Natural Features in Texas
105 places·1 county·Page 2 of 3
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Transport·McLennan County
The Brazos at Waco
The Brazos is the longest river entirely within Texas at about 840 miles, and this crossing is why Waco is here. The suspension bridge just upstream opened in 1870 with a single span of 475 feet — the longest suspension span west of the Mississippi at the time — built with around three million bricks fired on site because there was no railroad to bring materials in. Herds on the Chisholm Trail paid a toll to cross it rather than swim the river.
Nature·Austin County
The Brazos Bottom at San Felipe
The Brazos carries more water than any other river wholly inside Texas, and it has spent the last several thousand years swinging back and forth across this floodplain rather than staying put. The result is a meander belt several miles wide, full of abandoned channels and crescent-shaped oxbow lakes that mark where the river used to be. The deep silt it left behind grows bottomland hardwood forest — pecan, cedar elm, sugarberry and green ash — and it is the reason Stephen F.
Nature·Lubbock County
The Caprock Escarpment
The flat plain west of here ends in a wall a few hundred feet high running some 200 miles north to south, and the thing holding it up is a layer of caliche — calcium carbonate precipitated out of groundwater into a hard crust, capping softer red beds beneath. That cap is what makes the Llano Estacado so extraordinarily flat, and its edge is what makes the break so abrupt. Coronado's chroniclers described the plain above in 1541 as a sea with no landmark to steer by.
Nature·Harris County
The Cattle Egret's Arrival
The white birds standing among cattle in these fields are cattle egrets, and unlike almost every other bird here they arrived on their own. The species is native to Africa, crossed the Atlantic to South America in the late 1800s under its own power, worked north through the Caribbean, reached Florida in the 1940s and the Texas coast in the 1950s.
Nature·Hays County
The Cedar That Is Not a Cedar
The dark, dense trees covering these hillsides are Ashe juniper, and they are not cedars. The name stuck because the wood smells like one. They are also not newcomers: juniper pollen appears in Central Texas sediment cores well back into the Pleistocene, and Ferdinand Lindheimer, botanising in this country in 1845, described wide cedar brakes along the Comal River. What has changed is the proportion.
Nature·Brewster County
The Chisos Mountains
The only mountain range entirely contained within a U.S. national park, and the southernmost range in the continental United States. The peaks are volcanic — lava flows, ash falls and intrusions from a period of intense eruption between about 47 and 32 million years ago, sitting on top of much older sedimentary rock. The elevation makes them an island: black bear, Mexican jay and Douglas fir survive here in cool, wet conditions surrounded on all sides by Chihuahuan Desert.
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 under one percent of that. This edge is where it grades into post oak savannah, and the boundary was held for millennia by fire and grazing bison rather than by soil alone.
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 the mud it carries further down. The banks are lined with bald cypress and sycamore, and the pines come down almost to the water, which is an unusual combination this far west.
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 terraces rather than sliding sideways, which is why the meanders are so pronounced and so fixed in place. The bluffs above the channel expose the sands and clays of that older floodplain, and the gravel bars in the river are quartz carried down from the Llano Uplift, hundreds of miles upstream.
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 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. The Colorado carried enough sediment historically to be one of the muddiest rivers in the state, and the dams upstream have since taken most of that load out of it.
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 ahead. Sandbars, clear runs and a bottom of loose quartz grains distinguish this reach from the muddy Colorado further down.
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 break is the Balcones fault zone, and the city grew along it.
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 Mountain a few miles west supplied the roughly 15,000 carloads of pink granite used to build the Texas Capitol, donated by its owners in exchange for the state's labor and a railroad spur.
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 stepping down to the modern channel. Each terrace is an old floodplain, abandoned when the river cut deeper during a period of lower sea level, so the flats a mile back from the water are older river bottoms stranded above it.
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 very little sediment. It runs through country with essentially no towns on it, and access is so limited that the state manages both a natural area and a paddling permit system for it. Below here the river disappears into Amistad Reservoir.
Nature·Hays County
The Dripping Springs
Dripping Springs takes its name from a set of small seeps that settlers found here in the 1850s, on a tributary of Onion Creek a few hundred yards north of this road. They still run, and they are a good illustration of how Hill Country water works. That is Trinity Aquifer water, emerging where the ground has cut down to a permeable layer, and springs like it are what hold a base flow in Onion Creek through months when nothing at all is running off the surface.
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 yards that had been dry became tidal, streets flooded on ordinary high water, and Hurricane Alicia finished it in 1983.
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 a layer of organic-rich Cretaceous mudstone that dips southeast and lies a mile or two underground across South Texas. Hydraulic fracturing reached it in 2008, and within five years the play was producing over a million barrels a day — from rock that at this end of it you can walk on.
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 canyon into the southern rim of the Edwards Plateau here with bluffs several hundred feet high. Bat Cave nearby holds a maternity colony of Mexican free-tailed bats numbering in the millions, and the evening emergence is visible on weather radar.
Nature·Hays County
The Golden-cheeked Warbler
Of all the birds in North America, one breeds nowhere but Central Texas. The golden-cheeked warbler is a small black and yellow songbird that nests in the juniper and oak woodland on slopes like these and nowhere else on earth. It is particular about the reason. The female builds her nest almost entirely from long strips of bark peeled from mature Ashe juniper, bound together with spider silk, and no other material will do.
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 layer everything is built on — the Beaumont Formation — is a Pleistocene clay laid down when sea level was different.
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 before reaching wells around Houston — which is why the aquifer recharges far too slowly to keep up with a metropolitan area. It is the same withdrawal that caused the region's subsidence, and the shift toward surface water from Lake Livingston and Lake Houston is a direct consequence.
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 burrow into and clean seasonal ponds to breed in, and lost both to the city's growth — it was gone from Harris County by around 1970. It became one of the first amphibians ever placed on the U.S.
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 of it is left in anything like original condition, which makes it one of the most reduced ecosystems in North America.
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 running in its own meanders through bottomland forest and tidal marsh — close to 2,500 acres of it preserved, with alligators, bobcats and a reintroduced bison herd grazing restored prairie above the water.
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 compressed into lignite — brown coal, the softest and youngest kind, still soft enough to see plant fibres in. The Wilcox Group carries it in a band running northeast across Texas roughly parallel to the coast, and it has been strip-mined near here to burn for electricity.
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 limestone of the Hill Country and exposed the Precambrian basement beneath it — granite, gneiss and schist between about 1.0 and 1.4 billion years old, the oldest rock at the surface in the state.
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 sudden rupture — the evidence is offset curbs, stepped pavement and a persistent line of cracked foundations rather than anything anyone feels.
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 deep, porous sand that outcrops in a stripe running northeast across the state, holds enough water in a drier climate to support a tree that otherwise needs the rainfall of the Piney Woods.
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 slumped toward the Gulf, and they trap oil against their broken edges. Edgar Davis brought in the Luling field along this trend in 1922 after six dry holes, and the same fault zone runs northeast through Mexia and on toward Talco, marking one oil field after another.
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 American and South American plates collided to build the Ouachita mountain chain around 300 million years ago.
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 mountain fir forests in Michoacán and coming back north in spring. The insect that leaves Mexico is not the one that reaches Canada — the spring migrants lay eggs on milkweed here in Texas and die, and it takes another two or three generations to complete the trip north.
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 brush country between them was left as a disputed and largely lawless belt. Sending U.S. troops into that gap in 1846 is what started the Mexican-American War.
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 many deliberate releases finished the job. They are semiaquatic, breed several times a year, and eat the roots of marsh plants rather than the tops, which kills the plant outright and turns marsh into open water.
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 irrigated agriculture possible on the High Plains after the Second World War.
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 — crabs, shrimp and small fish shelter in them, and a single adult oyster filters something like 50 gallons of water a day.
Nature·Blanco County
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. The river runs 106 miles from western Gillespie County east to the Colorado at the head of Lake Travis, and it is one of the least regulated rivers of its size in Texas.
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 Blackland. The soil is what draws the line: a layer of sand over a dense clay pan that water cannot get through, so the ground is waterlogged after rain and bone dry weeks later, and post oak and blackjack oak are the trees that tolerate both.
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 most of a century and produced a Supreme Court case, an oil boom on a disputed sandbar, and in 1931 an actual armed standoff between the two states' governors over a bridge.
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 through the sediment ever since, arching the layers above into traps that hold oil.
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 a dry summer to keep loblolly pine alive in a climate that is otherwise too dry for it, and the low hills are the eroded edge of that sand formation rather than anything structural.
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 came down with them: between 1943 and 1973 about 4,700 square miles southeast of downtown sank at least six inches, and ground near the ship channel dropped roughly nine feet.
Nature·Blanco County
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. The marl erodes and the limestone does not, so what is left on every slope is a staircase.
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 waxy coating on its seeds, which makes soap and candles, and promoted along the Gulf Coast in the early 1900s as an oil crop.
Nature·Blanco County
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. Almost every house, ranch and small water system between Dripping Springs and Johnson City sits on it.
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 taken from Galveston Bay spend part of their lives in marsh like this. It is also a wintering ground for enormous numbers of snow and white-fronted geese. The delta is losing ground on two fronts: dams upstream hold back the sediment that used to rebuild it, and the land itself is subsiding.
Nature·Blanco County
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. Twin Sisters, on the Little Blanco River seven miles south of Blanco, was settled from 1854 and had a post office by 1856, the first inside what is now Blanco County, and by the end of that decade it was the centre of German settlement in the county.
Nature·Comal County
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·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 this species, a large share of these bats do not migrate to Mexico for the winter and stay year-round, so warm winter evenings can produce an emergence too.
Nature·Comal County
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. Where the creek meets faulted, fractured Edwards limestone, in a stretch defined for regulatory purposes as beginning at Herff Falls upstream near Boerne, it loses its flow downward into the rock rather than carrying it on to the river.