Nature
Bluebonnets and the Mowing Calendar
The wildflowers along these shoulders are managed, not accidental. The state highway department has sown seed along its rights of way since the 1930s and now buys tens of thousands of pounds a year, and — the part that actually matters — it holds off mowing until the flowers have set seed. Lady Bird Johnson pushed that practice into policy nationally in the 1960s.
Nature
Feral Hogs
The rooted-up ground along these bottoms is the work of feral hogs, descended from Spanish domestic pigs turned loose centuries ago and from Eurasian wild boar released for hunting in the twentieth century.
Nature
The Bluff at Monument Hill
The ground drops away sharply here where the Colorado has undercut a bluff a couple of hundred feet above the river — a rare piece of relief in country that is otherwise long, low rises. The exposure is sandstone and clay of the Eocene, laid down some 40 million years ago when the shoreline of the Gulf stood far inland of where it is now, and the whole belt of similar rock runs northeast across…
Nature
The Colorado at La Grange
The river swings hard against the bluff on one side and leaves a wide flat on the other, which is the ordinary behaviour of a meander — fast water on the outside of a bend cuts, slow water on the inside drops its load. That flat is why the town is where it is: deep alluvial soil that grew cotton, with a ford at the bend.
Nature
The Lignite Belt
Underneath this stretch is coal that used to be a swamp. Roughly 40 to 50 million years ago the Gulf shoreline sat about here, and the peat that accumulated in coastal marshes was buried and compressed into lignite — brown coal, the softest and youngest kind, still soft enough to see plant fibres in.
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.
