Natural Features in Comal County
Texas·5 places
Nature
Comal Springs
The largest spring system in Texas, discharging an average of about 290 cubic feet per second from the Edwards Aquifer along the Comal Springs fault, and the source of the Comal River — at roughly two and a half miles, one of the shortest rivers in the country.
Nature
Edwards Aquifer Recharge Zone
For roughly 30 miles along this stretch, the highway runs across the band where the Edwards limestone reaches the surface and creeks vanish into it. Streams draining off the plateau lose their water into sinkholes, fractures and caves here rather than running on to the coast, and that water reappears at Comal and San Marcos springs and in the wells that supply about two million people.
Nature
The Bracken Bat Column
Bracken Cave, in a hillside in southern Comal County, holds the largest concentration of mammals anywhere on earth. Up to twenty million Mexican free-tailed bats use it as a maternity roost through the summer, almost all of them females and their single pups. On a July evening the emergence begins around dusk and continues for hours.
Nature
The Upper Guadalupe
This is the Guadalupe River, and everything passing under the bridge is about ten miles from the end of its free-flowing life. Downstream the valley opens into Canyon Lake, impounded by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1964 for flood control on a river that had repeatedly wrecked New Braunfels and Seguin.
Nature
Where Cibolo Creek Sinks
Cibolo Creek crosses under US 281 here, and for much of the year the bed is dry stone. The Cibolo rises in Kendall County and flows southeast to the San Antonio River, and on the way it runs across one of the significant recharge features of the Edwards Aquifer.
Elsewhere in Texas
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