For the past six decades a few thousand chile pepper loving oddballs, freaks, and weirdos have descended upon Terlingua, Texas in the Chihuahuan Desert in early November to pay tribute to Wick Fowler and Frank X. Tolbert at the Original Terlingua International Championship Chili Cookoff.

Mr Fowler is the most legendary chili cook in the history of the Lone Star state while Mr. Tolbert penned thousands of words on the importance of chili to the great state’s citizenry. Both men are institutions in Texas and regarded with the same importance as Sam Houston or William B. Travis.

A rival contest takes place down the road a piece from the originators but little attention is paid to those upstarts.

Last week I traveled 1,001 miles from my home in New Orleans to west Texas via airplane and station wagon to take in what has become the most important cookoff in the chili canon.

Bear in mind there are thousands and thousand of chili-based cooking competitions staged across the US annually; however, Terlingua is the granddaddy and there’s really not much room for debate.

Even to be allowed to compete you must begin accruing points over an 11 month rampup to the grand finale.

Pulling onto the festival grounds feels like coming home. I first visited Terlingua in 1993, and while my attendance has not been perfect I’ve lost count of how many cookoffs I’ve attended. The Trans-Pecos region of Texas feels like the promised land.

Hundreds of makeshift campsites are dotted across thousands of acres of scrub land, arroyos, mesas, playas and dune fields. You could be walking across Neptune and not know the difference. Tarantulas the size of pie plates are commonplace. If you hear a high pitched scream at night don’t worry. It just means one has made themselves at home in a chili lover’s tent.

Deep in the scrum of campers it’s hard to walk fifty feet without somebody offering you a cold beer or styrofoam bowl of Texas Red.

The Chihuahuan is the largest desert in North America and you could not imagine a more perfect setting for a chili cookoff. When the cold Lone Stars and tequila get to flowing all bets are off. Wild times are available if you’re of a mind. Everybody’s blasting Doug Sahm, Gary P. Nunn and Jerry Jeff Walker.

A favored activity is walking down ‘cooker’s row’ on Saturday morning as the chili cooks prepare their concoctions for the judges. There’s a low-level tension afoot as you move from camp to camp. The contestants are having fun but you can feel the seriousness in the air. To bring a little levity to the situation I like to hand the cooks a pad and pen whilst casually telling them to ‘just go ahead write that recipe down for me right quick Hoss.’

When I’ve asked for cooking advice from former Terlingua grand champions a common refrain is that less is more. Keep removing extraneous ingredients and make your bowl as bare bones as possible if you’re looking to up your game and enter the medal rounds.

At turn-in when it’s time for voting I always offer a silent prayer that no masked desperados on horseback will hijack the ballot box as has happened in the past.

Judging chili shootouts is hard work. Eating dozens of spoonfuls of chili sounds like fun til you factor in that some of the folks in the competition are less skilled cooks than others. Even with fresh melon and crackers as intermezzo there is a certain sameness to many of the entries.

I retired from the game after a decade and it took a few months for my tastebuds to realign to the point where I could enjoy cumin, Mexican oregano, and chile powder again.

Saturday afternoon is when the weekend hits a climax. The judges have been at table for hours and hours slowly whittling down the contestants til we get to the top 20. The campers descend from the nearby hills and the chili cooks situate themselves near the judging pavilion to find out where they placed.

The mood is joyous and there’s plenty whopping and hollering as the emcee slowly announces the cooks who have made the lower-ranks.

The crowd reaches a fever pitch when Tom Kreutzer of Canyon Lake, Texas, is announced as first place winner. Bonhomie and good cheer fill the pavilion as the champ takes the stage where Texas legend Tom Nall awaits to hand over the trophy.

At the end of a long day of chili eating, beer drinking and relaxing with hundreds of like-minded Texas compadres I climb into the rear of the station wagon and situate myself with the hatch open.

The skies at night in this part of the world are something to behold. Thousands of stars and planets are aligned across the inky dark. Somebody at a camp nearby is playing an old Freddy Fender song. I daydream and drift off thinking about the grand lives that Wick Fowler and Frank Tolbert built for themselves through cooking chili, writing about chili and building a community of chili lovers out here on the mesas.

They will never be forgotten.

Viva Terlingua.