It’s a fragile little grass, with a fragile future. Guadalupe fescue was first identified in the Guadalupe Mountains in 1932 – but hasn’t been seen in its namesake Texas range for decades. By the early 2000s, it was known at only two locations – in Boot Canyon in Big Bend National Park, and in the Maderas del Carmen range, opposite the park in Mexico.
The plant was designated an endangered species in 2017, and a binational team of scientists mobilized to save it. They’ve experienced exhilaration and discouragement, and their efforts to “rescue the fescue” continue.
Dr. Helen Poulos is a botanist at Wesleyan University.
“It's interesting to see the number of people that continue to want to work on this little charismatic, precarious grass,” Poulos said. “It's kind of neat to try to help a grass recover from climate change and wildfires.”
With colleagues from the U.S. and Mexico, including Coahuila’s Narro University, she’s immersed in fescue rescue.
The team’s first task, she said, was to understand the mysterious plant. Growing in bunches, Guadalupe fescue has slender, curving stems up to 2-and-a-half-feet high. The grass was likely more widespread during the Ice Age, when conditions here were cooler and wetter. Now, it’s not only confined to isolated mountain canyons, but, the scientists found, to marginal habitats within those locales. It grows mostly in rocky areas, with partial shade.
These high-country forests are subject to periodic wildfire, and the team thought the grass might have evolved to thrive after such blazes. Then, in 2021, they had a real-world test, when the South Rim 4 Fire burned through the Chisos.
“The fire burned right through the population and killed over 50% of the plants,” Poulos said. “We have not seen regeneration in those plants. The numbers are not back. We had obviously the very severe 2023 and 2024 droughts. What we have found is, at least in August there weren't any new babies.”
But even as one fescue population had been decimated, there were exciting discoveries. The Texas mountains may be challenging to hike, but they don’t compare to the remote Mexican ranges, Poulos said. Trekking into the wild backcountry, the scientists identified two new populations in the Carmen Mountains. And 100 miles to the south, they discovered Guadalupe fescue growing in another range – the Sierra de la Madera.
Poulos and her colleagues are also working to increase fescue numbers. They’ve collected seeds and cultivated plants in greenhouses at Narro and Sul Ross State University. Those plants have been introduced in the Chisos and the Carmens – with promising results.
“We learned that planting in the fall is good,” Poulos said, “and most of the plants have continued to survive and grow.”
The next step, Poulos said, is to build outdoor nurseries at Big Bend National Park and in Mexico – where “insurance populations” of Guadalupe fescue can be grown, for reintroduction into the wild.
The team continues to monitor the wild fescue populations, and they now plan to measure “recruitment” – whether new baby fescues are taking root. After two years of extreme drought, the Chisos saw robust rains this summer, and the scientists visited to assess the impacts.
“We would've thought that the 2025 amazing monsoon would've made them all flower,” Poulos said. “We went up there in August and lots of grasses were flowering, but not that plant so much.”
It underscores the most fundamental threat to the endangered grass: climate change, and the intensifying heat, drought and fire it brings. Those forces threaten not only the fescue, but all the lifeforms that rely on our region’s “sky islands,” these forested mountains amidst the Chihuahuan Desert “sea.” Guadalupe fescue embodies the precarious fate of these special places.
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