The Lost Pines

The pines along this stretch of road have no business being here. The Lost Pines are a stand of loblolly pine covering more than 75,000 acres across parts of five counties, cut off by about a hundred miles of prairie and post oak from the main East Texas pine belt. They are a relic of a wetter climate, surviving on deep sandy soils that hold just enough water to keep them going through a Texas summer, and long isolation has made them genetically distinct from their eastern relatives and measurably more drought tolerant. Roughly eighty percent of the forest lies in Bastrop County, which makes this the western edge of the piney woods and the last pines a westbound driver sees. Coming from Austin they appear abruptly, and coming from Houston they are the last of a forest that has been thinning out for fifty miles. In September 2011, at the end of the worst single year drought in the Texas record, fire came through. The Bastrop County Complex Fire burned 32,400 acres of the Lost Pines and destroyed more than 1,600 homes, making it the most destructive wildfire in the state's history. Around ninety five percent of Bastrop State Park burned. What followed was one of the largest replanting efforts ever attempted in Texas. More than four million loblolly seedlings, grown deliberately from local seed so that the population's hard won drought tolerance was not diluted, went into roughly 16,000 acres of burned ground. The uneven young pines beside the highway are that work, fifteen years on.