white (highlights) and neutral gray (neutral mid-tones).
• An unnumbered image is the only one of the subject matter.
• A number corresponds to the sequential order in a subject-matter-related sequence.
• The letter “B” indicates color correction to approximate what was visible when the image was captured.
• The letter “C” indicates enhancement beyond an approximation of what was visible at the time of capture.