Over the winter I took a trip to my family's property in Brewster County, Texas. It's located off of Highway 118 about an hour south of Alpine. While it's pretty much all desert (think greasewood flats and cactus), it's a beautiful place — at least I think it is. No one lives there now. My great-grandparents did for a time, but a tornado severely damaged the place in 1996, and it’s been a fairly primitive setup ever since.

I was down there over the winter with a good friend from church who also had a connection to the area. We discovered that our family properties were barely 20 miles apart, and we had an instant connection. While his family no longer has access to the property he used to visit, my family still owns ours. After talking about it for over a year, we finally convinced our wives to let us take a week-long trip down there the week after Thanksgiving of last year.

The property sits about two miles off the highway and is down in a basin that acts as a watershed for Terlingua Creek, which runs all the way to the Rio Grande. Getting down there from the highway requires a high-clearance vehicle with four-wheel drive. As a kid, my dad somehow managed it with a 1996 Ford Econoline conversion van while pulling a U-Haul. How he did that, I will never know.

The week that I was there with my friend, we spent time hiking, cooking out, and exploring parts of my family's property I had never been to. One of my favorite spots, though, is the portion of Terlingua Creek that runs through the property. We have found fossils of clams and other sea life from when the whole area used to be under water millions of years ago.

There is a section that is fairly straight and runs towards a cliff before eventually turning and cutting a 30 foot deep chasm into the creek bottom that my family affectionately calls "The Bathtub". Most of the time, the creek only holds small pools of water, but I remember one trip as a kid when the water was up to my waist. My grandfather held my hand as we walked, and I remember wanting to keep going. He knew what I didn’t — that we were getting close to the Bathtub, and didn’t want us walking into it without being able to see it.

My friend and I were down at the property right in the middle of mule deer season, and we talked about the possibility of doing some hunting while we were there. We weren't sure we were going to make it happen, but one day we decided to just go for it. We decided to try to do a sit at dusk, so we parked the truck around 4:45pm, loaded the one rifle I brought, and made our way down to the creek. We picked a spot at the edge of an overlook on the section of the creek that was fairly straight so that we could see up and down the creek about 200 yards in either direction.

The wind was favorable — blowing in our faces from the west and heading back the direction we had come from. I handed my friend the monocular and I set up my grandfather's Marlin 336 chambered in .35 Remington on some shooting sticks. I know — .35 Remington isn't exactly the cartridge you think of for open country like that, but it was what I had been using most of the season. I had just put a new scope on the other hunting rifle I had, a Ruger M77, the old "tang safety" model, chambered in .270 Winchester and also belonging to my late grandfather, so the .35 Remington was the rifle I had the most confidence in at the moment. Loaded with Hornady's Leverevolution ammo with the 200-grain flex-tip bullet, the cartridge could reasonably be stretched out to 200 yards, which is about as far as I would want to shoot anyway.

So there we were, overlooking the creek and watching the shadows. The breeze was refreshing and it was a pleasant evening, just cool enough to bring a jacket. Scaled quail were flying back and forth over our heads as the sun began sinking low to the west. I remembered the scene from Lonesome Dove where Woodrow Call keeps watch with his Henry Repeater rifle on top of a rise overlooking the Rio Grande, and for a moment, I could almost imagine it was real.

The longer I sat, though, the more I began thinking a lot about people and place. I thought about my family's history, the land, and our connection to it. It felt special and privileged — to be sitting in a place that meant so much to the people I love, thinking about those who aren’t here anymore and how much they would have appreciated being there alongside us, doing exactly what we were doing. Eventually the shadows grew long enough and we called it a night. Although we didn't see any mule deer, it was anything but a wasted evening.