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- Nature·Austin County
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 u…
- Nature·Bastrop County
The Colorado at Bastrop
This crossing is old — a ford on the Camino Real, the Spanish road between San Antonio and the Louisiana settlements, chosen because the river runs over a firm sand and gravel bottom here instead of t…
- Nature·Colorado County
The Colorado at Columbus
The Colorado has cut a deep, tightly curved loop here, and the town sits inside the bend. Rivers on a flat coastal plain normally wander freely, but this one is entrenched — it cut down into older ter…
- Nature·Fayette County
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 insi…
- Nature·Bastrop County
The Colorado at Smithville
The river here runs on sand rather than clay, and that change is the beginning of something: the highway is entering the belt of deep sandy soils that supports the isolated pine forest a few miles ahe…
- Nature·Travis County
The Colorado Enters Austin
The river arrives here having just left the Hill Country, and the change is abrupt: a few miles upstream it runs in a limestone canyon, and here it is on the coastal plain in a wide, flat valley. That…
- Nature·Burnet County
The Colorado River at Marble Falls
The river drops over a granite ledge here — the falls the town is named for, now under Lake Marble Falls since the dam went in. The stone is not marble but granite from the Llano Uplift, and Granite M…
- Nature·Colorado County
The Colorado River Valley
The highway follows the Colorado from here most of the way to Austin, and the river is doing something unusual for a coastal-plain stream: it runs in a valley it cut for itself, with distinct terraces…
- Nature·Val Verde County
The Devils River
Often called the clearest and least spoiled river in Texas, and it is clear for a specific reason: almost all of its water arrives as spring flow through limestone rather than as runoff, so it carries…
- Nature·Harris County
The Drowned Subdivision at Brownwood
Brownwood was a waterfront neighborhood of several hundred homes that sank into Galveston Bay over about forty years. As nearby industry pumped groundwater the land dropped as much as ten feet, so yar…
- Industry & Science·Dallas County
The Eagle Ford Shale
The shale that reordered the American oil industry is named after a small settlement swallowed by west Dallas. Geologists described the formation from outcrops here in the 1880s, and the name stuck to…
- Nature·Uvalde County
The Frio River
Frio means cold, and it earns the name — the river is fed by springs emerging from the Edwards limestone at a steady temperature, so it runs notably colder than the summer air above it. It has cut a c…
- Nature·Harris County
The Ground Beneath Houston
There is no bedrock anywhere near the surface here. Houston sits on thousands of feet of sand and clay washed off the Rocky Mountains and dumped by rivers across a subsiding coastal plain, and the lay…
- Nature·Harris County
The Gulf Coast Aquifer
The water under this ground arrives from the north. Rain falls on the sandy outcrops up toward the Piney Woods, sinks into the Chicot and Evangeline sands, and moves seaward through them for decades b…
- Nature·Harris County
The Houston Toad's Missing Home
There is a federally endangered amphibian named for this city that no longer lives anywhere near it. The Houston toad was described in the 1950s from specimens collected here, needs deep sandy soil to…
- Nature·Harris County
The Katy Prairie
The flat, treeless ground west of Houston is the surviving edge of the Gulf Coast tallgrass prairie, which once ran roughly six million acres from Corpus Christi into Louisiana. Well under one percent…
- Nature·Harris County
The Last Unstraightened Bayou
Most of Houston's bayous were dredged, straightened and lined with concrete in the twentieth century to move water faster. Armand Bayou was not, and it is now one of the few in the region still runnin…
- Nature·Fayette County
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 compresse…
- Nature·Llano County
The Llano Uplift
The riverbed here is full of pink and gray boulders that belong to no other part of Texas. This is a broad structural dome about 65 miles across where erosion has stripped away the flat-lying limeston…
- Nature·Harris County
The Long Point Fault
There is a fault running under this part of Houston, and it does not make earthquakes. Gulf Coast growth faults form as thick piles of sediment slump seaward, and they move by slow creep rather than s…
- Nature·Bastrop County
The Lost Pines
A stand of loblolly pine grows here about 100 miles west of the main East Texas pine forest, separated from it by prairie that pines cannot cross. The reason is underfoot: the Carrizo Sand, a band of …
- Industry & Science·Caldwell County
The Luling-Mexia Fault Zone
A second, older set of faults runs roughly parallel to the Balcones about 30 miles inland, and unlike the Balcones it made people rich. These faults are growth faults, formed as coastal sediments slum…
- Nature·Brewster County
The Marathon Basin
The low, sharply folded ridges here are a window into rock that is buried everywhere else in Texas. These are Paleozoic sediments, up to about 500 million years old, crumpled when the ancestral North …
- Nature·Colorado County
The Monarch Funnel
Texas is the neck of an hourglass for monarch butterflies. Nearly the entire eastern North American population passes through the state twice a year, funneling down in autumn toward a handful of mount…
- History·Uvalde County
The Nueces Strip
For twelve years this river, not the Rio Grande, was where Texas ended as far as Mexico was concerned. The Republic claimed the Rio Grande in 1836; Mexico recognized the Nueces; and the 150 miles of b…
- Nature·Chambers County
The Nutria
The large rodent swimming in these ditches with orange front teeth is a nutria, a South American animal that arrived on the Gulf Coast for fur farming in the 1930s and got out — a hurricane and a good…
- Nature·Hale County
The Ogallala Aquifer
The flat farmland here sits on the Ogallala, a layer of sand and gravel washed east off the Rocky Mountains between about 10 and 2 million years ago, and it holds the groundwater that made large-scale…
- Nature·Galveston County
The Oyster Reefs of Galveston Bay
The reefs under this bay are built by animals, like a coral reef, but out of eastern oysters cementing themselves to the shells of previous generations. They are the structural habitat of the bay — cr…
- Nature·Colorado County
The Post Oak Savannah
This belt of scrubby oak and grass is a genuine transition zone — the band where the eastern forest gives out and the prairie begins, running northeast across Texas between the Piney Woods and the Bla…
- History·Cooke County
The Red River Boundary
The state line here is a river that will not hold still. The Red River meanders across a wide sandy bed and shifts its channel in floods, which left the Texas-Oklahoma boundary genuinely uncertain for…
- Nature·Harris County
The Salt Domes Beneath Houston
Buried under this part of the city is a column of salt several miles deep. It was laid down in a Jurassic sea, and because salt is less dense than the rock piled on it, it has been slowly rising throu…
- Nature·Bastrop County
The Sandy Country at Buescher
The rolling, sandy, pine-and-oak country here is the eastern lobe of an isolated forest sitting about a hundred miles west of the main East Texas pinelands. The deep sand holds enough moisture through…
- Nature·Harris County
The Sinking of Houston
The ground across this part of Harris County is measurably lower than it was a century ago. Pumping groundwater out of the sand and clay beneath the city let the clay layers compact, and the surface c…
- Nature·Harris County
The Tree That Took the Prairie
The dense stands of heart-shaped leaves along these roadsides are Chinese tallow, and almost none of this landscape looked like that a century ago. The tree was brought to the American South for the w…
- Nature·Chambers County
The Trinity Delta at Anahuac
The Trinity River ends here in a delta of freshwater marsh grading into brackish and then salt marsh, and that gradient is what makes the area so productive — most of the shrimp, crab and finfish take…
- Nature·Harris County
The Waugh Bridge Bats
A colony of Mexican free-tailed bats estimated in the hundreds of thousands lives in the expansion joints under this bridge over Buffalo Bayou, in the middle of the city. Unlike most Texas colonies of…
- Nature·Bastrop County
Where the Houston Toad Actually Lives
The endangered toad named for Houston has not lived there since about 1970, and this sandy county is its last real stronghold. It needs two things that rarely occur together: soil loose enough to burr…
- Nature·Montgomery County
Where the Piney Woods Begin
The change from prairie to pine forest happens over a remarkably short distance north of Houston, and the reason is soil and rain together — a few more inches of annual rainfall and sandier, better-dr…
- Nature·Bastrop County
Where the Sand Gives Way to Clay
The soil changes over a short distance along this stretch, from the loose sand that supports the Lost Pines to the dense dark clay of the Blackland Prairie approaching Austin. That single change decid…
- Nature·Harris County
White Oak Bayou and the Concrete Years
This bayou was rebuilt as a drainage machine. Through the middle of the twentieth century long reaches of White Oak were straightened and lined with concrete on the reasoning that flooding is solved b…