Conservation, Stewardship, Texas, Water, Water

The Guadalupe River

July 12, 2025 No Comments

Four years ago, I contributed the “Guad Is Great” essay about the Upper Guadalupe River for the book Viva Texas Rivers: Adventures, Misadventures, and Glimpses of Nirvana along Our Storied Waterways, edited by Steven L. Davis and Sam L. Pfiester (Texas A&M Press). The book was selected by the Texas State Library as the Texas Great Read 2025 Adult Selection https://www.tsl.texas.gov/greatreadtexas/tgradultselection2025

Here’s an excerpt of my essay describing the area that got hit by flash flooding – before the flood.

Schumacher Crossing

The river insinuates itself into the rocky oak-and-cedar scrub landscape of western Kerr County very subtly. There are no specific headwaters, no gushing artesian spring. Dry washes and gullies gradually collecti enough moisture from small springs to hold water in pools that stretch longer and longer until a steady, shallow stream trickles over a hard limestone bed and then tumbles out of the craggy hills toward the sea more than two hundred miles away.

At Boneyard Draw, on Farm-to-Market 1340, a sheer sixty-foot limestone bluff in the distance marks a bend in the drainage, the first hint of canyons to come. Just below the crossing is the turnoff to Kerr Wildlife Management Area, where the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department has been testing cedar (Ashe juniper) eradication, brush clearing, and other water-saving land management strategies. In addition to being a center of white-tailed deer research, this WMA holds one of the greatest concentrations of wild turkey in the state.

Less than a mile down the road, I detour down a county road, toward Cherry Springs Ranch, Guadalupe Bluffs Ranch, and Price’s Joy Spring Ranch Bed & Breakfast. At a low-water crossing, I find the river, sparkling in the sun the palest of greens with a slight tinge of blue, scooting over the hard rock bed.

A mile farther, the river is moving full tilt and roaring to life, with a deeper blue tint, a ribbon of sustenance snaking along a narrow alley guarded by soaring cypress trees and flanked by high bluffs, some rising one hundred feet above the water surface. Turkey buzzards politely wait on a fence poist while I pass before resuming cleanup duty on a mangled piece of roadkill.

A slide leading directly into the water on the banks of Mo Ranch Camp marks the beginning of the “camp run,” consisting of Camp Waldemar and Camp Stewart on the North Fork and Camp Mystic, Heart O’ the Hills Camp, and Camp Arrowhead on the South Fork. Crider’s Rodeo and Dancehall is also on the South Fork. There are not too many places in this world where a couple can two-step under the summer stars to the sounds of western swing fiddles and the steady rush of the river.

The Guadalupe widens, narrow, and spills from limestone shelf to limestone shelf as it moves past patios, swings, and ornate rockwork of dream ranches owned by CEOs, corporations, and churches. In one field by the river, scale replicas of Stonehenge and two thirteen-foot-high Easter Island statues have been erected.

The North Fork and the South Fork join just below the Hunt Store, a community gathering spot for vacationers, hunters, fishermen, swimmers, and visitors for more than eighty years. Several generations of the wealthiest, most influential Texans have spent the summers of their youth on this part of the river, learning the basics of life and being exposed to a wilder, more untamed version of the natural world than exists near the cities where they came from. Small wonder riverfront property here has been the most coveted real estate in the Hill Country for decades.

Anyone can glean a semblance of that experience by passing a night at an old-fashioned resort such at the Waltonia Lodges on the Guadalupe River, or jumping in and cooling off at Schumacher’s Crossing, the first significant swimming hole with easy public access on the river.

The bluffs fade farther into the background from the river as it flows between Hunt and Ingram. Ingram Dam creates enough large pools to support a bass board or a one-man sailboat and offers younger river rats the pleasure of dam sliding.

Parks become more plentiful farther downstream: Louise Hays Park on the south bank through most of Kerrville and Kerrville-Schreiner Park east of town. In both parks, people are disc throwing, fishing, and hanging out. The river gains stature but loses a bit of its curb appeal as it flows past Kerrville, Center Point, and Comfort, the bluffs considerably diminished, most of the cypress logged out long ago….

I keep looking for the right superlative to describe the upper Guadalupe’s blend of wilderness and playground and one remark sticks in my mind. At Kerr WMA, I stumbled upon Anthony Glorioso, a fresh-faced, curly-headed college student from Poughkeepsie, New York, who was working as a field assistant on a study of wild turkeys by radiotelemetry. Glorioso had never been to this part of the world, he said.

Asked about his first impressions, he it up.

“It’s like Africa!”

The New Yorker got it. The Guadalupe is that special.

and here’s what I wrote for texashighways.com following the July 4 2025 flood:

July 17, 2025

In the June issue of Texas Highways, I wrote about the Lower Guadalupe River below Canyon Lake as a vacation and recreation destination. I half-apologized for the extended drought that had impacted the river, assuring readers that despite low flows, fun could still be had.

On July 4, on that same stretch of river, RVs and campers had to be evacuated due to flash flooding. That week, floods impacted the Colorado, Llano, San Gabriel, Frio, and Nueces rivers and Big Sandy Creek in the Texas Hill Country. They also affected the Concho River by San Angelo, and in the Trans-Pecos region of far West Texas, waterfalls poured over Santa Elena Canyon for the first time in decades.

One hundred and twenty-five miles upstream from Canyon Lake, a cluster of thunderstorms infused with tropical moisture stalled over the upper Guadalupe River and its headwaters. As copious amounts of rain poured, the river and surrounding creeks swelled out of their banks. The water unleashed death and destruction as it ripped through summer camps, RV parks, cabins, homes, resorts, and campgrounds around Hunt, Ingram, and Kerrville. The deluge took the lives of people who were doing what Texans love to do in the summer: hang out by the water, swim, float, fish, paddle, and play on what is the prettiest stretch of river you’ll find in these parts.

Spring-fed, clear-running, and cool even in 100-degree heat, Hill Country rivers renew, replenish, and refresh in ways other rivers do not. A big part of their appeal is the rocky limestone topography they pass through on their way to the coast. That same landscape has earned its reputation as Flash Flood Alley. With little topsoil, hard rains quickly run off into creeks, streams, and rivers and turn waterways into raging, unforgiving torrents.

Ten years ago, on Memorial Day weekend, a destructive flash flood swelled the Blanco River, which rose 40 feet and swept through the town of Wimberley, killing 10 people. Property damage was severe. I cried seeing the cypress trees by my stretch of the river gone. We helped friends recover, while hearing harrowing stories of escape. The people of Wimberley, their neighbors, and strangers all converged along the river, rolled up their sleeves and started the arduous task of cleaning up and building back, just as Texans and people from all over the world are doing around Hunt, Ingram, and Kerrville, and in all the other parts of Texas impacted by flash floods.

It’s what Texans do.

The businesses along the lower Guadalupe below Canyon Dam have reopened and river lovers have returned. The healing for those around Hunt, Ingram, and Kerrville will not be so swift. The recovery is going to take months. The rebuild will take years. Some scars are permanent; the loss of life cannot be undone. But 10 years down the line, I can tell you there is hope. The Blanco remains the shining jewel of Wimberley, the main attraction for the hundreds of thousands who visit the community every year. Blue Hole is booked weeks in advance. Jacob’s Well is flowing again. Down by the river, young cypress trees have popped up where giant cypresses had been swept away by floodwaters. But across the river, where a stand of tall cypress survived, I can gaze up high into their branches and see debris from the flood of 10 years ago, a remnant and reminder of when this river ran too wild.

There will come a time when the upper Guadalupe is once again the Hill Country river of summer dreams, where the sounds of children learning life lessons at summer camps and vacationers kicking back to enjoy the natural world mixes with the soothing sound of flowing water. Until then, we grieve. We pitch in and help our neighbors. It’s what Texans do.

Boots, Chicano Soul, Conservation, Land, Texas, Water, Water

Forgotten Crossings at the Edge of Texas – Richard Parker’s book

April 17, 2025 No Comments

https://www.texasobserver.org/forgotten-crossings-el-paso/

Editor’s Note: Author Richard Parker died early last month, days after publication of his book The Crossing. “My dad was a person that loved learning about the world around him, and we saw that in his writing,” his daughter Olivia told the Albuquerque Journal. He was 61.

For years, one of my favorite places to visit in El Paso was the crossing where the Spanish conquistador Don Juan Onate and several hundred Spanish, mestizo, and Indigenous settlers crossed the Rio Grande/Río Bravo—El Paso del Norte—in 1598 on their expedition from Mexico to northern New Mexico.

The spot has all kinds of significance. The first Europeans entered present-day Texas here. It’s where the expansion of the Spanish empire to California, Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas began. The El Camino Real trail to Santa Fe and Taos runs through here.

Part of the site’s appeal is how it has been ignored and willfully hidden. The four-acre site is a little sliver of forgotten territory squeezed between the 15-foot border fence and the channeled river to the west and Paisano Drive, the CanAm Highway, railroad tracks, and Interstate 10 to the east. It’s hard to get to and maybe too close to the border for the Border Patrol’s liking, I guess.

For years, I’d take a meal at La Hacienda Mexican restaurant in the old house built in the 1850s by Simeon Hart, who operated El Paso’s first mill, so I could get a close up view of the crossing. Even when the restaurant was open, the area felt deserted. On one afternoon visit, I watched three teenage males emerge from the brush by the border fence and make haste toward Paisano Drive, having made their own crossing.

Just beyond the restaurant’s parking lot is a paved semi-circular plaza consisting of four markers along with a fountain that no longer flows, a mere stone’s throw from the fence and the miserable channel that passes for the Rio Grande. The markers commemorate the place as the major east-west link for telegraph lines and railroads in the United States and James Magoffin and Simeon Hart, portrayed as civic leaders and agents of the Confederacy during the Civil War who helped thwart Union soldiers from taking El Paso.

Since the closing of La Hacienda, access to the crossing has been blocked by a chain-link fence.

Behind La Hacienda is the pocket-sized Doniphan Park with a small playscape and half court, plus the original Fort Bliss, a two-story adobe that was long forgotten since the military installation relocated east of Mount Franklin long ago.

I was always puzzled why the site was willfully forgotten, as if it was a history city and state leaders didn’t want you to know about.

The Crossing: El Paso, the Southwest, and America’s Forgotten Origin Story is the title of Richard Parker’s new rich cultural and political history of El Paso. By virtue of the book being about El Paso, it’s an adventure into the Other Texas. El Paso has never really belonged to the Lone Star State. It’s in a different time zone. The landscape is sprawling desert pocked with dry mountain ranges, far from forests, lakes, and anything green. It’s dry and dusty, the antithesis of Texas alongside and east of Interstate 35, where most of the population lives. El Paso is the American West, geographically closer to Los Angeles than to Orange, Texas.

Parker writes about the tribes and traders who lived and traveled through the region before the Europeans arrived, and he makes the case that agriculture was practiced in the Lower Valley of El Paso before just about anywhere else on the continent. Even after the arrival of Juan Onate, Parker writes, the different folks who passed through El Paso generally got along—excepting the fierce Apache people—until the arrival of Anglos, the United States, and Texas.

As part of New Spain, then Mexico, El Paso prospered as a trading center and commercial hub where many cultures mixed and mingled. The troubles started, according to this telling, at the end of the Mexican War in 1848 when the Rio Grande was declared the international boundary and Mexico ceded all claims to Texas and the Southwest.

The new immigrants arriving in El Paso came mostly from the east, not the south, and included all kinds of outlaws, hustlers, and rapscallions, leading to a half-century of bloodshed (Cormac McCarthy’s sweet spot) and El Paso’s reputation as the Gunfighter Capital of the World. This mythic Marty Robbins-and-Felina-at-Rosa’s-Cantina version of El Paso has substance: Plaques on downtown streets identify where John Wesley Hardin was killed and where four men were shot dead in five seconds.

Parker profiles a very different Pancho Villa from the one portrayed in legend, and he cites Villa’s numerous ties to the city.

Mexican Americans suffered discrimination from “Juan Crow” segregation laws in Texas, often forced to attend separate schools and routinely refused service in restaurants and public facilities, even lynched because of the color of their skin. Efforts to delouse Mexican immigrants who commuted to and worked in El Paso with poison gas in the 1930s were successfully stopped, although the method caught the eye of German Nazi scientists, who employed a similar method in their concentration camps.

Parker also writes of tolerance and progress, such as when the Ku Klux Klan attempted to make inroads in El Paso in the 1920s and was rebuffed; of Company E and the Texas Thirty-Sixth Infantry Division and other uncredited Mexican-American heroes of World War Two; the Bracero program that admitted farmworkers from Mexico; the election of Raymond Telles as the first Hispanic mayor of a major city in the United States when he was picked to lead El Paso in 1957; and the Texas Western College Miners winning the NCAA basketball championship in 1966 with its starting lineup of all-African-American players beating the all-White University of Kentucky Wildcats.

He writes of the military, immigration, the drug war—elements that define life in the borderlands—and of the Guggenheim-owned ASARCO copper smelter smokestack, the tallest in the world when it was built, and its history as a spewing font of noxious lead, arsenic, and cadmium.

The negative Anglo/U.S./Texas influence culminates in the murder of 23 shoppers at an El Paso Wal-Mart by a 21-year-old racist from the Dallas area in 2019. Parker makes clear the killings were the end product of the hate-spewing, Mexico-bashing U.S. President Donald J. Trump.

Parker’s manuscript could have used a more thorough edit. He sometimes tries to connect the dots between dates and events to make a point but doesn’t always hit the mark, particularly when breaking down the dynamics between Indigenous tribes in the region and delving into details of the Mexican Revolution.

A photograph caption reads: “A view of contemporary El Paso’s East Side, with the Franklin Mountains, rising to seven thousand feet above sea level, in the background.” But the actual image, taken from the top of the Doubletree Hotel downtown, is of El Paso’s Westside, along with Juárez, with the Juárez mountains in the background.

But The Crossing brims with El Paso pride, citing elements that give El Paso its character, teasing out the small stuff that makes it unique and unlike the rest of Texas, to the point that Parker suggests El Paso secede from Texas and join New Mexico because they’re more aligned culturally, socially, and politically, as well as geographically.

Parker tells his own story, too, growing up on El Paso’s Westside, i.e. the more prosperous side. His Arkansas-born Anglo father managed a maquiladora across the river in Juárez. His Hispanic mother came from Monterrey. Parker has been a reporter for the Albuquerque Journal, an opinion writer for The Atlantic and the New York Times, and an instructor at the University of Texas and Texas State University. His previous book Lone Star Nation: How Texas Will Transform America suggested Texas portends where the United States is headed.

Halfway through the book, I started wondering how Parker was going to frame his storytelling for Texas media at book events, whether he’d pull punches or be as blunt as he is in print. Then, days after publication, Parker was found dead in his residence.

Two years ago, a non-profit called Abara House announced plans to restore Hart’s Mill/La Hacienda restaurant and repurpose the site as a multi-use borderlands center. A master plan has been designed, but to realize the project funds have to be raised.

For now, the crossing is closed to people like you and me. The best I can recommend is to Google 1720 Paisano, and when you get there, drive real slow and peer through the chain-links and the brush, and you might catch a glimpse of the four historic markers and forlorn fountain in the grassy clearing.

With Parker’s passing, The Crossing becomes a coda for his relationship to the borderlands, a place he portrays as a model of different cultures working together, tolerance, and understanding—a few things, he contends, the rest of Texas could learn from.

Blog, Books, Conservation, Film, Land, Marfa, Stewardship, Texas, Travel, Water, Water

Water Wars in West Texas

November 15, 2024 No Comments

https://landreport.com/water-wars-dell-city-el-paso

My story in The Land Report about water, springs, aquifers, Dell City, El Paso, Fort Stockton and Far West Texas.

RULE OF CAPTURE. The protracted legal battle over monetizing water rights in the Dell Valley hinged on age-old British common law.

Published On: October 30, 2024

Table of contents

It’s a familiar story: Big city needs water and is willing to pay for it. Property owners with extensive landholdings and abundant groundwater want to sell their water. Billionaires swoop in and buy surrounding acreage. Then, the local groundwater district redraws key boundaries restricting landowners’ ability to sell their water. Lawyers descend. Court battles ensue.

That’s the gist of the documentary film Water Wars, which has been screening at film festivals after debuting at the 2024 Dallas International Film Festival, where it won a grand jury prize. Directed by Mario Mattei, Water Wars is an engaging tale about an extremely complex issue.

Rule of Capture is a property right in Texas. If you own the land, you also own the water under your land. The landowner is able to capture all the water under their property. It’s theirs to do with as they please. That’s the theory, at least. But in Texas, a state that champions property rights, those rights are not as absolute as some landowners might think, and they come with all kinds of restrictions and limitations.

PIONEERING RANCHERS. Phil Guitar’s family began ranching in the Dell Valley long before its prodigious water resources were identified.

Guitar Ranch

Water Wars tells the story of Phil Guitar, a rancher whose properties are spread out across West Texas, including more than 30,000 acres in the Dell Valley. The valley surrounds Dell City, an isolated town of 245 that’s less than a square mile in size and is distinguished by the prettiest view of the Guadalupe Mountains, the highest range in Texas, as they rise majestically from the snow-white salt flats at their base. The view is especially scenic in the fall, with fields of red chiles ripening in the foreground.

That mountain range is now part of Guadalupe Mountains National Park. Similarly, Dell City and Dell Valley have changed over the years. Phil Guitar’s granddaddy started ranching in this high plain in the Chihuahuan Desert after buying up part of the historic Figure 2 Ranch during the Great Depression. He was an entrepreneur who recognized value in owning land. The expanse included a watering stop for the old Butterfield Overland Mail stagecoach service, which implied that a steady supply of water was available. Someday, there might be value in that, he thought.

The Lynch family, ably represented in the film by Laura Lynch, was a part of the next wave of immigrants to the Dell Valley: The farmers who moved in after geologists searching for oil found water instead in 1948. The Bone Spring-Victorio Peak Aquifer, 50 to 100 feet below the dry, rocky surface, contained a huge pool of water, most of it runoff from the Sacramento Mountains 100 miles north in southern New Mexico. So much water existed below the surface that when tapped, a well could produce more than 3,000 gallons a minute. With that much water, farmers could irrigate fields and grow crops, and the aquifer would recharge, filling up all over again.

In 1948, an ocean of water was discovered beneath the Chihuahuan Desert.

The Valley of Hidden Waters

Promoters declared Dell City “The Valley of the Hidden Waters,” and an influx of farmers responded. During the 1950s, enough cotton was farmed to keep six local cotton gins busy, including those owned by the Guitar family, who also had cottonseed oil mills and compresses. Alfalfa, chiles, melons, and onions were also cultivated.

Even with this sea of water, farming in the desert was a hit-or-miss proposition. In 1964, the end of the Bracero Program, which had brought millions of Mexican guest workers into the US labor pool, put many farmers out of business. In 1966, a torrential flood inundated Dell Valley, washing away crops and causing an estimated $4.3 million in damages. By the 1990s, Dell City had dwindled to just two cafes, a convenience store, a hardware store, and a bar. Ninety percent of the valley’s 40,000 acres of cropland was water-intensive alfalfa.

Meanwhile, approximately 90 miles west of the Dell Valley, the population of the El Paso-Juarez metropolitan area, which relies on the Rio Grande and the Hueco-Mesilla Bolsons Aquifer for drinking water, was approaching 2 million. A city utility, El Paso Water, went on the prowl for more dependable water and saw Dell Valley as a potential source.

The mission of the El Paso Water forced the agency to look far and wide for dependable water sources.

El Paso Water

For all their concerns that their big-city neighbor was out to steal their water, large Dell Valley landowners eventually reached a consensus: Pumping and shipping water to El Paso was potentially a lot more profitable than pumping water to their alfalfa and pepper fields.

On the other end of the proposition, Woody Hunt, El Paso’s most prominent developer, whose interests included pipeline construction, saw the writing on the wall and purchased 5,000 acres of farmland in the Dell Valley. Philip Anschutz, who ranks N^o. 88 on the 2024 Land Report 100, also started buying farmland in the Dell Valley. As a major investor in Union Pacific Railroad, Anschutz controlled a right-of-way crucial to the construction of a pipeline.

With the specter of a big water play, the board of Hudspeth County Underground Water Conservation District No. 1 voted that in order to determine how much water a landowner could export without impacting the aquifer, a landowner must have irrigated his acreage during a 10-year historical-use period from 1992 through 2002. Land that was not irrigated did not qualify. That restricted the Lynch family, who had put significant acreage into a government conservation program. It set up a classic battle pitting farmers against ranchers. Farmers pumped as much water as necessary to water their crops. Ranchers were far more conservative in their water use, utilizing stock tanks to provide water for their livestock, eschewing irrigation pumps. The district had effectively limited the Guitars’ and the Lynches’ opportunities to sell groundwater.

“Five percent of the property gets 95 percent of the water rights,” is how Jim Lynch put it.

The phrase water wars has a long history in the annals of the American West concurrent with its settlement by European immigrants two centuries ago. No matter where you go out West, water remains a contentious subject. There’s never enough.

Rule of Capture

As I watched the documentary film, I felt like the past 30 years of my life as a journalist were passing in front of me. I knew Dell City and the story of the Valley of the Hidden Waters and its future as a source of fresh water for the people of El Paso, 75 miles west. I recognized many of the characters in the film. And I knew about Rule of Capture.

My interest dated back to the mid-1980s, after I had become an avid swimmer at Barton Springs, a natural pool in Austin fed by artesian springs. I was visiting my friend Kirby Warnock at the Warnock homestead five miles east of Fort Stockton, a West Texas town that is a popular gas and rest stop along Interstate 10. On our way into Fort Stockton on a back road, I noticed sluice gates in the sandy scrub, concrete embankments, what appeared to be canals, and faint remnants of crop rows. What was up?

“There were 200 small truck farms out this way,” Kirby explained to me. “They were fed by Comanche Springs in town,” he said, referring to a historic gathering spot for Native Americans, Spanish explorers, and pioneering settlers that comprised the largest complex of artesian spring water in West Texas.

In 1955, landowners west of town, including Clayton Williams Sr., one of West Texas’s most distinguished civic leaders, drilled wells and installed diesel pumps to feed their crops and newly planted pecan orchards. After the irrigation got up to full speed, the springs stopped flowing for the first time in recorded history. The motorized pumps flooding alfalfa fields and pecan orchards were intercepting groundwater flowing from the Glass Mountains south of Fort Stockton toward Comanche Springs.

Comanche Springs

The truck farms east of town, and Fort Stockton’s biggest tourist attraction, the Comanche Springs swimming pool, soon dried up. Smaller landowners sued the irrigating farmers, but the Texas Supreme Court upheld Williams, et al’s rights to pump all the water they cared to pump, citing Rule of Capture. In Texas under Rule of Capture, the landowner owns the water under the surface. If the landowner can capture the water, they may do what they wish with it. Groundwater, the court ruled, was too “secret, occult, and concealed” to regulate.

Rule of Capture was established in England and adopted by Texas when it became a state back in the mid-19th century, when much of the Lone Star State meant the eastern, wetter half of present-day Texas. In the 21st century, Texas remains the only western state where Rule of Capture is a property right.

It seemed other greedy landowners could do what the pumpers did to Comanche Springs because groundwater transcended property lines.

Antelope Valley Ranch

In 1995, I attended a community meeting at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Fort Davis, a historic Texas mountain town, to gauge the potential impact. The small gathering included prominent area ranchers who had come to learn more about El Paso Water’s recent purchase of the 25,000-acre Antelope Valley Ranch between Marfa and Valentine. If El Paso was to continue growing, the city needed that groundwater.

There was a palpable fear among the ranchers at the Fort Davis meeting that El Paso Water threatened to drain them. Austin developer and attorney Richard Suttle explained what recourse they had, which wasn’t a whole lot.

“Up until tonight, I believed that the right to capture groundwater was an inalienable right,” a neighboring rancher, Chile Ridley, told me for a story I wrote for Texas Monthly. “But I have never been faced with this prospect. When something your neighbor does affects you, I say maybe we should look at the way things are currently designed. As property owners, we’re caretakers and stewards of the land. El Paso wouldn’t conserve it. I’m not at all clear what is the right thing. I’m just concerned about waking up some morning and not having water to drink.”

Another rancher close to Antelope Valley, Lynn Crittendon, added, “As a neighbor, I hope they act responsibly.”

Judge Lucius Bunton

In I997, I drove to Pecos to visit Judge Lucius Bunton. Four years earlier, Bunton made an exception to Rule of Capture in a decision that protected endangered species. Bunton mandated limits to how much water could be taken from the Edwards Aquifer, a vast groundwater complex that has long sustained San Antonio and surrounding communities.

Bunton’s decision led to the creation of the Edwards Aquifer Authority by the Texas Legislature and, indirectly, to Texas’s first comprehensive water plan.

“I’m not going to take credit for that,” Judge Bunton told me for a profile I wrote for Texas Monthly, “But I encouraged some years ago, long before this water bill and the aquifer authority, that the legislature do something. The state of Texas ought to do something. This is a step in the right direction.”

Bunton grew up on a hardscrabble Presidio County ranch located between Marfa and Presidio not far from the old Shafter silver mine. The judge allowed how Rule of Capture worked pretty well in the eastern half of the state. But in the part of Texas where he grew up, Rule of Capture was a direct threat: The biggest pump rules.

I had already visited Dell City, identified by a weathered billboard as The Valley of the Hidden Waters, where the shadow of El Paso loomed large.

Hudspeth County Herald

The Hudspeth County Herald had been covering the rural versus urban water issues extensively. One of Laura Lynch’s uncles, Jim Lynch, had been farming in the Dell Valley since 1950. He was a major landowner, and he was also in charge of the weekly Herald.

“My thinking is, if we have to give up our water, all of us should share in the money,” he told me. “If a few farmers sell out, they’ll make money, the water will diminish, and everyone else will have to go out of business without compensation.”

Lynch understood the dynamic well. “We all know El Paso is bigger than any of us, and if they choose to take this water, we don’t have the money collectively to fight them. Phil Anschutz is one of the wealthiest men in America. If he’s together with Hunt, there’s no stopping them,” Lynch said. The Lynch family eventually entered into a partnership with Anschutz.

State Water Plan

In 1997, the Texas Legislature, under the direction of Lieutenant Governor Bob Bullock, enacted Senate Bill 1, a 50-year “ground up” plan to provide for water in anticipation of Texas’s projected growth. The State Water Plan avoided directly addressing Rule of Capture — legislators and state leadership regarded the property right as sacrosanct and too hot to handle — and instead established 16 regional planning areas, each region charged with balancing rural and urban needs while championing creation of groundwater districts that could restrict water use in order to preserve the resource, subject to voter approval. The rub was that since the state did not provide budgets for the districts that were being created, most districts would be understaffed and underfinanced. A single lawsuit could gobble up a district’s annual budget.

Today in Texas, regardless of Rule of Capture, if the land you own is within a groundwater district, your groundwater use may be restricted (although that has rarely been the case). If the land you own is outside a groundwater district, you can use as much water as you can pump. And so can your neighbor, who may or may not have a bigger pump or intentions similar to yours.

Despite those efforts by the state, the Texas Supreme Court affirmed the right of Ozarka, the bottled-water company, to mine a spring in East Texas for commercial purposes, even though the mining caused neighbors’ wells to go dry.

Kinney County, about 125 miles west of San Antonio, was a vivid example of a local groundwater district trying to do the right thing minus finances. The district was challenged by a handful of landowners who wanted to sell and ship their groundwater to San Antonio, an idea that generated pushbacks from farmers and ranchers who wanted to continue to use their groundwater locally and feared a few greedy landowners would dry their wells.

Water marketers, legislators, attorneys, and lobbyists joined the fray, arguing over how much (if any) water could be pumped and sold outside the county without impacting springs, creeks, and streams inside the county. The argument led to accusations of mismanagement, ballooning legal fees, and groundwater district meetings being videotaped by landowners who wanted to sell water.

“Eight-tenths of one percent of county property is irrigated,” Kinney County judge Tully Shahan said, “and the irrigators are trying to tell us what to do with 100 percent of the water.” Darlene Shahan, Tully’s wife, was the general manager of the groundwater district.

T. Boone Pickens

T. Boone Pickens saw the potential in water as a commodity made possible by Rule of Capture. He organized landowners in the vicinity of his 65,000-acre Mesa Vista Ranch near Pampa in the Texas Panhandle to form a compact to sell water to thirsty cities. If landowners organized, they could avoid the contentious infighting in Kinney County.

I visited Pickens’ Mesa Vista Ranch, studied his plans, and wrote an article for Texas Monthly titled “Boone Pickens Wants to Sell You His Water.” Even though the amount of water that had already been pumped from the Ogallala Aquifer made irrigated farming no longer feasible in the Texas Panhandle, Pickens and his allies perceived value in pumping and shipping the precious commodity.

Ten years later, I ran into Pickens at an event in Dallas and reintroduced myself. His eyes narrowed in recognition.

“You cost me a lot of money,” he said acidly. “What happened?” I asked.

He told me how the compact he’d organized ended up having to sell its groundwater not to Dallas or to Fort Worth but to the Canadian River Municipal Water Authority that serves Amarillo, Lubbock, and other communities in the Texas Panhandle and the South Plains.

“At least you sold it to your neighbors,” I said, congratulating Pickens on doing the right thing.

50-Year Plan

In 2001, I spent a day in El Paso driving around the city with a water cop, looking for telltale signs of water spilling over the curbs of residences and businesses around town. I also took a meeting with Ed Archuleta, the longtime general manager of El Paso Water. Archuleta did his best to make the case that when it came to water, El Paso was the most conservation-focused city in the entire state.

Archuleta cited El Paso Water’s 50-year plan designed to meet the projected needs of 1.3 million people. Eight million gallons of treated wastewater were being recycled into El Paso’s Hueco-Mesilla Bolsons Aquifer each and every day. Rationing ordinances and rate increases had reduced overall demand by 20 percent. In addition, El Paso Water had a desalination plant that treated and cleaned 29 million gallons of brackish and otherwise undrinkable groundwater every day.

El Paso Water intended to secure its water responsibly. This wasn’t going to be another Chinatown where Noah Cross and other power players engineered the theft of water rights from Owens Valley farmers to build a new and better Los Angeles. If El Paso Water purchased faraway land for future use of the water beneath it, then it was imperative to continue farming on that ground as long as it was economically feasible.

Dell Valley landowners did their homework and got on the same page. The science was clear. Fifty-thousand acre-feet of water could be pumped annually, and the aquifer could still fully recharge.

Unlike most modern water stories, this one had a happy ending for the landowners — with a couple of caveats.

Phil Guitar, whose right to use the water beneath his property had been restricted by the board of Hudspeth County Underground Water Conservation District No. 1, appealed his case all the way to the Texas Supreme Court — and won. Guitar’s argument boiled down to the definition of the word “use.”

Then Guitar met with the ground-water district and helped rewrite its rules. He was then able to drill test wells on his land to prove up the groundwater so a deal with El Paso Water could be cut to the satisfaction of both parties.

$222 Million in Water Purchases

The Lynches, who were also fighting the groundwater district, sold their 26,470-acre CL Ranch for $50 million in 2016. Phil Anschutz and Woody Hunt got a healthy return on investment when Anschutz’s 16,000-acre CLM Ranch also sold in 2016 for $66 million.

El Paso Water has spent more than $222 million buying 20 properties and now owns 70,000 acres of the Dell Valley, along with necessary permits to pump the water. The requisite pipeline due west to El Paso has yet to be constructed. Meanwhile, the utility has sustained the farming tradition in the Dell Valley, leasing 50,000 acres to farmers growing alfalfa and chiles. A young farmer can now break into the business in Dell Valley without owning any land.

El Paso Water’s deal with Dell Valley landowners led to the sale of the 40,000-acre Antelope Valley Ranch between Valentine and Marfa for $6 million in 2024, a tidy profit from the initial $1.5 million investment in 1995, according to Denise Parra of El Paso Water. The 150-mile pipeline from Antelope Valley to El Paso was projected to cost at least $470 million, far too expensive for the utility.

Keep an eye out for Water Wars in 2025. Think of it as a direct descendant of Jack Schaefer’s classic Shane, pitting farmers against ranchers in the New West. After screening Water Wars, I called Philip Guitar, one of the film’s producers and the son of the plaintiff in the aforementioned Texas Supreme Court case. One of my principal questions revolved around the standard story structure of a Western: Who wore the white hats and who wore the black hats?

MAKING A SPLASH. In April 2024, Water Wars won the Grand Jury Prize for Best Texas Feature at the Dallas International Film Festival.

Takeaways

“This is lined up for the viewer to determine who the bad guy is,” Philip said. “I’m not saying who the antagonist is. I’m not saying who the protagonist is. We are putting it out there for you to determine what you think. You figure out who you think it is. Maybe you think the antagonist is Phil Guitar. Maybe you think the antagonist is Phil Anschutz or Woody Hunt. Maybe you think the antagonist is El Paso Water.”

The board of the Hudspeth County Underground Water Conservation District definitely did not emerge unscathed. In the film, Laura Lynch noted that one board member shot a man twice and did time for another offense.

“What was the takeaway for landowners?” I asked Philip. “What did he want the film’s audience to think about?”

“Be aware of potential consequences that lie ahead,” Philip said. “It doesn’t matter if you have one acre or 10,000 acres. If you’re a landowner in Texas, you should look and ask, ‘Am I in a groundwater district?’ And if you are, ‘What are the rules of that district?’ It’s not a bad idea to get involved and see what your groundwater district is up to, what they’re doing, and what the laws are.

“You may think because it’s Rule of Capture, you’ve got the right to do anything you want with your water. And in most situations, you should. Our ruling helped usher in the idea that all landowners should be treated fairly and equitably. But these districts can be autonomous. They make their own rules. They need to be double-checked to make sure all landowners are being treated equitably.”

“And, if your land isn’t within the boundaries of a groundwater district, it helps to know about your neighbor’s use of groundwater and if their intent squares with yours,” I added.

“You could be drained dry,” Philip said.

There’s a bitter postscript to Water Wars. In 2023, after production on the documentary had wrapped, Laura Lynch, 65, was killed in a head-on collision on Highway 62 between Dell City and El Paso three days before Christmas. The photogenic grandmother was the voice of post-ag Dell City, buying derelict buildings and converting them into Airbnbs that catered to tourists visiting Guadalupe Mountains National Park.

It takes a special person to love a little town like Dell City. That was Laura.

TRAGIC LOSS. A founding member of the Dixie Chicks, Dell City native Laura Lynch was killed in a head-on collision after production wrapped.

Blog, Surf, Travel, Water, Water

The Old Man finally rides a wave at Waco Surf

June 7, 2024 No Comments

My story in Texas Highways about learning to surf at age 72

https://texashighways.com/things-to-do/riding-waves-as-a-septuagenerian/

By Joe Nick Patoski

June 3, 2024

A man in swimwear rides a surfboard on a large blue wave

Photo by Wyatt McSpadden

Surfing has been a lifelong obsession for me. Back when the Beach Boys ruled the airwaves and the California surfer lifestyle became something to emulate, two junior high friends and I pooled our money and bought a surfboard by mail order—but never put it to the test. I rented longboards on South Padre Island family vacations, but try as I might to paddle out past the third sandbar to catch a wave, the few times I did manage to stand up, the wave disappeared. Unless a hurricane or tropical storm was in the Gulf, I would later learn, those choppy waves were as good as it got.

But today is the day. I’m going to surf. All it takes is a two-and-a-half-hour drive to the woods east of Waco, a couple hundred dollars, and the desire to finally stand up on a surfboard at age 72.

I’m at Waco Surf, the new epicenter of Texas surfing, to experience how technology is impacting surfing in much the same way ski lifts, snow-making machines, and manicured trails transformed snow skiing. In 2021, new owners bought Waco Surf’s lagoon and upgraded it into a surf and water park with slides, a lazy river, cabanas, and a hotel.

After checking in at the Surf Center, the spacious headquarters with a floor-to-ceiling view of the 2.5-acre lagoon, I head for the open-air palapa for the park’s Beginner Academy. I’m joined by three fellow novices from across the state, as well as a broad-shouldered California native named Stephen Shipman who is a lifelong bodysurfer. “They won’t let me bodysurf here, so I guess I’m going to have to learn to stand up,” the 68-year-old says. His confidence suggests that won’t be a problem.

We’re given generic 6-foot longboards with soft padding while instructor Reef Ellison, a surfer from Houston, gives us the 101. This includes pointing out the features of the board, how to paddle, and, ultimately, how to stand up.

After running us through a series of yoga stretches, we enter the shallows of the chlorinated lagoon. Across from us, surfers work intermediate swells in front of the wall lining the entire bank of the lagoon. Somewhere near the No. 7 marker, a machine engine cranks with a soft rumble akin to a washing machine. Seemingly out of nowhere, waves start to appear.

Manufactured in various sizes, our waves are set to the most forgiving level: The Coaster. These progress all the way to The Wedge, a wave that reaches up to 5 feet. In this controlled environment, there’s no need to worry about paddling out to the swells, as there are Surf Team members waiting to launch and catch you at the end.

Our assigned team member, treading water, urges me forward, and in a flash, I begin to slide down the wave. The sensation of pushing the board down the slope feels like I’m trying to steady myself on an icy pond. Standing on the board with knees bent, arms extended for balance, I aim toward the wall and ride the wave until it peters out five seconds later.

One of the most frustrating aspects of trying to surf in the Gulf or the Pacific is getting knocked back by waves while paddling out. Waco Surf has eliminated that early obstacle in its design. After that first attempt, a waiting surfer was quick to congratulate me: “You popped right up! There are some people who’ve been going for a while who can’t do that.”

Following the first half of the session, the swells grow slightly larger. With each attempt, my energy begins to flag, and on the final wave, I have my first honest wipeout. Shipman, the seasoned bodysurfer, overcomes a frustrating start to master standing up. He quickly signs up for an second session later that afternoon.

Since that weekend, I’ve looked at myself cresting waves—captured for posterity in photos on wacosurf.com. Even all these months later, I can feel and relive the adrenaline-filled thrill of every ride. Although cautious at first, I gave myself over to the moment and risked it all in a culminating wipeout—not bad for an old guy. No matter that it took place far from any sandy shore. Surfing lesson: $139.

Austin, Conservation, Land, San Antonio, Stewardship, Texas, Travel, Water, Water

Texas’ Swimming Holes Are Drying Up

January 27, 2023 No Comments

My story about swimming holes in Texas, drought, and climate change in the 50th Anniversary issue of Texas Monthly magazine.

https://www.texasmonthly.com/travel/ode-to-texas-disappearing-swimming-holes/

The Blanco River in Blanco State Park in September 2018. Photograph by Nick Simonite

Texas Icons

An Ode to Texas’s Disappearing Swimming Holes

I’ve spent the past half century immersing myself in Texas’s clear, cool waters. But if development and drought have their way, I may be the last of my kind.

By Joe Nick Patoski

February 2023 1

This article is part of Texas Monthly’s special fiftieth-anniversary issue. Read about the other icons that have defined Texas since 1973.

I lived through the golden age of Texas swimming holes. Having spent my youth submerged in chlorinated pools in and around Fort Worth, I moved to Austin in 1973 and discovered Hippie Hollow before it was a county park and Barton Creek before a mining executive threatened to build a giant development along its banks.

Swimming in clear artesian spring water was a revelation to me. As a child, I’d seen San Marcos Springs when it was the Aquarena Springs theme park, but I didn’t associate the crystalline waters that Ralph the Swimming Pig frolicked in with something that was accessible to me. And yet, to my delight, I came to learn that they were.

The water in a Texas swimming hole is a pale blue or green or a hue somewhere in between that you can see through, often right to the bottom. Your eyes don’t sting when you open them underwater. There are creatures to observe—minnows, perch, crawfish, carp, catfish, bass, turtles, ducks, and maybe even, God help me, a water moccasin. A spring-fed swimming hole means cool-to-cold temperatures. The bottom is limestone, not squishy mud. Spoiled by such wonders, I quickly developed an aversion to cement ponds, as The Beverly Hillbillies’ Jethro Bodine called conventional swimming pools, and flinched at the scent of chlorine.

My then-girlfriend got me hooked on doing widths at Austin’s famous Barton Springs, and pretty soon I had worked up to swimming a round trip along the pool’s roughly one-eighth-mile length. Then it was a half mile and then a full mile. I was addicted. If I missed a day, I got cranky.

My search for clear, clean water turned into a treasure hunt. Hill Country rivers were prime targets: the Guadalupe, the Comal, the west fork of the Nueces, the Blanco, the San Marcos, the Llano, the Frio, the Medina. Creeks that fed the rivers sheltered hidden delights such as Jacob’s Well, Krause Springs, and several Blue Holes.

But I also found swimmable springs near Houston (swimmable but murky—it’s Houston!), near the Panhandle (Roaring Springs), and in the desert (Independence Creek). I became a regular at Balmorhea State Park, in far West Texas, swimming in the pool every month of the year. There are secret spots that I’ve been sworn never to reveal, at the risk of physical harm, and secret spots I can’t share because I trespassed. Having a gun pulled on you when you’re sopping wet is no fun.

Swimming-hole denizens are my tribe. We quietly exchange information about places worth checking out and share where the crowds aren’t. I’m fortunate to have friends who own ranches with secret holes to swim in and to have been invited to the Narrows, a typically off-limits miniature canyon in the Hill Country smack-dab between Blanco and Wimberley.

My obsession grew so fevered that thirty years ago my family and I left Austin for Wimberley to gain regular access to the Blanco River. I found an ideal swimming hole, and for years it has been part of my daily routine during the warm months.

Along the way, I’ve learned about karst topography and other unique features that make Texas swimming holes so abundant. I’ve also learned about the rule of capture, a Texas law that allows property owners to draw as much underground water as they wish, even at the risk of drying up a neighbor’s wells and springs. In the fifties, it effectively killed Fort Stockton’s Comanche Springs, once the largest in West Texas.

It wasn’t the first swimming hole to disappear, and it’s far from the last. In 2021, for the first time in my many summers in Wimberley, the Blanco ran so low that there wasn’t enough river to swim in. Extended drought, exploding population growth in the watershed, and aggressive groundwater pumping had reduced it to a trickling stream.

My bible, Gunnar Brune’s Springs of Texas, Volume 1, had warned me that this would happen. A technical volume published in 1981, it’s an expanded version of a 1975 report that Brune, a Fort Worth geologist, prepared for the Texas Water Development Board. He noted that the decline of Texas springs, in number and in volume, began with the first Spanish colonists and continued to the time of the book’s publication, largely as a result of agricultural, industrial, and municipal use of water, as well as the reduction in groundwater recharge.

That decline continues, primarily fueled by population growth. By 2005 only 17 of the 31 large springs once known in Texas remained. During the drought of 2022, Blue Hole, in Wimberley, and nearby Jacob’s Well were closed to swimming because of low or no flow. The Frio River at Concan went dry. Las Moras Springs, near Brackettville, stopped running. And this sad trend will likely only accelerate: we’re expecting a hotter, drier Hill Country in the future.

Some years back, I toured the Coal Mine Ranch in the isolated Trans-Pecos borderlands northwest of Candelaria. My host paused at a field of sun-bleached rubble. This was an ancient river delta, he said, leaning down and picking up a large rock to hand to me. Up close, I could make out the fossilized remnant of a very large turtle shell.

Will this be the fate of so many of the springs, creeks, rivers, and swimming holes that I love? Will the iconic image of our times be a minnow trapped in a shrinking puddle as the waters retreat? Or will the springs flow again and my beloved Blanco return when the rains come? So far in my lifetime, the water has always come back. But what about the next time?

Though the signs right now are dire, my faith remains strong enough that I recently ordered a new swimsuit, goggles, and earplugs. Perhaps I’m fooling myself. Perhaps hope is the only thing that springs eternal.

This article originally appeared in the February 2023 issue of Texas Monthly with the headline “C’mon in, the Water’s Finite.” Subscribe today.

Blog, Conservation, Land, Stewardship, Texas, Travel, Water, Water

Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge – the Wild Rio Grande Valley

December 30, 2022 No Comments

https://texashighways.com/things-to-do/on-the-water/explore-rio-grande-valley-wilderness-wildlife-at-laguna-atascosa-national-wildlife-refuge/

Explore the wilderness and wildlife of Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge

Creature Comforts

By Joe Nick Patoski

A sunrise view of Laguna Madre from the Plover Point observation deck. Photo by Erich Schlegel; Illustration by Lin Jesse

An illustration of a swimming duck with a bright red head moving through tall grassy reeds

A redhead duck. Illustration by Lin Jesse

Beyond Laguna Madre,

on the ocean side of South Padre Island, a bank of cumulus clouds looms over the Gulf of Mexico. Morning light casts a palette of radiant oranges, yellows, pinks, and blues, minutes before the sun makes its debut above the clouds.

Sunrise in January is prime time at Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge in the Rio Grande Valley. The tropical humidity and heat, the norm from late March until November, abates, and the winter residents move in. From the Plover Point observation deck, the Laguna Madre —one of only four shallow, hypersaline bays in the world—shimmers with sublime views.

Living creatures are everywhere—in the water, on the land, in the sky. Songbirds flit out of the impenetrable thornscrub brush called the monte, while a pair of scissor-tailed flycatchers pirouette around a Spanish dagger yucca. A clutch of shockingly pink roseate spoonbills stands out among hundreds of white egrets, herons, and ducks congregating in a shallow pond. On the shore of the laguna, shorebirds gingerly step in the shallows in search of breakfast. Redfish, too, their tails extending above the water surface as they feed on shrimp. A brown pelican spies a tailing redfish and quickly scoops it up. On the road through the thornscrub, rabbits and roadrunners crisscross the path where a brilliantly dark indigo snake has just slithered. Coyotes, whitetail deer, and nilgai antelope roam undisturbed across the open savannah. Butterflies and dragonflies flutter around by the dozens.

A collection of palm trees and grasses with water and cloudy sky in the background

Redhead Ridge on the shore of Laguna Madre. Photo by Larry Ditto

Welcome to the wildest part of the wild Rio Grande Valley, which offers a glimpse into the natural world that flourished across deep South Texas before it was settled, farmed, and developed. Coastal, tropical, jungle, and desert all at once, the Valley is where the two major North American migratory bird flyways converge, and it’s a crucial wintering grounds for waterfowl. Laguna Atascosa is at the center of the action.

The rapidly developing region is also attractive to humans. From 2000 to 2020, the Rio Grande Valley population—including Cameron, Hidalgo, Starr, and Willacy counties—grew 41% to 1.37 million people. According to the Texas Demographic Center at the University of Texas at San Antonio, the number is projected to grow another 15% to 1.58 million by 2050, depending on migration rates. But while habitat loss is the usual story in the booming RGV, Laguna Atascosa is all about rewilding.

The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service established the refuge in 1946, carving about 11,000 acres from a World War II gunnery range to protect wintering bird habitat, primarily the redhead duck on Laguna Atascosa. Over the past two decades, assistance from groups including The Nature Conservancy and The Conservation Fund, along with settlement funds from the 2010 BP Oil Spill, have allowed the refuge to add over 50,000 acres to expand to more than 120,000 acres across multiple units. The South Padre Island Unit protects land on the northern end of the island, and the Bahia Grande Unit protects wetlands between Laguna Vista and Brownsville. Ongoing purchases are creating a new coastal corridor for wildlife to travel between patches of their fragmented habitat, including via special highway underpasses.

“There’s not a more significant place for wildlife diversity in Texas, and maybe the country, than the Lower Rio Grande Valley, from songbirds to ocelots to waterfowl,” says Jeff Francell, director of land protection for The Nature Conservancy in Texas. “Most of the native brush in the Valley was converted to farmland decades ago, and so to enhance the native wildlife populations, it’s important to take some of that land and restore it for wildlife. For example, one of the pieces of property we were able to acquire was an old shrimp farm, and we were able to buy part of it to provide a corridor for ocelots between Laguna Atascosa and Bahia Grande.”

Laguna Atascosa astounds in its diversity: 417 bird species, 130 butterfly species, 45 mammal species, 44 reptile species, and 450 plant species. And the refuge is far enough from the border to avoid lighting, walls, and other disruptive issues that have negatively impacted some refuges along the Rio Grande. Outside of a visitor center, a couple of roads, and a handful of overlooks, the refuge has very little infrastructure. Wildlife conservation is the priority. This is by far the biggest chunk of wild in the Rio Grande Valley

Two people, one with binoculars and another with a camera, look for birds along a watery shore

Birding on the tidal flats at South Bay by the Brownsville Ship Channel. Photo by Larry Ditto

About 15 minutes before daybreak, I meet the refuge’s visitor services manager, Georgie Garcia, in the visitor center parking lot and jump into his high-clearance pickup. Garcia, a Brownsville native and Iraq War vet, drives the truck across Buena Vista Road and opens the gate at the trailhead to Granjeno Trail, the access to Steve Thompson Wildlife Drive. We continue to Plover Point to take in the sunrise before touring the heart of the refuge via roads, trails, and barely visible dirt tracks.

Garcia, one of seven employees, also maintains the trails with a brush cutter to keep the monte from encroaching, stocks the feeders and water features, conducts educational outreach, and coordinates the seasonal volunteers. The Friends of Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge group runs the bookshop in the visitor center, and volunteers help cover for Garcia whenever he is away from the service counter, which is the source of permits and information. Luckily, the service counter has a picture window that looks over a bird feeding station.

“Every day I bet my paycheck I’ll see a green jay,” Garcia says of the Neotropical bird rarely seen elsewhere in the United States. “There will be 20 on a feeder sometimes.”

The visitor center reopened in May after being closed for two years due to the pandemic. In 2019, the refuge restored its main thoroughfare, Buena Vista Road, from a potholed country road to a two-lane boulevard with bicycle lanes on both sides, along with eight large speed bumps to keep traffic under the 25-mph speed limit. The “Ocelot Crossing” signs are for real.

The park’s other road—Steve Thompson Wildlife Drive—closed to private motor vehicles in 2013 when a car hit and killed a lactating female ocelot. A 60-person tram operated on the loop seasonally in the 2010s until it broke down in 2018 and was declared beyond repair.

These days, hiking and cycling are the only ways to explore Steve Thompson Wildlife Drive and the 55 miles of other trails.

As we drive through two fallow fields lined with tree tubes containing seedlings and saplings of natives such as mesquite and hawthorn, Garcia says the refuge’s revegetation efforts have stepped up as more land has been added. “All that acquired property was ag fields,” he grins confidently. “Give it 10 years; it’ll be South Texas thornscrub.”

An illustration of a bird with dark brown wings, a white tuft, and small head with a beak sitting on a wooden branch

An Aplomado falcon. Illustration by Lin Jesse

A map of coastal Texas showing the Laguna Madre and Laguna Atacosa areas

Map illustration by Lin Jesse

A boat makes a wide white wake as it traverses a green channel

Boating the Stover Cove area on Laguna Madre. Photo by Erich Schlegel

The ocelot—a small, secretive spotted feline, about twice the size of a house cat—has become a symbol of the refuge. Laguna Atascosa is home to 30-35 ocelots, one of two breeding populations in the U.S.

In cooperation with the refuge, the Friends of LANWR group holds an annual Ocelot Conservation Day in March at the Gladys Porter Zoo in Brownsville—March 5 this year—with booths and presentations.

“We know the biggest problem is habitat loss,” Garcia says. “This past trapping season, they were able to trap six ocelots and put collars on them. The ocelot is an umbrella species; it’s at the top. If you restore their habitat, it’s going to help a lot of other South Texas species, some of them endangered or threatened.”

While making the rounds, Garcia chases off several cows that wandered in from a neighboring ranch, watches a gator snag an unsuspecting bird, and fetches the remnants of a mylar balloon snagged on a prickly pear.

We drive south to the 26,000-acre Bahia Grande Unit, an addition to the refuge that is west of State Highway 48 and the Brownsville Ship Channel.

An illustration of a large tortoise walking through green grasses and flowers

A Texas tortoise. Illustration by Lin Jesse

“This was a complete dust bowl,” Garcia says, gazing across rough vegetated lowlands spiked with yucca. “Now we’ve restored it to beautiful coastal prairie wetlands, with lomas, how it used to be.” Lomas are low vegetated hills that exist in only three places in the world. “We’re going to bring in some fresh water, which should balance out the salinity.” The Bahia Grande is hunting grounds for Aplomado falcons, which eat insects, lizards, birds, and small mammals.

We inspect a channel between two small inlets in the estuaries and watch a school of redfish forming a V as they move through. We stop near another small shallow lake, almost dry, and Garcia walks toward a sandy shelf, maybe 5 feet high. Beneath the shelf, dozens of perfectly circular beads no more than an eighth of an inch in diameter, each with a hole in the middle, are scattered in the sand around our feet.

“The thinking is this was on a trade route between the coast and the interior,” Garcia says. Once revegetation has taken hold and archeological work is complete in two to four years, Bahia Grande will have public access. For now, it is open to hunters on designated weekends in the winter.

A silhouette of a person riding a bicycle in front of a sunset

Cycling on Steve Thompson Wildlife Drive. Photo by Eric Schlegel

Visiting Laguna Atascosa

Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge offers a look at why the Rio Grande Valley was slow to be civilized for large-scale human population. What’s great for the creatures and critters translates to rough country for people—it’s hot, humid, windy, and buggy.

Park staff members recommend bringing a wide-brimmed hat, bug repellent, sunblock, long pants, high socks, and sturdy footwear to ward off ticks, chiggers, and snakes—regardless of the time of year.

The refuge doesn’t have food or drink for sale, and fuel is 15 miles away at the intersection of SH 100 and FM 510 west of Port Isabel. The nearest hospital is in Harlingen, 28 miles from the visitor center.

Admission costs $3 per vehicle. An annual pass is $10. The refuge trails are open daily, dawn to dusk. The visitor center opens Wed-Fri 7 a.m.-2 p.m. 22817 Buena Vista Boulevard, Los Fresnos. 956-748-3607; fws.gov/refuge/laguna-atascosa

The Friends of Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge group maintains a calendar of events and activities on its website, flanwr.org.

We don’t see a soul on our five-hour tour, except for a lone cyclist cruising along the back side of Steve Thompson Wildlife Drive. He is clearly in the zone, steadily pedaling, lost in the rhythm and unaware of our truck inching up behind him. Garcia patiently keeps his distance for a few minutes, then gently taps his horn. The cyclist startles. He pulls over and grins as we pass.

The cyclist is Irv Downing, a 68-year-old former endurance racer who moved from South Padre to be closer to the refuge, which he cycles about “every other day.” Downing calls Laguna Atascosa his Serengeti. “The scenery, the setting, the laguna, it’s just spectacular,” he says. “My son was visiting from Seattle last week, and on our ride photographed 20 nilgai antelope.”

After talking to Downing, I figure I could bicycle this route too—if it wasn’t too windy, too hot, or too cold. “This is a difficult trail because of the distance and wind factor,” Garcia acknowledges. “The way to do this is on an electric bike.”

My ears perk up.

I couldn’t locate any e-bike rentals near the refuge, so I find one to borrow near my home in Wimberley and load it into my SUV. Back at the refuge, I meet photographer Erich Schlegel at the visitor center parking lot just before sunrise.

The narrow, paved route along Steve Thompson Scenic Drive is downright bucolic, especially with the rising sun casting a soft golden glow over the whole scene, straight out of a Van Gogh landscape. I pedal conventionally most of the way, twisting the accelerator handgrip whenever I lag behind Schlegel and whenever headwinds slow
my pace.

We cycle through the monte, up and down a loma, past prairies and estuaries, and along the shores of shallow lakes, bogs, mudholes, and wetlands. Wildlife stirs all along the way. Because we’re on bikes, the wildlife is more active, less oblivious to our presence, than when we were driving the route in a truck. We see several white-tailed deer scamper up from a creek bottom, followed by a herd of nilgai antelope cows who stroll across a grass prairie to meet up with a herd of nilgai bulls.

We cycle 13 miles in two hours including stops at Plover Point and Renee’s Overlook along the shore of the Laguna Madre. It’s a good workout, even with electric assistance. But it is nothing like the exhilaration I feel being there, passing the morning in that part of the Rio Grande Valley where the wild things are.

There is one caveat. No ocelot sighting. I reach out to Hilary Swarts, one of the refuge’s two wildlife biologists. Swarts is an ocelot specialist who has trapped and collared the cats on the refuge; she also documented the first ocelot kitten discovered on the refuge in about two decades.

Swarts, who has worked at the refuge for nine years, has spotted ocelots in the wild twice, one in July 2020 and one this past June, both near the visitor center. “Whenever I feel pessimistic, I remind myself they’re all over this refuge,” she says. “They’ve seen me more often than I’ve seen them. They could be staring at us right now.”

That’s the spirit of Laguna Atascosa.

“It’s that wild, that alive,” Swarts says. “And you don’t have to hike or bike to appreciatethat. Just plant yourself somewhere and watch.”

Laguna
Atascosa Wildlife

Birders are as hip to Laguna Atascosa as the birds are. The late Roger Tory Peterson, a pioneer of modern American bird-watching from New York, made six trips to the refuge in the 20th century in search of uncommon sightings. More than 400 bird species have been spotted at the refuge, including South Texas specialties such as green jays, Altamira orioles, and plain chachalacas.

Popular bird-watching sites include the visitor center, which is home to blinds, feeders, and water features; Kiskadee Trail, a paved, wheelchair-accessible path; and the Mesquite Trail loop and the Prairie Island viewing area.

Osprey Overlook, a covered platform with a sweeping vista of the 3,500-acre Laguna Atascosa, is a magnet for pelicans, herons, egrets, and, during winter, 85% of the redhead ducks in North America.

Endangered Aplomado falcons were introduced on the refuge in 1993 after being eradicated in most of the Southwest. Twenty-six pairs presently reside on the refuge, most around the Bahia Grande Unit.

Near Osprey Overlook is the trailhead to Alligator Pond, where alligators wallow in their element. And while you won’t likely see them, wild cats are out there too—bobcats, cougars, and ocelots.

Hunts, which take place on designated days between November and February, are managed to cull invasive hogs and nilgai antelope.

From the January 2023 issue

Austin, Barbecue, Conservation, Land, Stewardship, Texas, Travel, Water

The President’s Ranch Trail Drive – cruisin’ with LBJ

November 25, 2022 No Comments

https://texashighways.com/travel-news/for-a-quick-road-trip-the-presidents-ranch-trail-takes-you-all-the-way-with-lbj/

from TexasHighways.com

For a Quick Road Trip, the President’s Ranch Trail Takes You All the Way With LBJ

See how the first president from Texas was influenced by the land and communities of the Hill Country

Written by:Joe Nick Patoski

Published: November 22, 2022 at 4:38 pm

The exterior of a white house with a green lawn and mature trees

Way back in 1967, local boosters in Gillespie, Blanco, and Hays counties got together and devised the President’s Ranch Trail, a 100-mile drive from Stonewall to San Marcos, tracing the life of Lyndon Baines Johnson, who was in the last years of his term as president of the United States.

There were ceremonies and a map, but the trail never gained traction until after Johnson left office, when most of the significant sites went under the oversight of the National Park Service and Texas State Parks. Significant infrastructure to accommodate tourists has since been added. And it’s all free.

I was intrigued by Johnson, the 36th president of the United States and the first president from Texas. That lofty position assured a legacy, much of which is enshrined at the LBJ Presidential Library and Museum in Austin.

But to fully appreciate the person, you need to visit the place where he came from, where the land and water and structures vividly tell the story of Johnson’s life. More than any single person, LBJ transformed his beloved Hill Country, bringing electricity and dependable water to people who had neither, then putting the region on the map as president, spending so much time at his Stonewall ranch, it became known as the Texas White House.

Studying the original map and factoring in modern road conditions and population growth, I devise an amended President’s Ranch Trail, focusing on Stonewall and Johnson City, and leaving out the 38-mile leg from Blanco to San Marcos through Wimberley. The trail can be covered in a single day or broken up into a two-day adventure.

I start in Johnson City, just west of the junction of US 281 and US 290. At the corner of East Ladybird Lane and South Avenue G is the Lyndon B. Johnson National Historic Site Visitor Center, within eyesight of the family home Johnson lived in while growing up, and, nearby, the Johnson settlement, the root source of the LBJ saga.

At the visitor center, I watch the 15-minute introductory film LBJ The President, learn more about his legacy reading the exhibit panels, check out the Model T given to LBJ by the Henry Ford Museum, and visit with Joe Owens, the friendly host behind the counter.

“I was a social studies teacher and love history,” Owens tells me. “I get to meet people from all over the country, all over the world.”

The annual visitor count coming off pandemic closures is about 140,000, and would be higher, Owens says, if the Texas White House wasn’t closed for repairs. (After Ladybird Johnson died in 2007, the family home was given to the National Park Service and opened to visitors. Since 2018, however, structural and foundational issues plus needed improvements have forced its closure.)

When other folks drift into the visitor center, Owens pulls out three matching maps of the ranch district and the Johnson City district and goes into detail about what there is to see and do. I choose to begin at LBJ’s boyhood home—a white clapboard structure with green trim and high ceilings—the next block over.

A map of all the spots to visit on the President’s Ranch Trail.

The family moved into this house in 1913 and lived there until Lyndon left for college in San Marcos in 1927. The simple frame house on Elm Street is deceiving: The Johnsons were already well-connected, with cousin James Polk Johnson founding the town of Johnson City, and Lyndon’s father, Sam Ealy Johnson, serving five terms as a state legislator. Ten years after he left for college, Johnson stood on the home’s front porch to announce his candidacy for the U.S. House of Representatives.

Across the street from the visitor center, at Elm and Avenue F, is the headquarters of the Pedernales Electric Cooperative, which puts up Christmas lights that are as spectacular as those around the Blanco County courthouse four blocks north. The co-op, created through Johnson’s persistent lobbying as a congressman, brought electricity to the Hill Country.

Following Owens’ directions, I head to the Johnson settlement, two blocks by foot, or easily accessed from the Johnson Settlement Event Center parking lot, four blocks west on US 290, just across from a gas station.

A half-mile gravel loop leads to the settlement’s event center, and a collection of 19th-century cabins, a barn, and corrals with longhorns over the fence line. Lyndon’s grandfather, Sam Ealy Johnson Sr., and his great-uncle Tom Johnson based their cattle operation here from 1867 to 1872. Sending cattle to market up the Chisholm Trail, theirs was the biggest trail-driving outfit in Blanco and six adjoining counties.

From the settlement on the western edge of Johnson City, I continue west 10 miles on US 290 to the settlement in Hye, passing manicured estates of wineries, distilleries, meaderies, and cideries—the new ranches of the Hill Country. On the left, at the turnoff to Hye-Albert Road, is the storied Hye General Store and Post Office, where 4-year-old Lyndon mailed his first letter, according to the historical marker at the entrance. The storefront, built in 1904, was gussied up in a red, white, and blue motif for LBJ’s 1965 swearing-in of new U.S. postmaster general Lawrence O’Brien on the front steps. Today, the post office shares space with Farm Ale Brewing, which is opening a new tasting room soon.

Continue west 3 miles on US 290 to the visitor center for the LBJ State Park and Historical Site. Pick up a pass to drive the LBJ Ranch (no charge). The visitor center also features tchotchkes at the gift shop, a life-size Lyndon to pose next to for photos, and a theater showing films about LBJ.

Next stop is a few hundred feet east of the visitor center on Park Road 52: the living history homestead of Sauer-Beckmann Farm.

“We do everything as if it’s 1918,” says Mark Itz, a fifth-generation Fredericksburger dressed in buckskin who works at the farm as a state park ranger. He and volunteers guide visitors through the vegetable garden, canning room, blacksmith shop, and sewing room where Kathy Catlin shows off her seamstress skills. You can also watch demonstrations of how to feed the domestic stock, gather eggs, chop wood by hand, and keep the wagon wheels turning,

“We just cooked our lunch on the wood stove,” Itz says. “Ground meat, rice, onions, squash, sweet potato. We make our own blood sausage, liver sausage, and head cheese.”

Itz then answers a question about what he misses the most living in 1918. “Electricity would be the biggest thing,” he says. “We didn’t get that here until 1945.” He then explains how Congressman Johnson secured the largest loan for rural electrification ever to establish the Pedernales Electric Coop in 1942.

“And vehicles,” Itz adds to his answer, “although folks around here continued using wagons to haul stuff because the beds of early pickup trucks were so small.”

From the living history farm, it’s across the Pedernales River, the lifeline that nourishes this part of the Hill Country, to the LBJ Ranch, a 2,000-acre spread that Johnson purchased from his aunt in 1951 when he was a United States senator. LBJ’s message “All the world is welcome here” greets visitors beginning the loop around the ranch.

I glimpse inside the Junction School, the classic one-room school where little Lyndon first attended class, and where President Johnson initiated the Head Start education program for underprivileged children. This is followed by the small house marking LBJ’s birthplace (reconstructed in 1964), his grandparents’ house nearby, and the family cemetery.

Heading north, west, and south on the paved one-lane ranch loop (also popular with cyclists), you pass fallow fields, manicured grazing pastures, herds of whitetail deer, a massive irrigation pivot, the show barn with its pens and corrals where LBJ’s prized rust-colored Hereford cattle are housed (ranch hands will answer your questions), the airstrip, and other points of interest.

The drive leads to “Air Force One-Half,” as the small Lockheed jet was called by LBJ. Situated in the adjacent hangar is the National Historical Park Visitor Center for the Texas While House, the Johnson’s home away from Washington, D.C. An exhibit panel highlights the movie nights hosted at the Texas White House in this hangar, a Resistol hat and pair of Lucchese boots—signature presidential wear—a view of the storage room filled with gifts that LBJ bestowed on guests, and a Ladybird-centric room.

A brown old-timey car parked inside of a building next to a white vintage car

Historic Model T at the LBJ Ranch. Photo by Will van Overbeek.

A brown National Parks Service sign reading "Lyndon B. Johnson National Historic Park"

LBJ Ranch and Texas White House. Photo by Randall Maxwell

The star attraction, though, is the family home, which is currently off-limits. Lack of funds stalled repairs, but it is now on track to reopen within the next five years.

While that may have kept the visitor count down, according to Joe Owens, it’s still fun to check out the grounds where LBJ staged barbecues and walk past the small cottage identified as the United States Secret Service Command Post.

Trinity Lutheran Church across the Pedernales River from LBJ Ranch Trinity Lutheran Church, Stonewall. Photo by Will van Overbeek.

Side Trip: LBJ Museum of San Marcos

While the big LBJ Presidential Library in Austin is a destination unto itself, the little LBJ museum on the square in downtown San Marcos complements Johnson’s Hill Country. According to director Debby Butler, the small three-room museum is dedicated to Johnson’s time as a student seeking a history teacher’s certificate at Southwest Texas State Teachers College, now Texas State University, and the two years he spent teaching at the Welhausen School for Mexican children in the South Texas community of Cotulla.

The museum also functions as a small-scale version of the national and state park visitor centers’ exhibits, with the addition of text in Spanish as well as English. Listen to audio of LBJ speaking (and telling some pretty good jokes) while viewing panels that chronicle his initiatives including the Civil Rights Act, the Economic Opportunity Act, and the Wilderness Act, and the Space Race. You can also see Lyndon at leisure, including a photograph of the president dancing with his favorite actress, Carol Channing. Among the displays is an exhibit case featuring a colorful array of Johnson campaign buttons and a yellowed original front page of the San Marcos Record announcing Johnson’s death.

The San Marcos Museum informs visitors that Johnson wasn’t just class president, but he was also on the debate team and president of the college’s press club. A black-and-white photo series from 1957 shows him physically cajoling another senator, speaking volumes of LBJ’s persuasive powers. Upstairs is a re-creation of Ladybird’s whistle-stop campaigns by train, along with exhibit panels about her life. Three panels feature her powerful conservation speeches at the Padre Island National Seashore, Big Bend National Park, and Fort Davis National Historical Site. I appreciated reading the reprint of a homesick letter he wrote to his mother, also a school teacher, when he was teaching in Cotulla, in which he writes “Babtist” for Baptist—written like a true Texan.

After a pause by Trinity Lutheran Church (where Lyndon and Ladybird attended Sunday services when they were on the ranch), I turn onto Lower Albert Road, crossing US 290 and continuing south 3 miles down a road past real farms that once dominated the area. Albert, a quick left on FM 1623, consists of a historic dance hall and adjacent icehouse/bar, surrounded by a spacious open picnic area with the Cowboy Cantina food truck.

Just beyond the dance hall is the turnoff to a gate and a sign identifying the building on the other side as the Williams Creek School House. This is where LBJ attended school for a year when he was 4 (clearly, a watershed year for the young fellow). The school is now the Albert Community Club and open for club events only.

Less than a half-mile farther east on Farm-to-Market Road 1623, take County Road 206 (Hye-Albert Road) 5 miles back to Hye, then go 5 miles back to 290. Johnson City, your starting point, is 10 miles east. Altogether the route is about 50 miles and can be done in a full day, or two-days if you prefer a more leisurely visit. There are plenty of quaint places in the area for an overnight stay.

The land, you will discover, shaped the man. And this particular man had enough prominence and clout to preserve and honor the places and people who made it that way. Everything’s OK on the LBJ.

LBJ served by BBQ caterer Walter Jetton

Blog, Blues, Conservation, Features, Land, Music, Stewardship, Tejano, Tex Mex, Texas, Travel, Water, Water

The Wild and Urban Brazos River

August 27, 2022 No Comments

https://texashighways.com/things-to-do/on-the-water/the-wild-and-urban-brazos-is-a-river-full-of-contradictions

The Brazos

is a river of contradictions. Flowing more than 800 miles on a diagonal course across the breadth of Texas, the Brazos starts as a Western river coming off the High Plains and ends as a Southern river lazily looping its way to the Gulf of Mexico.

An overhead view of Waco, with Baylor stadium on the right and the Brazos river separating two sides of the city

A view of the Brazos running through Waco with Interstate 35 splitting the picture

Over the course of two centuries, engineers have dammed, channeled, diverted, and fragmented the Brazos, partly to control deadly floods. But while the river has been moderated, it has not been tamed. It still runs wild every now and then, thwarting even the mightiest barriers. As recently as 2016, Brazos River flooding damaged 1,400 homes and killed six people in southeast Texas.

Understanding the Brazos is no easy feat, no matter how many miles you’ve paddled, how many hours you’ve sat on its banks, or how many times you’ve jumped into it. In search of a new perspective, I asked my friend George Farris, owner of Above and Beyond Aviation in Austin, to fly me over the river. On a clear day last fall, Farris took me along as he piloted his Cessna 172 to Haskell, north of Abilene, where we began to trace the Brazos River down to the coast.

With its watershed extending into New Mexico, draws and drainages grow into forks until the Brazos finally becomes a river where the Double Mountain and Salt forks converge in northeast Stonewall County, about 18 miles northwest of Haskell. Here the river carves a ribbon through low, lightly vegetated canyons, its rusty color mirroring the iron oxide-rich red clay soil of the surrounding Rolling Plains.

Seventy air miles east of Haskell, near Graham, the Clear Fork joins the main stem, now a river of substance with distinct bands of dark green vegetation covering its banks and occasional bankside clearings identifying sand-mining operations and crop fields. To the east, wrinkles on the horizon signal the Palo Pinto Mountains and Possum Kingdom Lake, the first major impoundment on the Brazos, dammed in 1941. Covering 17,000 acres, the lake is home to a state park and draws boaters, anglers, skiers, and vacationers.

Below Morris Sheppard Dam, the Brazos courses through tall limestone bluffs and steep cedar-covered slopes. This was Comanche territory 150 years ago, later immortalized in author John Graves’ Goodbye to a River. The book details Graves’ canoe trip with his dog in November 1957, motivated by the coming Lake Granbury impoundment.

“Most autumns, the water is low from the long dry summer, and you have to get out from time to time and wade, leading or dragging your boat through trickling shallows from one pool to the long channel-twisted pool below, hanging up occasionally on shuddering bars of quicksand, making 6 or 8 miles in a day’s lazy work,” Graves wrote, “but if you go to the river at all, you tend not to mind. You are not in a hurry there; you learned long since not to be.”

A man in a long-sleeve white shirt paddles a canoe

Canoeing the John Graves Scenic Riverway

After flying over the upper Brazos, I made plans to see it up-close with a return in late March to kayak a 19-mile section known as the John Graves Scenic Riverway. My paddling friend David Hollingsworth and I took a shuttle from Rochelle’s Canoe Rental in Graford to the put-in at the State Highway 16 bridge, where fishermen were also gearing up to hit the water, some by kayak and some in a shallow-drafting motorboat.

The land still wore its winter coat thanks to a late spring and extended drought. Amid the pools and riffles, I saw some huge carp and a teeny-tiny minnow. Perhaps it was one of two endangered shiner species that live in the Brazos—the sharpnose shiner and smalleye shiner.

A map showing major points on the Brazos river

Gene Wilde, a biologist who recently retired from Texas Tech University, compares the shiner’s reliance on free-flowing water to salmon of the Northwest. “They need 200 miles of free-flowing river to feed, grow, and spawn, completing their life cycle,” he said. “Dams on the Brazos prevent that.” The minnows were once so abundant that entrepreneurs seine-netted the river to scoop up schools of fish to sell for live bait. Now the little fish are hard to find.

Though the environment is changing, the scenery remains sublime. Long curving bends beneath cuesta slopes provide habitat for countless birds. I spotted over 100 great blue herons flapping their pterodactyl wings, white egrets and hawks by the dozens, and one juvenile golden eagle.

We camped on an island near Chick Bend, between SH 16 and Farm-to-Market Road 4. Hooting owls and howling coyotes serenaded us to sleep. At dawn, three Longhorn cattle awakened us as they lumbered across the island on their way to greener pastures.

Headwinds and low flow—water release from Sheppard Dam was a tepid 100 cubic feet per second—made it a difficult trip, one best saved for better conditions in the spring or fall. But the opportunity to see the same river embraced by Graves and Comanche chief Quanah Parker was worth the effort.

An overhead view of green fields and gravel roads

A reconstruction of Fort Velasco at the site where the Brazos met the coastline before the river was channelized

Back in Farris’ Cessna, we followed the Brazos as it wound through low hills before widening into its second major impoundment, Lake Granbury, and about 50 miles later, Lake Whitney. Below Whitney Dam, the Brazos takes on an orderly appearance with houses clustered close to its banks. On the outskirts of Waco, the Bosque River joins the Brazos at the top of the 416-acre Cameron Park, the crown jewel of Waco with its 100-foot limestone cliffs and outdoor recreational opportunities.

Waco is known for its bridges, most of all the Waco Suspension Bridge, the granddaddy of Texas bridges. Constructed with cables made by John Roebling Co., the same contractor who would later build the Brooklyn Bridge, it was the longest single-span bridge west of the Mississippi when it opened in 1870 as a toll bridge. In later decades, the cable system was replaced and the bridge reinforced with steel. The city closed the bridge to vehicles and converted it into a pedestrian bridge in 1971. The 1902 Washington Avenue Bridge, just upstream from the pedestrian bridge, connects downtown to Waco’s east side, a historically Black neighborhood.

Below Interstate 35, the Brazos serves as a scenic backdrop for Baylor University’s football stadium and baseball park, the Mayborn Museum Complex, and the boathouse for the school’s rowing team.

Waco built a new low-water dam in 2007 to mitigate flooding and stabilize Lake Brazos in the downtown area. Todd Nafe, outdoors writer for the Waco Tribune-Herald, said the river has since blossomed as a recreational destination. “The riverfront has become a significant economic resource, with restaurants, parks, food trucks, art festivals, triathlons, fishing tournaments, and fundraising events bringing folks back to the banks,” he said.

A man in a white hat and wearing a PFD holds a large paddle on the banks of the Brazos

Bruce Bodson, executive director of Lower Brazos Riverwatch

Two people stand holding fishing rods on the rocky banks of the Brazos river

Nicole Nation and John Valyan, of Bryan, fish the lower Brazos near Somerville.

A dark bluish black sky with bright stars peeks through vents in the roof of a tent

A starry night as seen from a sandbank campsite on the upper Brazos River

Below Waco, the Brazos River runs through the cotton plantation country that seeded the Republic of Texas in the 1800s. As we flew south to refuel in College Station, we watched the Brazos cut through lush woodlands and wide-open prairies. Settlers who were part of Stephen F. Austin’s Old Three Hundred—the first colonists the empresario brought to Texas—developed farms in the Brazos bottomlands, some of them reliant on slave labor before the Civil War.

Robertson County towns like Hearne and Calvert remain primarily African American. Calvert was the hometown of Hall of Fame baseball player Rube Foster, who helped found and operate the National Negro League until his death in 1930. Another notable Foster, singer-songwriter Ruthie Foster—no relation to Rube—grew up in nearby Gause.

“Me and my cousins loved walking or riding in my Papa’s truck down to the river bank all summer long, with our fishing gear in tow,” recalled Foster, who now lives in Austin. “We smaller cousins always made too much noise for the older cousins to catch anything, but it was fun to just hang out, run around with our shoes off, and practice our fishing pole casting.”

To get a closer look at this section of the Brazos, I met six paddlers including Bruce Bodson, executive director of Lower Brazos Riverwatch, on a September morning for a 16-mile kayak trip starting at the SH 21 bridge, southwest of Bryan.

“I call this the free Brazos,” said Bodson, who founded the nonprofit Riverwatch in 2018 to protect the environment of the river’s 425 miles from Waco to the Gulf of Mexico. This is the least appreciated and most industrialized section of the river. “No dams exist below Waco,” he continued. “It is very much a Southern river—slow moving, looping and bending, with a gradient of less than 1%. The water quality is good, just silt-laden. There’s more variability than people realize.”

The river ran wide and muddy along our route, its sandy banks rising 10 to 20 feet high. Black willow, cottonwoods, and sycamores grew along the shorelines, where kingfishers alighted and skimmed the water. We saw three wild hogs swim across the river and a cottonmouth snake futilely chase a large frog out of the water and onto a beach. Along the way, we stopped to examine petrified wood and look for fossilized shark’s teeth and mussel shells.

Lower Brazos Riverwatch reports exposed pipelines and abandoned wells to state authorities, and their stewardship is getting results. “We’ve got legislative committees and landowners paying attention to the river as a potential asset now,” Bodson said.

We finished at the SH 60 bridge, 3 miles southwest of College Station, surrounded by rows of white cotton in every direction. “It’s wilderness down there,” Bodson said. “You get on that river, and there is nobody down there. You are absolutely alone.”

History of the Brazos

By the time 18th-century Spanish explorers gave it the name Los Brazos de Dios (The Arms of God), the Brazos River had been home to creatures and humans for tens of thousands of years. Learn more about this natural and cultural history at museums along the river’s course.

Waco Mammoth National Monument, Waco: About 15,000 years ago, the Brazos was prime habitat for the extinct Columbian mammoth. At this archeological site near the confluence of the Bosque and Brazos rivers, see the fossils of a nursery herd of Ice Age Columbian mammoths, along with fossils of a camel and juvenile saber-toothed cat. nps.gov/waco

Brazos Valley Museum of Natural History, Bryan: This museum features exhibits covering the Brazos Valley’s history back to the Ice Age, including exhibits on Native American artifacts, great Brazos floods, and cotton farming. brazosvalleymuseum.org

San Felipe de Austin State Historic Site, San Felipe: Founded in 1824 on a Brazos River bluff, San Felipe served as Empresario Stephen F. Austin’s colonial capital until it was burned in 1836 during the Runaway Scrape. The historic site includes a museum and replicas of some of the town’s original buildings. thc.texas.gov/historic-sites/san-felipe-de-austin-state-historic-site

Washington-on-the-Brazos State Historic Site, Washington: Along with a living history farm and a museum covering the Texas Republic, this complex contains a replica of Independence Hall—where delegates signed the Texas Declaration of Independence—a riverside exhibit about the historic Robinson Ferry crossing, and exhibits mentioning various 19th-century efforts to navigate the Brazos in steamboats. thc.texas.gov/historic-sites/washington-brazos-state-historic-site

Brazos Bend State Park, Needville: Located 45 miles southwest of Houston, this park has 37 miles of trails to explore wetland lakes and sloughs in the Brazos River bottomlands. The park is known for its alligators and waterfowl. tpwd.texas.gov/state-parks/brazos-bend

A man in a long-sleeved white shirt paddles between two rock outcroppings on a river

Canoeing through bluffs on a stretch of the upper Brazos known as the John Graves Scenic Riverway.

From my bird’s-eye view at 5,000 feet, I watched the landscape flatten as the Brazos cruised under US 290 and I-10 and through the Katy Prairie. This landscape looked similar to the Llano Estacado of the Panhandle, except everything was coated a verdant green. About 10 miles from the Gulf of Mexico, the Brazos’ graceful curves and loops straighten into a channel as the river enters Freeport, an industrial maze thick with refineries and tanker ships.

Unlike most Texas rivers, the Brazos empties directly into the Gulf, rather than filtering through bays or estuaries. But it doesn’t meet the ocean where it originally did at Surfside. In 1929, the Army Corps of Engineers diverted the Brazos just upstream by dredging a new channel that empties into the Gulf about 5 miles down the beach.

There, the Brazos ends undramatically. I later drove along the levee road that traces the channel for almost 4 miles, where locals fished for red drum, black drum, trout, and channel cat. After passing a cluster of storage tanks and buildings, I reached a gate with a “No Trespassing” sign. The waves of the Gulf were barely visible in the distance, but I couldn’t go any further.

A mile high up in the air offered a different perspective. Every man-made object I could see—from Possum Kingdom Lake to cotton fields, sand mines, historic bridges, the Houston skyline, and tankers in the Gulf—was tied to that green-brown ribbon I’d been following. As Farris banked his airplane west, I could see the mighty Brazos was really the most Texas river of them all.

Paddle the Brazos

There’s no better way to experience the natural qualities of the Brazos River than from the seat of a kayak or canoe. Outfitters operate at numerous locations on the Brazos, a river that offers a variety of paddling experiences throughout its course.

Rochelle’s Canoe Rental, Graford: provides rentals and shuttles for trips on the upper Brazos’ John Graves Scenic Riverway. rochellescanoeandkayakrental.com

Brazos Outdoor Center, Rainbow: the nearest wild river experience to DFW, includes campsites, equipment rentals, and shuttles. brazosoutdoorcenter.com

Dick’s Canoes, Aquilla: provides rentals and shuttles for trips on the Brazos below Whitney Dam. dickscanoe.com

Pura Vida Paddle, Waco: find kayak and stand-up paddleboard rentals, as well as classes, across the Brazos from Cameron Park and on Lake Waco. puravidapaddle.com

Waco Paddle Company, Waco: canoe, kayak, and stand-up paddleboard rentals in downtown Waco on the bank of the Brazos. wacopaddlecompany.com

Hidalgo Falls, Navasota: The closest whitewater to Houston, this private paddlers park is owned by the Texas Rivers Protection Association. txrivers.org/discover-texas-rivers/brazos-river

From the July 2022 issue

Austin, Blog, Conservation, Land, Stewardship, Texas, Travel, Water, Water

Behold the Bounty of the Blanco, Texas Highways magazine

June 24, 2021 No Comments

https://texashighways.com/things-to-do/on-the-water/behold-the-bounty-of-the-blanco/

Behold the Bounty of the Blanco

The splendid and fragile beauty

of the Hill Country’s keystone river

By Joe Nick Patoski

Photographs by Erich Schlegel

Rivers in Texas run the gamut from bucolic babbling brooks to churning whitewater, from rocky dry channels to wide and muddy waterways. The Blanco River, which winds 87 miles through the eastern Hill Country, stands out for exhibiting all of those characteristics at one time or another. I should know. The Blanco is my river.

Twenty-eight years ago, our family moved to Wimberley to be near the Blanco. I’d been hooked on swimming at Barton Springs, Austin’s 68-degree spring-fed swimming pool. When it was time to move, we decided to jump ahead of the inevitable suburban sprawl while looking for another spring-fed place to swim.

I was sold on the house my wife had found the minute we drove over the Blanco on Bendigo Crossing, a low-water bridge also known as the Slime Bridge. Upstream, people were splashing around in the clear water, their laughs punctuated by shrieks of pure joy. Marco! Polo! Bright shafts of late afternoon sunlight shot through the branches of tall cypress trees hovering above the riverbank. Never mind what the house looked like.

An overhead view of the wide blue Blanco river with boats in the middle and trees on the side

Kayaking the Blanco near Wimberley

A watercolor illustration showing a map of the Blanco and San Marcos rivers between Austin and San Antonio

The vintage ’70s ranch-style home needed some love and care, but it would do just fine: It was a half-mile from the Blanco and gave us river access through a property owners’ park.

The first time I jumped in the Blanco, I was taken aback. The water tasted clean. The visibility underwater didn’t compare to Barton Springs’ clarity—the suspended limestone sediment in the Blanco clouds the water and gives the river its name, which translates to White River. But it tasted clean. Smelled clean too.

From April through October, I swim in the Blanco. It is one of the greatest pleasures I know. It’s a pleasure I share with growing crowds of both locals and visitors who converge on the river’s cypress-lined banks at places like Blanco State Park in Blanco; Blue Hole Regional Park on Cypress Creek, a tributary of the Blanco in Wimberley; and Five Mile Dam Park, a 34-acre Hays County park at the lower end of the river near San Marcos. On summer weekends, the parks routinely fill to capacity.

The crowds have grown as suburban sprawl has infiltrated Hays County. The county’s population grew nearly 50% from 2010 to 2019, making it the nation’s second fastest-growing county, according to the U.S. Census.

“The Blanco has always been a hidden gem with little access, fiercely hoarded and protected,” says Ryan McGillicuddy, a Texas Parks and Wildlife Department conservation biologist who advises landowners on land management. “But the Hill Country continues to become carved up, and whether landowners like it or not, more people are coming to the river.”

Over the past year and a half of COVID-19, I’ve gotten to know my particular stretch of the Blanco even better. Swimming in the river almost every warm day has been a saving grace. Fallow season walks have opened my eyes to the subtle shift of the seasons. The bird and bat migrations, I now realize, aren’t a twice-a-year migration, but rather a constant, steady symphony of movement throughout the year.

When the wind kicks up, you can’t see the Blanco’s bottom for the chop. When the flow is high and fast following a flood, there’s enough whitewater to haul out the kayak, and as soon as the muddy current clears up, go paddling. The river is never the same. And no matter how stressed out it might appear to get, it always comes back. The Blanco has never let me down. The question is: Can we hold up our end of the bargain?

A lone kayaker paddles under green trees and blue sky

A young woman in swim goggles stands on a wooden dock on the edge of the blue Blanco river water

Blue Hole Regional Park on Cypress Creek in Wimberley

The Blanco—locally pronounced “Blank-o,” rather than the Spanish “Blahn-ko”—is the bellwether river of the Hill Country. It’s notorious for its frequent flash floods, treasured for its semi-pristine water quality and quantity, and fretted over because of threats posed by rapid population growth. While human development encroaches the river now, it wasn’t always this way. Few written accounts exist of early European explorers in Texas visiting the Blanco. The topography was too rugged, and the river valley too defended by Native Americans, particularly Lipan Apache and Comanche, who were hostile to incursions by outsiders.

The Blanco begins as a cluster of springs in Kendall County, running shallow as it enters Blanco County and growing as it courses beyond the town of Blanco into the Wimberley Valley and Hays County. It joins the San Marcos River just downstream of the city of San Marcos. Along the way, the Blanco traverses a landscape of cliffs, steppes, canyons, tributaries, waterfalls, springs, and rapids.

The Blanco River bottom is mostly hard limestone and absent natural vegetation. Its water quality remains close to unsullied. On numerous occasions, people have told me the Blanco is the second-cleanest river in Texas. The Devils, the Frio, and the upper Nueces rivers have all been cited as the cleanest, depending on whom you’re talking to. As the self-declared “King of Texas Swimming Holes,” I’ve swum in all of these, and written about them in these pages, including stories about the Frio in 2019 and the Nueces in 2020. I’m not sure which is the cleanest, but they’re all less polluted than other rivers in the state. The Blanco is hardly pristine, though. More than 100 dams and low-water crossings span the river, according to the Nature Conservancy of Texas. Riverbank and riparian habitat are increasingly fragmented as ranches are cut into subdivisions.

I’ve lived by the river long enough to see the Blanco go hog wild on uncontrolled rampages, swallowing trucks and trees, and killing livestock and people—most notably during the destructive and deadly Memorial Day flood of 2015. There’s a reason the Blanco is the heart of what’s known as “Flash Flood Alley.” During extended droughts, and practically almost every August, I’ve watched the river slow to a trickle. My rule of thumb is the earlier in the summer, the better the swimming—as long as the spring and summer rains come. Late in the summer, if it’s been dry and there’s no apparent flow, I’ll skip my swim and go back to the house wondering if I’ll outlive the river, what with all these external pressures it faces, most of them human-related. Is the Blanco a relict, a river at the end of its run? With the local climate trending drier and hotter, is the Blanco destined to be a huge dry wash of bleached rubble, like the thousands of once-upon-a-time drainages threading through the Big Bend and the Chihuahuan Desert farther west?

The Blanco is that delicate—and that marvelous.

Bright green ferns grow along the banks of the Blanco River

Proper Respects

Responsible River Recreation

The Blanco has the reputation of being a fenced-off, no-access river. Even today, trespassers can still have a gun pulled on them if they’re in the wrong place at the wrong time. Respect “No Trespassing” signs and purple paint markers on fences, trees, posts, and walls. (A Texas law passed in 1997 allows landowners to use purple paint in lieu of “No Trespassing” signs, with the same consequences.) Ignoring those warnings can lead to being arrested, jailed, and/or fined, which can pretty much ruin your river experience. Don’t fret. There are numerous parks where the public can access the Blanco River for swimming (see below). Always be mindful of the local environment and practice “leave no trace” principles, such as proper trash disposal, respecting wildlife, and not collecting what you find, including rocks, plants, and arrowheads.

Above: A fern grotto on the Blanco near Wimberley

A man in a gray shirt stands on a rock above bright blue water

David Baker at Jacob’s Well

David Baker came to the Wimberley Valley in 1988 and bought property on Mount Sharp Road that included a piece of Jacob’s Well. Here he started the Dancing Waters Inn.

If there is a steward of the Blanco watershed, it’s Baker. If you’ve seen Jacob’s Well, you’ll understand.

Located about 5 miles from Wimberley, the deep, heart-shaped underwater cave is the source of Cypress Creek. The well begins as a crack on the limestone surface before tunneling deep into Trinity Aquifer. The mouth of the cave makes an incredible swimming hole, and the sweet sensation of diving off the rocks into the hole’s cold, clear water is a rare thrill, even among other spring-fed pools.

Baker founded the Wimberley Valley Watershed Association and led the campaign for Hays County to purchase the well and its surroundings, replacing a trailer park and tennis courts with an educational and research center.

“My first impetus was to erect a fence and keep people out,” Baker says. “But thinking long term, if we don’t share these special places with people, they won’t care if they’re destroyed. They won’t know. We’ve got to do better connecting the community to these local resources.”

As the protections increase, so have the external challenges. Baker was involved in the successful four-year fight to stop a private company’s plans to pump and ship groundwater out of the county, which was finally resolved earlier this year. In 2019, working with Hays County and other interested parties, Baker helped stop the City of Blanco’s discharge of 1.6 million gallons daily of treated wastewater into the river. The treated water triggered algae blooms on the Blanco that extended far downstream. The town is now using the wastewater to irrigate alfalfa fields.

“These are some of the few clean rivers left in Texas, and even the most thoroughly treated wastewater contributes to their degradation,” Baker says.

It’s a race between conservation awareness and unfettered development in a booming region. In 2000, Jacob’s Well, which provides about 10% to 20% of the Blanco River’s baseflow via Cypress Creek, stopped flowing for the first time in recorded history. In 2008 and 2009, due to drought and groundwater pumping, the well stopped flowing again, and then again in 2011, 2013, and January of this year.

Despite these threats, Baker is an optimist. Last November, 70% of Hays County voters approved a $75 million parks bond for the county to secure land to protect natural resources and increase river access. And Jacob’s Well, he likes to point out, has become an economic engine through tourism. In recent years, overnight lodging has contributed $70 million annually to the economy in Wimberley.

“Last year, 35,000 visitors from 28 different countries came and visited the well. Twice that many visited Blue Hole,” Baker says. “When people see this, they begin to understand how this all fits together.”

Groups of people sit under tents or in the sun along the banks of a blue-green river

Five Mile Dam Park in San Marcos

I’ve grown to appreciate the Blanco’s nuances. Some mornings the surface is smooth as glass, sunlight painting shadowy ribbons on the rock bottom. Other mornings, wind ripples the surface, the wavelets sparkling like shimmering diamonds.

My thing is jumping in and swimming about a quarter-mile upstream to the big boulder and beyond, following the contours of the riverbed as I work a steady alternating stroke, stretching, kicking, my body and mind getting locked in a rhythmic, meditative zone. The sight of a snapping turtle moving slowly across the bottom may startle, interrupting the repast. I’ve had the same reaction spotting gar and snakes close by underwater.

A man in a collard shirt and

Hays County Commissioner Lon Shell

As a native of San Marcos, Hays County Commissioner Lon Shell has long known about the Blanco’s beauty—and dangers. But still, he says, the growing demands on this local treasure have presented a learning curve for the community. “When we first opened Jacob’s Well as a county park in 2011, we didn’t understand that people from all over the country, and eventually the world, wanted to see it,” he says. “That lesson has been learned.”

Shell has made protection of natural resources a priority. Conserving land around the Blanco improves the river’s water quality and can also mitigate the severity of flooding, he says, by directing development and impervious cover away from the river and encouraging the restoration of riparian habitat that naturally absorbs floodwaters and mitigates erosion.

“There are a lot of people in western Hays County who haven’t been here that long,” he says. “They see the Blanco as a river, but I don’t think they respect or understand the river and its value as much as old-timers. The [2015] flood brought that to the forefront: the importance of managing the resource, conserving it, and potentially reducing the likelihood of flooding.”

Shell is proudest of the Sentinel Peak Preserve, a new 535-acre park. When Shell caught wind of the pending sale of the old El Rancho Cima Boy Scout ranch, he strategized with area officials and the Nature Conservancy to secure some of the land. Located just below the rocky ridge known as Devil’s Backbone, the preserve covers a milelong stretch of the Blanco River, protecting prime habitat for the endangered golden-cheeked warbler. Officials hope to have the preserve ready to open to the public by late 2022 or early 2023.

“The importance of getting people on the land and seeing the river is immeasurable,” Shell says. “Signal Peak is iconic. It’s the perfect spot for us to do this.”

The new preserve brings hope for McGillicuddy, of Texas Parks and Wildlife. I recently caught up with the biologist as he met with science students from St. Edward’s University. “With a property like Sentinel Peak, there is a rare opportunity to start with a blank slate and shape how the land can be managed for both conservation and recreation,” he says.

Pulling up grasses from the bank, McGillicuddy demonstrated how they help prevent erosion and soil loss during floods. The group discussed the importance of landowner stewardship; the restoration of the Guadalupe bass, the state fish; how the Blanco is connected to Barton Springs and San Marcos Springs; the impact of the 2015 flood; and how to manage for future floods.

Such challenges are enough to turn a river lover like me into a worrywart. But the uncertainty of what’s to come is balanced by experiences like an afternoon this spring. Swimming in the river, I raised my head every now and then to gaze at the line of majestic cypresses looming above the bank and to check for red-eared slider turtles sunbathing on the rocks. At moments like these, I can’t imagine a more splendid place on earth.

Two men relax of the water of the blanco under a green tree

A swimming area by the dam on the Blanco River at Blanco State Park; Five Mile Dam Park in San Marcos

Dive In

Recreating on the River

While private land borders the majority of the Blanco, there are numerous opportunities to swim and enjoy the river’s natural beauty.

Blanco

Blanco State Park: a mile of riverfront, campsites, and cabins. 830-833-4333; texasstateparks.org
Redbud Café: soups, salads, and sandwiches on the square. redbud-cafe.com

Wimberley

Blue Hole Regional Park: Online reservations are required for the swimming hole on Cypress Creek. cityofwimberley.com
Jacob’s Well Natural Area: Advance reservations are required for swimming, but not for the hiking trails. hayscountytx.com
Cypress Falls Swimming Hole: swimming and a hotel. thelodgeatcypressfalls.com
Creekside Cookers BBQ & Bar: great food and outdoor seating. creeksidecookers.com
Rio Bonito Resort: cabins and swimming on the Blanco. riobonito.com
7A Ranch Resort: cabins, a pioneer town, and swimming on the Blanco. 7Aranch.co

San Marcos

Five Mile Dam Park: riverfront with swimming and hiking. hayscountytx.com
Herbert’s Taco Hut: a longtime local Tex-Mex favorite, near the bank of the San Marcos River. 512-392-2993

From the July 2021 issue

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Texas, Texas music, Travel, Water

The Cajuns of the Golden Triangle

January 2, 2021 No Comments

https://texashighways.com/culture/people/cajun-culture-flourishes-texas-golden-triangle/

from the. January 2021 issue of Texas Highways magazine

Photographs by Dave Shafer

In Texas’ Golden Triangle, Cajun Culture Flourishes

A man plays an accordion in front of a sign reading 'Bon Temps Accordions Jude Moreau' Jude Moreau, a Cajun accordionist from Groves

on a muggy August morning in southeast Texas. But inside the Neches River

Wheelhouse, a waterfront bar and restaurant in Port Neches, husband-and-wife duo Dana and Krissy Melancon are bright and chirpy as they settle in front of the microphones of their remote broadcasting studio. On cue, the airwaves crackle with the sound of a train whistle, followed by a loud accordion pushing a peppy rhythm with fiddle and guitar.

Every Sunday morning, The Cajun Express radio show mixes four hours of swamp pop, zydeco, and most of all, Cajun music with community news, dedications, and requests. Loose and familiar, the broadcast serves as a meeting point for Cajuns from across the Golden Triangle, that geographic zone in Texas’ southeast corner defined by Beaumont, Port Arthur, and Orange.

“This show is a responsibility,” Dana Melancon says. “I don’t want to let anybody down. The people listening are willing to share stories and make connections for you. It’s not anything I’m doing. I’m just putting the music out there.”

Accordionist Bridget D’Lane Roberts

“I don’t think southeast Texas Cajuns consider themselves separate, although it’s one of these pride things,” Melancon says, nodding toward the dozens of fans on hand for the live remote broadcast. “In southwest Louisiana, you might get, ‘You’re not really Cajun. You weren’t born here, you’re not living here.’ But it’s tongue-in-cheek teasing.”

As The Cajun Express opens its second hour, daylight reveals a waterfront setting by the Neches River where massive barges and oil tankers rumble past, headed upstream to refineries and the Port of Beaumont, or downstream to Sabine Lake and the Gulf of Mexico. The setting, adjacent to Riverfront Park, might not be confused for Louisiana’s Atchafalaya Basin. But for Golden Triangle Cajuns who show up for the broadcast, it’ll do just fine.

The tale of the Acadians, the French-Canadians who were exiled from Nova Scotia in the 18th century, has been much told, most famously by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in “Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie,” published in 1847. The epic poem recounts love lost during Le Grand Dérangement, when the British kicked French immigrants out of the Maritime Provinces of eastern Canada during the French and Indian War of 1754-63. Roughly 3,000 refugees found their way to southwestern Louisiana—present-day Acadiana.

The Acadians—or Cajuns, as they became known—were an insular bunch, isolated from the rest of the world by swamps and rivers until Louisiana Gov. Huey P. Long’s bridge-building frenzy in the 1930s. Unlike most assimilated American cultures, Cajuns have been able to hold on to their customs, folkways, and, at least in the heart of Cajun country, their French dialect.

The story of the next Cajun diaspora, from southwest Louisiana to southeast Texas, is less celebrated. The first Cajuns began moving across the Sabine River in the early 19th century, among them the Hébert family who established a farm on Taylor Bayou in Jefferson County in 1842. The 1850 U.S. census documented 600 “Franco-Louisianans” in southeast Texas. Cajun relocation to Texas grew in the early 1900s with the expansion of the Southern Pacific railroad and then the rapid growth of petroleum and chemical refineries around Port Arthur. Faced with a choice between scraping by as a sharecropper or making a middle-class income at a refinery, many Cajuns headed west to Texas.

A blue sky over blue water and tall grass in a marsh

A Port Arthur marsh

The inside of a wood-paneled home with rocking chairs and a brick fireplace

La Maison Beausoleil in Port Neches

The easiest way to understand and appreciate a culture that isn’t your own is through its food and music. The Cajuns stand out on both fronts.

Cajun cuisine is everywhere and anywhere in southeast Texas, from crawfish farms to destination restaurants and boudin joints. The stalwarts of Cajun cuisine are well known: gumbo, étouffée, blackened redfish, and delicacies like boudin (spicy pork and rice sausage) and cracklins (crunchy fried chunks of pork skin, fat, and meat). At the Pine Tree Lodge in La Belle, just outside Beaumont, you can order alligator from the menu while watching their wild cousins in Taylor Bayou from the outside deck. In the Golden Triangle, you’ll find boudin balls alongside hot dogs at the concession stand of a high school football game—and gumbo on the menu of a Mexican restaurant.

Larry Judice, 71, is a third-generation Texas Cajun whose father and grandfather operated groceries and meat markets in the Golden Triangle. In 1978, he opened Larry’s French Market, a grocery and deli in Groves, just outside of Port Arthur, serving lunch plates to refinery workers.

“By trade I was a butcher, and we sold lots of seafood,” says Judice, now retired. “We were one of the first to sell crawfish live. We started getting rid of shelves and putting more tables in. Then we put in a dance floor. It just boomed after that.”

Larry’s evolved into a full-blown entertainment venue with an all-you-can-eat Cajun seafood buffet and live bands on weekends. In many respects, Larry’s functions like a community center. “There are so many Cajuns that live around here,” Judice says. “We love the music, the food, friendship, family getting together to have a fais do-do—a dance—having a good time.”

Stewart Gordon, manager of Larry’s French Market, insists there’s a method to les bon temps madness: “They eat till they’re stuffed, then they dance it off.”

A man throws a large net over a body of water

Netting bait fish near Groves

Indeed, music is perhaps the strongest cultural bond uniting Cajuns in the Golden Triangle, attracting the community for dances and parties.

“I’ve had this music in my heart since I was a little kid,” says Jude Moreau, a Groves bandleader who spent summers as a kid at the family farm near Opelousas, Louisiana, where he experienced rural Cajun life firsthand. Moreau learned to dance and play accordion after being immersed in Cajun music at the old Rodair Club, an influential but now-defunct Cajun institution on the outskirts of Port Arthur.

“I don’t know how to explain this—we’re huggers. OK?” Moreau says, reflecting on Cajun music’s infectious groove. “We love to be up close and personal. So even when we’re dancing a two-step, we’re close to each other, like we’re hugging; it’s the same way when we dance the waltz. What we play makes you want to dance—it moves you, it draws you in.”

Moreau has played stages in Texas and beyond with Ed Poullard, a Creole accordionist from Beaumont. In a workshop behind his home, Poullard repairs, tunes, and builds Cajun accordions from scratch—a craft he learned from Moreau. Pausing from his work on a single-row button accordion, Poullard unpacks the dynamic between Cajuns and Creoles, i.e. Cajuns with African, Caribbean, and/or American Indian ancestry.

Creoles play zydeco music, accordion-driven dance music infused with rhythm and blues and hip-hop elements, which is very different from contemporary Cajun music. But when Poullard, a Creole, and Moreau, a Cajun, play old-style music together, they’re “married,” Poullard says.

“Cajun and Creole are wedded together,” he says. “You can listen to somebody born in the early 1900s, and be they Creole or Cajun or beast, the sound of the accordion is very similar. As the years progressed, Cajun style became more intricate, more note-y, and the Creole style remained simple and pure. That’s it. That’s the only way to explain it.”

While Moreau and Poullard are in their 60s, younger Cajuns from the Golden Triangle are coninuing the musical
tradition. Donovan Bourque, a gregarious 19-year-old from Beaumont, is among those up-and-comers as the accordionist for the band Cajun Strong.

Bourque works at Big Doobie’s Boudin & Cracklins food truck in Port Arthur, where he sometimes leads multi-hour jams outside the shack. His playing precedes him. “Grown men have texted me asking for accordion tab sheets, if I could write it out for them, or send them a video,” Bourque says with a tinge of incredulity. “I try to help as much as I can because this is something you don’t want to let die.”

Text: We love the music, the food, friendship, family getting toegher to have a fais do-do

A man in a red hat holds a rope of sausage

Joshua Rodrigues of Big Doobie’s Boudin & Cracklins in Port Arthur

A sign reads "No Swimming" next to a dock along brown water and tall trees

Alligators discourage swimming in Taylor Bayou.

With Cajuns residing in southeast Texas for more than a century, their culture is intertwined with the Golden Triangle mainstream, says Tom Neal, director of the Museum of the Gulf Coast in Port Arthur.

“To us, the Cajun people and their culture is our culture,” Neal says. “It’s a standing joke that I hear from time to time that Port Arthur ought to be part of Louisiana. We’ve blended so much that we don’t hardly think about it.”

The museum explores Cajun heritage with artifacts including a vintage pirogue, the type of dugout canoe Cajuns used to navigate bayous and swamps. It also chronicles the history of the discovery of oil at Spindletop and the ensuing development of the Texaco and Gulf Oil refineries in Port Arthur, both magnets for Cajun workers.

Cajun and Creole musicians are also prominent in the museum’s Music Hall of Fame, among them Choates and Clifton Chenier, “the King of Zydeco,” who moved to Port Arthur in 1946 to work in the Gulf Oil Refinery.

The most visible landmark testifying to the Cajun presence in the Golden Triangle is La Maison Beausoleil in Port Neches’ Riverfront Park. The cypress house harkens to the Cajun settler lifestyle. The Broussard family built the house in Louisiana’s Vermilion Parish in 1810, and it was moved to Port Neches to serve as a museum in 1985, says Karen Mills, president of Les Acadiens du Texas, the group that maintains the home. Each year, on the second Sunday of October, La Maison Beausoleil hosts a Cajun French mass. Sweets, gumbo, and boudin sold at the event help fund the house’s upkeep.

“The Broussard family gave the house to us to open as a museum because of all the Cajuns who had moved from Louisiana when the men came to work in the refineries,” Mills explains.

The Museum of the Gulf Coast and La Maison Beausoleil have been part of tour schedules during Port Arthur’s annual Cajun Heritage Festival in April. Though festival plans have been upended by the coronavirus pandemic, events like the Cajun Heritage Festival and Cajun Night at the Texas Rice Festival in Winnie offer visitors the immersive, full-tilt Cajun experience—down to the dance contests and crawfish races.

Gloria Pate, the promoter of the Cajun Heritage Festival, sees Cajun culture’s wide appeal through her work with the festival and her online radio show, which airs on Cajun Sounds Internet Radio.

“I got a message last week from a guy in Dubai,” she says. “It’s worldwide. They love the music. They become enthralled with the music, the energy, our joie de vivre. We see it time and time again with hurricanes and plant explosions. People think of the music and they think of the food, but it’s so much more. It’s hard to put into words, other than neighbors helping neighbors.”

Back at the Neches River Wheelhouse, Melancon says he’s noticed a surge of interest in Cajun culture, especially among young musicians like Bourque.

“Back when I was young, it was not cool,” he says. “I’m 61 now, and the Cajun stuff is cool to the younger people. They’re starting bands, getting together to learn Cajun language. It’s riding on their shoulders now. The culture and the feel for the Cajun way of life is as strong as it’s ever been. It’s second nature now, like wanting to learn to cook a gumbo.”

A man in a gray shirt and black hat stands next to an accordion

Accordionist Ed Poullard, in Beaumont

Texas-Cajun Touchpoints

As Cajun people have crossed the border to southeast Texas from Louisiana, they’ve brought their culture and customs along with them.

The Cajun Express radio show broadcasts 6-10 a.m. Sundays on Beaumont radio station 105.3 FM and online at thecajunexpress.com. On the second Sunday of the month, the Melancons broadcast live from the Neches River Wheelhouse in Port Neches.

Neches River Wheelhouse, 720 Lee Ave., Port Neches. 409-853-1249;
nechesriverwheelhouse.com

Larry’s French Market, 3701 Pure Atlantic Road, Groves. 409-962-3381;
larrysfrenchmarket.com

Big Doobie’s Boudin & Cracklins, 6247 W. Port Arthur Road, Port Arthur. 409-548-1335.
facebook.com/doobiescajunmeats

Museum of the Gulf Coast, 700 Procter St., Port Arthur. 409-982-7000;
museumofthegulfcoast.org

La Maison Beausoleil, Riverfront Park, 600 Grigsby Ave., Port Neches. 409-989-9211

The Cajun Heritage Festival is set for April 17 at Port Arthur’s Carl A. Parker Multipurpose Center.
For updates on the event’s schedule and status, visit cajunheritagefest.com.

Cajun Sounds Internet Radio streams music 24-7 at cajunsoundsinternetradio.com.

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