The spring bloom, as a traveler mounts toward the Llano Estacado,1 begins a few weeks later than the bloom below the Hill Country though, and the land is scarred only by the ubiquitous fence line, the occasional structure on a settled land and the fill and asphalt ribbons of transit that make enjoying travel through Comancheria2 possible.
The Texas Hill Country Coloring Book will help those who are interested in identifying the flowers named below by their other common names and by their scientific nomenclature, as well as provide an activity for children who may make a trip to ease their suffering. Another great resource is the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center Web site, and the Center is a destination for any traveler to Central Texas.
An early start, and the diffuse light under the low, scudding clouds of dawn across Texas added to the sparse opportunity to record the spring bloom along State Highway 71, until crossing US Highway 281.
Engleman's Daisy, the yellow flower in the preceding picture, and Indian Blanket predominate along the roadside that meanders over and through the hills on the route through Llano and into Brady. They seldom extend past the fence line that separates the roadway from the pasture and occasional field, where the soil is deep enough to sustain a crop, but provide sequential moments of color and wonder for a traveler.
Even the bloom of beggar's Tick, the germ of those annoying little seed pods that inspired Velcro, adds to the quilted margins between the private and the public domain, during the climb to the plain that lies the better part of another 300 miles to the west.
Sometimes, even the scars, where the Earth was cut away to lay the high-speed trails between the East and West, 3 add to the scenic treats along the way. The Coreopsis (the yellow flower) and Old Man on the Mountain (the white flower) add their color to the scene, while the budding Prickly Pear and Lace cacti promise to add their color in another week or two. I may go back in a few weeks for the pastel yellow of the Prickly Pear and the pastel purple to light pink of the Lace cactus, or I may just wait until next year and plan an extended tour of Comancheria that will bring me back through the cactus bloom.
This is very nearly like the scene where the girl from Montana (the Big Sky Country) said she never saw skies as big as the sky in Texas (it really happened). A spattering of Bluebonnets (which have already gone to seed at lower elevations) and Indian Paint Brush lend their color to a foreground that is also spotted with Rock daisy, Crow Poison and Old Man on the Mountain.
The deep wine-red of the Indian Blanket in the foreground accent a scene nearly as common as the dwellings of mankind along this westward trail. The stone sentinels that remain behind to watch over the memories to those who once warmed themselves during the months of cold that precede the spring bloom, and sometimes chill the bone after the bloom begins, and the passive harvesters of wind energy that draws their life sustaining water from the basins, where it percolates through the limestone sub strata, open doors to wonder.
The grasses too add texture and color to the land. Heads full of grain and almost imperceptible bloom, they whisper in the wind about their dominance of this land before fences and the ways of civilized men transformed the prairie to land choked by cedar breaks and Prickly Pear.
By the time the Prickly Pear in front of the stand of Live Oak come into bloom, the Indian Blanket and Bluebonnet will have gone to seed. Later, after the grass has ambered under the summer sun, the deep purple of the prickly pear fruit will nourish the birds that live in the area through the dry months that stretch into an Indian summer that precedes the autumn rain and the fall bloom that follows.
The land itself varies along the trail from Austin to Forrest Fest. The limestone that dominates this region of Paleozoic sea turned dry land by geological forces also contains a large section of sandstone. The numerous Lace cactus and Prickly Pear that will bloom in mid to late May will soon make this scene more interesting.
Lace cactus, which could not be seen clearly before reducing this picture for the Web, are about the size of a toddler's fist.
White Prickly Poppy now thrive here, among the out of use relics left by someone who once lived and worked on the land.
White Prickly Poppy are not usually so showy, and more commonly are spotted here and there.
The pastel pink of Prairie Paint Brush began coloring the margins of the trail between Llano and Brady . . .
. . . and so too did Cut Leaf Primrose.
Drawing nearer to San Angelo on the westward trek, the Hill Country now behind us, we traverse a countryside resplendent with views of prairie lands, many of which would be much the same as this.
Then we arrive at a stretch of the yellow variety of Prairie Paint Brush, and a bonus of Prairie Larkspur.
Prairie Paint Brush gather around a shrine to someone's memory, just ahead of our ascent to another terrain on the final leg of the trip up to the Llano Estacado.
John Ford could have directed John Wayne in this stretch of land between San Angelo and Sterling City, but . . .
I don't recall ever seeing the Duke stop to admire the Engleman's Daisy, Rock Daisy, Prairie Verbena and Yellow Primrose that dot the landscape.
We never saw this aspect of Lamesa until we returned home and ripped this out of a Google satellite view. It shows the characteristic circular pattern of crops nourished by the rich soil and watered by pivot irrigation systems that are necessary to sustain the cotton culture of this dry land farming region.
On the road home after the fest, we stopped to capture enough views of Lamesa from the south side of town to piece together this panorama. It does a fair job of showing the lay of the Llano Estacado.
Not all of it is quite as flat as it appears here, and features like the Palo Duro Canyon add to the attractions available to visitors to the region.
On the way into Big Spring,* I stopped to capture something that characterizes this land as much as any aspect of it, wind energy exploitation. Wind farms are relatively new, in this land characterized by sprawling cattle ranches and oil pumps.
* The presence of springs had a lot to do with decisions to settle this land before its abundant aquifer was discovered, and many settlement's name often reflects this fact.
You have to look closely, but, here, a kind of symbiosis is symbolized by the wind turbine that provides the energy that drives the oil pump, while an Aero Motor (water windmill) draws yet another of the precious liquids from the Earth beneath the land.
The Aero Motor is visible under the struts upon which the oil pump pivots, and the wind turbine is just to the right of it.
Another view of the Aero Motor and wind turbine, old and new applications of a technology that exploits one of the two abundant, renewable energy sources in this land, the wind that is driven by the solar energy that is also abundant.
The stretch of road between Big Spring and Sterling City has no creeks, only draws, and can't really be captured in a single snap shot. It is a land of panorama.
Nor, with few exceptions, can the stretch of road southward from Sterling City toward San Angelo.
There are creeks along this stretch of road though, further up past San Angelo, and their names are pure Texas—and Al Capp only borrowed this one for his Li'l Abner comic strip.
We stopped after crossing the San Saba River to take a shot of it. The thing I regret most about the picture being too uninteresting to include in this travelogue is that it was a little frightening to walk out onto the narrow, two lane bridge while traffic sped past me at 70+/- mph. This shot of the Prairie Verbena on the slope down to the river provides some consolation though.
The Prairie Verbena, Bluebonnet, Indian Blanket, Yucca, Prickly Pear, Mesquite tree and rocks are the reason for this shot.
The "Grand Dame" of poetry in Texas, Peggy Zuleika Lynch, is a flower among the many we stumbled across on the trip.
Peggy insisted on taking a shot of me too. Since the camera survived being slammed against rock when I fell, while trying to get a shot of the Palo Duro Cañon a few years ago, I figured it would survive this too . . .
. . . and it's a good thing it survived too. This cache of flora was too good to be true! Bluebonnets, Engleman's Daisy, Indian Blanket and several hues of the pink variety of Prairie Paint Brush make this my favorite shot.
What would a travelogue of a journey across half of Texas be without a picture of Longhorn cattle? Incomplete! There's an ass in the mix for a bonus, but what's that black thing behind the Guy wire for the utility pole? Why, it's a llama! What would the Duke think?
Home, or nearly so. On a clear day—and Austin is big enough that this shot can often be enshrouded by an amber veil of ozone—the city can be pretty if you like that kind of thing.
1 Llano Estacado is the name given to the southern reach of the Great Plains by the early Spanish explorers in their quest for the fabled seven cities of Cibola. Translated as "Staked Plains," this region of western Texas and eastern New Mexico was named by early Spanish explorers who placed stakes along their route to mark their way back across the flat, featureless land.
2 Comancheria is the name given to the home range of the Comanche Indian; roughly the entire reach of the Great Plains south of Nebraska, and to the coastal area of Texas. The introduction of the horse to the Comanche culture, and their adaptation to it, made them, like the Sioux to the north, among the finest light cavalry in the World by the beginning of the nineteenth century. By the beginning of the American Civil War, Austin, Texas, the state capital, marked the boundary between the "white" settlement in Texas and Comancheria, where bands of Comanche hunters after the buffalo that grazed the Llano Estacado, and their raiding parties made travel through or settlement in their domain a risky adventure until the late 1870s. The Web offers a lot of information about Comancheria and the Comanche Indian, the most famous of which is Chief Quanah Parker.
3 Technically, Highways 71 (Texas State) and 87 (US) are designated as north-south, but they run at a north westerly to south easterly direction between Austin and Lamesa.