Natural Features in Blanco County
Texas·7 places
Nature
Flash Flood Alley
The low-water crossing signs along this road are not decoration. Central Texas, in a crescent following the Balcones Escarpment from west of San Antonio through Austin and up toward Waco, produces more flash floods per square mile than anywhere else in North America. Three things combine to do it.
Nature
Hill Country Whitetail
The Edwards Plateau carries more white-tailed deer than any comparable area in North America. Texas holds roughly five million whitetail altogether, and the densest concentration of them is here in the Hill Country. State survey units in the counties west of this road have run close to 265 deer per thousand acres, which works out at about one deer for every four acres.
Nature
The Blanco River at Blanco
The Blanco River rises in Kendall County and runs about eighty-seven miles east to the San Marcos River, and this crossing is near the top of it. Most of the time it is a modest, clear stream over limestone ledges, held just downstream in the long pool at Blanco State Park behind a set of small dams that a Civilian Conservation Corps company built in 1933 and 1934 and that are still in use.
Nature
The Pedernales at Johnson City
US 281 crosses the Pedernales River just north of Johnson City. The name is Spanish for flint, given for the chert cobbles in the riverbed, and Texans have said it as Purd-n-alice for long enough that the Spanish pronunciation now sounds wrong locally.
Nature
The Stair-Step Hills
The hills along this stretch of US 281 all have the same profile. A flat bench, a short steep riser, another bench, and every hill for miles repeating the same steps at the same heights. That is the Glen Rose Formation, a shallow-sea deposit about 110 million years old, laid down as alternating layers of hard limestone and soft marl.
Nature
The Trinity Aquifer
West of the Edwards outcrop the country drinks from a different aquifer. The Hill Country Trinity is a stack of older Cretaceous sands and limestones, and unlike the Edwards it neither takes water quickly nor gives it back in great springs. It fills slowly, through fractures and thin soil, and a well drilled into it produces modestly and recovers slowly.
Nature
The Twin Sisters
Two matched hills stand west of the highway here, about 1,760 feet at the summit and several hundred feet above the road, and they have been a landmark for as long as anyone has travelled this line. The community below took their name.
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.
