Enchanted Rock



The sides of the highway filled with flowers

From Big Springs in West Texas, we’re headed toward Fredericksburg in the hill country of Texas. As we head southeast, the land began changing from the flats with alternating cotton fields and dry ranch land to Mesquite trees on both sides of the road. Then all of a sudden, the sides of the highway was filled with wild flowers – yellow, red, blue, and purple. What a gorgeous sight! Apparently, Lady Bird Johnson sponsored wild flower plantings along many of Texas highways. It certainly was impressive. Black-eyed Susans seem to dominate the yellow flower; Indian Blanket, the reds; and bluebonnets, the blue. As looked at the Blue Bonnets, we thought they were Lupines. Well, sure enough, there are in the Lupine family. Our major stop for the day was Enchanted Rock State Natural Area. The area is dominated by a large rock formation about 250 feet above the riverbed. Rather than hike to the summit on this 80 degree day, we decided to hike Sandy Creek, with the flowers dominating the scenery.

Indian Blanket and Blue Bonnets

We walked the main street of Fredericksburg in the afternoon, a tourist town dominated by many German restaurants, places for wine and beer tasting, and tourist shops selling various Texas souvenirs and food. We enjoyed a fine German meal of Jagerschnitzel, red cabbage, and spatzel and beer at the Altdorf Restaurant and Biergarten. 



Enchanted Rock

 

Alibates Flint Quarry



Lake Meredith

If you are more of visual person than a reader, a video of this trip with more pictures and less detail is available on youtube.

After snow earlier this week, we left Fort Collins in 70 degree weather and it was soon in the 90’s as we reached Southeast Colorado. Most of Southeast Colorado, is pretty desolate. The drought has not helped this area at all, everything dried out. Most of the towns here looked deserted, except for Limon. Our intention was to stop for the night at a commercial campground in Dumas, Texas. The oil boom was evident – the campground was completely full. So we kept on to find a campground at Lake Meredith Recreation area. The recreation area had over 100 camp sites, but the problem was we couldn’t tell from the signage where they were. After going down one road only to find a boat ramp and picnic area. We tried for another, but the navigator function on Mary’s phone wanted to lead us to a spot with no signs for the rec area. So we turned back to the headquarters area and sure enough about 3 miles further on was a campground and we were the only camper. We had crossed this huge dam., but there was almost no water behind the dam. It was a beautiful campsite with a great sunset view of the dam and lake.



Alibates Flint

Today, we visited Alibates Flint Quarry National Monument, the only National Monument in Texas. This is a unique site in the U.S., the source for the flint that went into everything from Clovis points (10,000 years ago) to those of the 19^th century. This flint is multicolored and readily identifiable from this area. The flint from here has been found in tools all the way up into Minnesota and down into Central America. The flint was formed in an area of about 10 square miles and within this area are over 3000 flint quarries. Our naturalist led us on a hike to two of the quarries. She had a lot to say about the history and botany of the area. We know that the area was occupied 10,000 years ago because an Alibates flint was found to have killed a mammoth, at that time the area was green and tropical. She had studied about the medicinal properties of many of the local plants like yucca and sage and used them rather than vitamin supplements. After our hike, we headed on down to Big Springs, Texas.