Bead-Lobo Olive Brown Gray Stone TB

Please drop this item in rural or Premium Member Only caches.  Do not drop it in an urban cache or leave it behind at a caching event.  Transport the bug in the original plastic bag for as long as the bag lasts; this prevents the chain and tag tangling with other items.  Otherwise, take this travel bug anywhere you wish.  No permission needed to leave the U.S.

Small Stone Donut Focal.  While the TB owner lives on the Southern High Plains in the Panhandle of northwest Texas, he has spent considerable time in what many Texans would call Far West Texas.  It remains a favorite part of the state.  Much of it is the Chihuahuan Desert.  In the desert are remotes outposts of civilization and even mountains that rise high enough to harbor junipers and pines.  This travel bug commemorates a favorite place in the region, partly because the history and partly because of memories.

Lobo’s  water had been discovered before the Civil War and the wells were the reason for the town to be on the San Antonio-San Diego Stagecoach Mail Route.  The water even seemed abundant enough to make the town a water stop for steam locomotives in the 1880s.
 
The town lost population after the seat (Culberson County) went to Van Horn in 1911.  When the population approached 90 people, the water table fell.  The population was estimated at 40 in the mid 1970s when a man named Bill Crist bought the entire town to revive it, but it failed.  In 1991 Lobo was abandoned by its last residents.  It remains on private property. 
 
The history of the little community is interesting enough, but the writer’s interaction with the place was to find a trail along the west side of the Sierra Vieja in the late 1960s.  We were told the Lobo postmistress might have some information.  She did know of a track, but more than that she regaled us with some history of the area we intended to travel.  She reported that Jay Gould (the railroad developer and speculator) built a railroad with Chinese laborers from the Lobo siding to a seam of coal on the west side of the Sierra Vieja.  Gould sold stock in the mine but it was never developed.  The tracks were pulled up and Gould wend off to something else. 
 
We took off and found much of the trail on the old railroad bed; we followed it through a tunnel to an old trestle.  We scrambled across the trestle and explored the shaft; it was little more than an extended adit.  However, it had extensive use by bats, judging by the guano.  We continued our trip southward, and with some road repair here and there we passed through the communities of Candelaria and Ruidosa then on to Presidio.  We tried to repeat the trip some years later and found our way blocked by a new fence and a locked gate.