Big Bend’s Jackass Flats and Little Burro Country Store
The first time I saw the sign for the new Little Burro Country Store at Jackass Flats on Texas Highway 118 sixty miles south of Alpine, I knew it would be my kind of place, an establishment that demanded I stop, look around, and find out what’s going on there in my corner of the Big Bend.
Jackass Flats?
How could there be a better name for this Chihuahua Desert land that at first glance looks like it was groomed by a befuddled Mother Nature after she had been building tropical gardens of Eden all over the world.
When you initially see them, parts of the Big Bend are like that; they look as if they are the ultimate expressions of “badlands,” a word which is an East Coast synonym for desert and a word I detest when it is applied to the Big Bend.
In fact, this Jackass Flats terrain twenty miles north of Study Butte-Terlingua is both bad land and good land, moonscape soil that looks like it could birth no plant, but is sprinkled with hearty cactus, moisture-loving Spanish dagger, muscular ocotillo, defensive prickly pear, and fat bunch grass. All beautiful plants, especially in their desert context.
Jackass Flats (JAF), the country store, surrounding out-buildings, Cactus Farm across the highway, and the JAF Improvement Association, Inc., are the work of Pam Gordon who is the full time resident and manager. The owners are Paul Burger, Titusville, Florida; Mary Annette Hunter, Silver Lake, Minnesota; and Pam.
She has taken over the territory after Mother Nature walked away tired doing her duty in West Texas.
I first met Pam on Monday, June 27, 2022, when I stopped in at JAF to look around. Some months ago, a friend, Woody Crumbo, Jr, had told me I should stop in and visit with his friend Pam.
Some History Notebook readers will know Woody because he came to Lovington a couple of years ago when the Max Evans documentary PBS film premiered at the Lea County Museum and the Lea Theater.
Woody passed away earlier this year. He was the son of Max’s close buddy and art mentor Woody Crumbo, Senior. The older Crumbo, who died in 1989, was one of the most famous Native American artists of the last century, a man who lived among a community of artists in Taos, New Mexico, just as Max did back in the 1950s and 1960s.
At any rate, I had an enjoyable visit with Pam, and I learned some about her life in the Big Bend and the incredible amount of work she has done in building and running JAF. It is a seasonally thriving community of folks who visit there on their way from Alpine to Terlingua and Big Bend National Park, and along and off of the highway the folks who have chosen to make their homes in the mountains, canyons, and mesas of this part of the Big Bend.
Since I have written about the Big Bend many times in the Lovington Leader, readers of this story will likely be familiar with the fact that wife Mary and I have a cabin on acreage we call South Camp.
Some may not be aware that we also have another piece of mesa land 20 miles or so as the crow flies from South Camp. We call that place Campo Frontera, which we have owned for almost three decades.
So the Harris family feels right at home in the community of some of the most interesting and creative people on the planet. Somehow we have landed in a territory full of runways to homes of painters, musicians, singers, writers, architects, geologists, and of course pilots who think of the Big Bend as a place far and way and too many miles to travel by automobile.
Thus, Pam has in her community individuals enough to entertain and enlighten folks from all over the world. Near the Harris camps are men and women who are from Europe, Canada, Mexico, and many states in the USA, from Connecticut, to California, and Alaska.
One couple near us has spent the two decades before they arrived in the Big Bend living on their boat as they traveled around the world more than once. We figure that after that much time on the ocean, they just need some steady years on dry land.
I think with Jackass Flats on Highway 118, Pam Gordon has found her fountain in the desert that just about anybody traveling to or from BBNP, Big Bend State Park, or the funky ghost town Terlingua will want to stop at the Little Burro Country Store.
She has what the character Sam Cable Hogue has in the Sam Pechinpah 1970 movie “The Ballad of Cable Hogue.”
That is a film directed by Sam Peckinpah and shot in Nevada. Its star is Jason Robarbs, and it is a film that novelist Max Evans played the role of a man riding shotgun on a stagecoach driven by the actor Slim Pickens.
Cable discovers a water source in the middle of a desert, and he turns it into a goldmine in the middle of a desert with water nowhere in sight.
What did Cable call his spring and accompanying acreage?
He called it Jackass Flats.
Now Pam tells me that the owners did not have the Cable Hogue movie in mind when they named their place in the Chihuahuan Desert Jackass Flats. In fact, there are many places in the world named Jackass Flats, including a town in Australia north of Melbourne. It’s also the name of federal land in Nevada, which is part of the US Army’s National Security Site, Area 25, for testing nuclear weapons.
Near the government land in the Amargosa Valley, there is a popular bar that is known as the Jackass Flats Bar.
Pam’s Jackass Flats is not a bar, but it is an area with a growing population interested in quality-of-life leisure time. Although I did not get to attend the live concert, she had her Tuesday night music at the Cactus Farm the day we met. Pam’s music venue features many men and women from the dozens of singers and musicians who have settled in southern Brewster and other neighboring West Texas counties.
Pam has live music events and Full Moon Pot Luck dinners and a Dutch Oven Cook Off in October.
It’s a little warm along the border during the summer months, but Mary and I are looking forward to being there just as often as we can, and stopping to see Pam and listen to some live music.
When we are on the road, the Harrises usually don’t travel very many miles without stopping to purchase something, and the Little Burro Country Store looks like it has just about anything we would need.
We’re sure happy Pam has helped create the community she has.
If you stop in, tell her where you learned about Jackass Flats.