The Texas Land

Start in the far east, where Texas is wettest, on water that looks like nothing else in the state: channels winding through a forest of bald cypress hung with Spanish moss. Read more Caddo Lake is one of Texas's few natural lakes that is not an oxbow, and it owes its existence to a logjam. The Great Raft, a mass of fallen timber that choked the Red River for somewhere between 80 and 165 miles, backed water up its tributaries; tree rings put the lake's birth around 1770 to 1800. Caddo legend says an earthquake made it.

Captain Henry Shreve's snag boats spent the 1830s tearing the raft apart, and the last of it was blown up with nitroglycerin in 1873. The water dropped, and the lake has been held up by a dam since 1914. It is a Ramsar wetland of international importance, one of the largest flooded cypress forests in the country, with more than seventy kinds of fish, alligators, and paddlefish.

South through the Piney Woods is the place the Park Service calls the biological crossroads of North America. Read more In the Big Thicket, southeastern swamps, eastern hardwood forest, central plains, pine savanna and dry sandhills all meet, and so do their plants and animals: about 1,320 kinds of vascular plants, more than 300 birds, and nearly 1,800 butterflies and moths. It is counted among the most biologically diverse places in the world, and was one of the first two national preserves, in 1974, and a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in 1981.

This pin is the Pitcher Plant Trail, a boardwalk over a wet savanna where four kinds of carnivorous plant grow: pitcher plants, sundews, bladderworts and butterworts, living on insects because the soggy, acid soil gives them almost nothing else. The original Thicket covered two to three million acres. About 113,000 are protected now.

The rivers of the east all run to the Gulf, and the coast they reach is a line of marsh, bay and barrier island. Read more The ground at Aransas National Wildlife Refuge first rose out of the sea about 120,000 years ago, and since 1937 it has been kept for birds, more than 400 kinds of them.

One matters more than the rest. Every winter the last wild flock of whooping cranes, North America's tallest bird, flies down from Wood Buffalo National Park in northern Canada to these marshes, arriving in late October and staying until April, living largely on blue crabs. Around 1941 there were just fifteen of them wintering here, and every whooping crane alive today descends from those fifteen. The Aransas flock numbered about 560 in 2025.

South along the coast the barrier islands run on, and Padre is the longest. Padre Island National Seashore protects seventy miles of it, which the Park Service calls the longest stretch of… Read more undeveloped barrier island in the United States: sixty-five miles of Gulf beach with dunes behind that can creep up to thirty-five feet a year. The island itself is young, built from sand in only the last five thousand years or so.

Behind it, from this height you can see the Laguna Madre, one of the few hypersaline lagoons left in the world, mostly about three feet deep and saltier than the sea because the sun evaporates it faster than the Gulf refills it. On the beach, Kemp's ridley sea turtles, the most endangered sea turtle there is, nest in greater numbers than anywhere else in the country, and all five Gulf sea turtle species have nested here.

Inland from the coast, the flat plain runs into a wall. The Balcones Escarpment is a line of faults where the Hill Country was lifted above the coastal plain, and along it, water held in the… Read more Edwards limestone finds its way out. The largest group of springs in Texas rises here in New Braunfels, pushed up under pressure through fissures along the Comal Springs fault into Landa Lake, at about seventy-two degrees all year.

The flow has averaged about 318 cubic feet a second, and it is measured more continuously than any other Edwards spring. In the drought of 1956 it nearly stopped. The river it makes, the Comal, runs only two to three miles before it joins the Guadalupe, and locals like to call it the shortest river in the country. The fountain darter, a fish under two inches long, lives only here and in the San Marcos.

Up the fault at San Marcos, the second largest springs in Texas pour from three big fissures and some two hundred smaller openings in the floor of Spring Lake, about 152 cubic feet a second on average. Read more Unlike Comal, they have never been known to stop. The water is so clear and so constant that it has made its own world: the Texas blind salamander, pale and nearly eyeless, lives only in the aquifer beneath, and Texas wild rice grows only in the river below. Both are endangered; the salamander was among the first species ever listed.

People have been drawn here for a very long time. Sediment cores show humans about 11,500 years ago, and it is believed to be one of the longest continuously inhabited places in North America. The lake itself dates from 1849, when the river was dammed for a mill.

The same limestone that holds the water is riddled with caves, and in this one lives what Bat Conservation International calls the largest bat colony in the world. Read more Every spring, pregnant Mexican free-tailed bats fly in from Mexico and farther south, and by summer an estimated fifteen to twenty million are roosting here. Nobody can count them exactly.

It is a maternity colony. Each mother has a single pup in late June, and the pups cling to the ceiling in crèches of four hundred or more to a square foot. At dusk the adults pour out of this crescent-shaped mouth, a hundred feet wide at the bottom of a collapsed sinkhole, in a column that can last hours, and each nursing mother eats nearly her own weight in insects before morning. BCI has owned the cave since 1992.

Above the escarpment, the Edwards Plateau has been carved by its rivers into the Hill Country, a land of deep, shaded canyons. Read more In this one, on the upper Sabinal River, grows a large, isolated stand of bigtooth maples, far from any others of their kind. The evidence suggests they are survivors of the last ice age, when the climate was cooler and wetter and maples grew widely; as it warmed, they held on only where these high canyon walls kept them shaded and damp.

For a few weeks each year, usually late October into early November, they turn red and gold, which is the one time the park is crowded. In spring the endangered golden-cheeked warbler nests here, a bird that nests only in Texas.

North of the limestone, the Hill Country opens a window into something far older. In the Llano Uplift, erosion has stripped the younger rock away and exposed the granite roots of an ancient mountain range. Read more Enchanted Rock is the most famous piece: a dome of pink granite that cooled from magma about a billion years ago, perhaps seven miles underground, and now rises some four hundred feet above the country around it to 1,825 feet.

As the rock above it wore away, the granite expanded and split into curved sheets that peel off like the layers of an onion, which is why it is a dome. On cool nights after hot days it creaks and groans as its surface contracts, and the Comanche and Tonkawa both feared and revered it. Rain pools in pits on top hold fairy shrimp, whose eggs wait out the dry months.

North of the Hill Country, the limestone tells a different story. A hundred and thirteen million years ago the edge of a shallow sea ran through here, and dinosaurs walked its tidal flats of lime mud. Read more The mud hardened, was buried, and has been uncovered again by the Paluxy River, which has cut down through the rock and scoured the track beds clean in its riverbed.

There are two kinds of tracks. Three-toed prints were most likely left by Acrocanthosaurus, a meat eater about thirty feet long. The huge round ones belong to a sauropod, a long-necked plant eater about seventy feet long, and they were the first distinct sauropod tracks ever found, proof that these animals walked on all fours on land. A boy found the first tracks after a flood in 1909, and Roland Bird of the American Museum of Natural History excavated some of them in 1940.

Far to the northwest, on the Canadian River in the Panhandle, the rock is older still: about 260 million years old, laid down in a shallow Permian sea. Read more Part of it turned into a hard, banded stone in maroon and many other colors, Alibates flint, and for some thirteen thousand years people came here for it.

Clovis mammoth hunters were the earliest known users, and their Alibates points turn up more than three hundred miles away. Folsom bison hunters followed. Later villagers dug most of the pits, more than 736 of them still on this mesa top, and traded the flint for Pueblo pottery, obsidian and Pacific shell. It was still being worked until around 1870. The quarries can be seen only on a ranger-led walk.

South of the Canadian, the High Plains are as flat as a table, until they suddenly are not. Read more The Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red River has spent about a million years cutting into the Caprock, and the result is Palo Duro Canyon, about eight hundred feet deep. Texas calls it the second largest canyon in the country; other counts rank it lower. Either way, it is the Grand Canyon of Texas.

Its walls are a layered history of about 250 million years. At the bottom are red Permian shales streaked with white gypsum, then Triassic layers in lavender, grey and orange, then a hard Triassic sandstone that caps the hoodoos, including the Lighthouse under this pin, and at the rim, the Ogallala, gravel and sand washed out from the Rocky Mountains. That rim rock also holds the Ogallala Aquifer.

Palo Duro is one notch in a much longer wall. The Caprock Escarpment is the eastern edge of the Llano Estacado, the High Plains, where the land drops as much as a thousand feet to the Rolling… Read more Plains below, and the streams that cut it feed the Red, the Brazos and the Colorado. At Caprock Canyons it has eroded into red Permian badlands.

It also holds the Texas State Bison Herd. By 1888 fewer than a thousand bison were thought to be left in North America, down from tens of millions. In 1878 Mary Ann Goodnight had urged her husband Charles to rescue orphaned calves, and their ranch herd became one of five that nearly every bison on the continent descends from. Its last fifty or so animals came to this park in the 1990s, perhaps the last of the southern plains bison, and they now number in the hundreds.

South and west of the Caprock the land dries out, and in places turns to sand. The Monahans Sandhills are part of a dune field that runs about two hundred miles, westward and north into New Mexico. Read more The sand is almost pure quartz, heaped into dunes up to fifty feet high or more, and most of them were built in the ice age, between about 25,000 and 16,000 years ago. Many still drift with the wind.

What holds much of the rest in place is a plant most people never notice: the shin oak, a true oak that stands under four feet tall when grown, with most of its bulk in roots that reach deep for water. There is fresh water surprisingly close beneath the dunes, and it sometimes seeps up between them. People were camping here twelve thousand years ago.

The highest ground in Texas was once the bottom of a sea. About 260 to 265 million years ago, a reef of sponges and algae grew along the rim of the Delaware Sea, a basin about 150 miles by 75, and… Read more thrived for some five million years. When the sea's channel to the ocean narrowed, it evaporated and buried the reef in salt. Millions of years later, faulting lifted it thousands of feet into the air.

That reef is the Guadalupe Mountains, and the Park Service calls it one of the best preserved fossil reefs in the world. El Capitan, the great pale cliff under this pin, is its prow, 8,085 feet high. Just behind it, Guadalupe Peak reaches 8,751 feet, the highest point in Texas. In McKittrick Canyon a spring-fed stream runs all year, and bigtooth maples turn in late October.

Even the desert has springs. At Balmorhea, San Solomon Springs push up about fifteen million gallons a day, some sources say twenty or more, from an aquifer fed partly by rain on the Davis… Read more Mountains, at seventy-two to seventy-six degrees all year. In the 1930s the Civilian Conservation Corps built a pool around them, 1.3 acres and twenty-five feet deep, often called the largest spring-fed swimming pool in the world. Swimmers share it with fish.

The pool drowned the natural desert wetland, or ciénega, and the park has since built a new one. It matters: the Comanche Springs pupfish, named for springs at Fort Stockton that went dry in 1955, now survives only in the Balmorhea springs, and the endangered Pecos gambusia depends on them too.

South to the Big Bend, where the Park Service says the Chisos are the only mountain range in the country wholly inside a national park. Read more They are volcanic, the remains of eruptions between about 42 and 32 million years ago, and they rise nearly a mile above the desert around them, to 7,832 feet at Emory Peak.

This pin is the Window, a pour-off where Oak Creek drains the Chisos Basin through a notch that frames the desert far below. The mountains also tell a comeback story. Black bears were common in 1901 and gone by 1944; in the late 1980s a female swam the Rio Grande from Mexico's Sierra del Carmen, and about thirty to forty bears live in the park now.

The tour ends where the rivers of Texas began it, with water. The Rio Grande swings around the Big Bend, the great curve that gives this country its name, and here it has sawn straight through a… Read more limestone block laid down in a Cretaceous sea: cliffs up to 1,500 feet high, a gorge as narrow as thirty feet, the tallest walls of any canyon in the park. The Park Service calls the Rio Grande the youngest major river system in the United States; it cut these canyons within the last two million years.

Facing into the canyon, the left wall is Mexico and the right is Texas, and the border runs down the middle of the river. A short trail crosses Terlingua Creek at the canyon mouth and follows the Texas wall in until it meets the water. Beyond that, there is only the river.