Nature
Balcones Escarpment at Salado
Salado Creek runs off the escarpment here through a set of springs that made this a crossing on the Chisholm Trail and before that on the Camino Real. This is near the northern end of the Balcones zone, where the escarpment is lower and less obvious than it is at San Antonio but still separates the Lampasas Cut Plain to the west from the blackland to the east.
Nature
The Blackland Prairie
The soil here is a deep, dark clay that swells when wet and cracks open when dry, sometimes to a depth of several feet — a vertisol, weathered out of the soft Cretaceous marl and chalk underneath. It grew a tallgrass prairie of little bluestem and Indiangrass that ran in a belt from San Antonio to the Red River, and because the soil was extraordinarily fertile, essentially all of it was plowed.
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.
