Natural Features in Austin County
Texas·3 places
Nature
Mill Creek and the Sand Hills
The low sandy rises here are old river deposits, not hills in any structural sense — the streams draining this stretch have cut down through layers of sand and clay laid along successive Gulf shorelines, leaving the more resistant sand standing as gentle ridges.
Nature
The Brazos Bottom at San Felipe
The Brazos carries more water than any other river wholly inside Texas, and it has spent the last several thousand years swinging back and forth across this floodplain rather than staying put. The result is a meander belt several miles wide, full of abandoned channels and crescent-shaped oxbow lakes that mark where the river used to be.
Nature
The Coastal Prairie's Inland Edge
The open country along this stretch is the far inland margin of the Gulf Coast tallgrass prairie, which once ran about six million acres from Corpus Christi into Louisiana and is now reduced to well under one percent of that. This edge is where it grades into post oak savannah, and the boundary was held for millennia by fire and grazing bison rather than by soil alone.
Elsewhere in Texas
Hear it from the road
Whistlestop tells you this story automatically when you drive past. No searching, no tapping, nothing to ask.
