Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2020 i Texas Highways Magazine

After nearly three months cooped up at home without traveling much farther than our local grocery stores, our staff is looking forward to future trips to some of our favorite Texas spots as well as exploring new ones. The first time I saw this month’s cover photo of the crystal-clear Nueces River, I immediately added it to the top of our family’s bucket list. After you’ve finished reading writer-at-large Joe Nick Patoski’s excellent portrait of the river and its environs, starting on Page 44, I’m betting you’ll want to add it to yours, too. Here’s where some of our other staff members are setting their sights: Tyson Bird, Digital Strategies Manager: I’m looking forward to visiting a region of Texas I’ve spent very little time in, but have always wanted…

Photographer Kenny Braun discovered Wes Cooksey Park in Uvalde County while on assignment for this month’s feature story about the Nueces River (Page 44). “A local recommended that I check it out,” said Braun, who is based in Austin, “and it was indeed a great place to hang out, swim, and take in the beauty.” Located just north of State Highway 55, the park sits on the Nueces where a dam forms a spring-fed lake. The photo “has kind of a surreal quality because of my location under the bridge and the unique view of the river,” he said. In the summer, this same spot is often packed with people swimming, tubing, and paddling.…

After gushing up from cold springs, the James River’s crystal-clear waters wind through a narrow, verdant canyon before joining the Llano River at a shoal of smooth stones just south of Mason. Farther north, the Pease River runs in ribbons from the caprock through grass-tufted mesas and across pebbled limestone beds. Near its mouth at the Red River in Vernon, it bends around muddy pastures covered with tall grasses and big trees. The James and the Pease, no matter how lovely, remain largely unvisited. There are few points of entry, making them difficult to access. During trips in 2016 and 2019, we—Michael Barnes, a longtime columnist for the Austin American-Statesman, and Joe Starr, an English as a Second Language professor at Houston Community College—hardly saw anyone on their banks. In…

The bovine skull came into view as we rounded a bend on the Rio Grande, setting a scene like the desert backdrop of a Wile E. Coyote cartoon. With its muzzle down, horns up, and carcass stretched as flat as a carpet, the cow had apparently come to the dirt bank and lay down for its final rest. Only the effects of time and weather had disturbed it since. Drifting past the desolate sight, I marveled at the glory and isolation of exploring one of Texas’ wildest places—the Lower Canyons of the Rio Grande. Last November, I joined photographer Laurence Parent and a party of nine others for an 83-mile paddling trip along the Texas-Mexico border. For seven days, we followed the river’s verdant strip through a chain of dramatic…

Michael Barnes and Joe Starr, the co-authors of this month’s feature “In Search of Forgotten Rivers” (Page 36), have taken road trips together since attending the University of Houston in the 1970s. They started tracing Texas rivers before GPS was in widespread use; Barnes, who writes for the Austin American-Statesman, says they let the rivers be their guides. “In terms of tracing them, if you’re doing it by car and on foot, you’re seeing Texas in a completely different way,” he says. “We really got to know those backroads that most people never get to take.” The feature, along with “A Return to the River,” a July 2018 story by Texas Highways writerat-large Clayton Maxwell, will be included in the forthcoming anthology Viva Texas Rivers! Literary Portraits of the Waterways…

You’d be hard-pressed to find someone more fully connected to Texas history than J.P. Bryan. A relative of Stephen F. Austin—his great-great-grandmother was Austin’s sister—Bryan grew up in Freeport with a dad who served as the president of the Texas State Historical Association. Bryan attended the University of Texas and found success in the energy business in Houston, which funded his passion for collecting and preserving objects of Texas history. Since the late 1970s, Bryan and his wife, Mary Jon Bryan, have also dedicated themselves to restoring old buildings, from the Gage Hotel in Marathon to a historic home in Round Top to an abandoned orphanage in Galveston, the latter of which the couple reopened five years ago as The Bryan Museum. It’s not unusual for visitors to bump into…

Thank you for the enlightening article by Michael Hurd about Juneteenth in Texas (and beyond) in your June issue, and thank you, Mr. Hurd, for sharing your personal memories, history, and experiences, which added depth and color to the important historical information. Martha Tuzson Stockton, Austin On the Road You cannot go to Hico [“Back to Your Routes,” May] without stopping at the Koffee Kup Family Restaurant for some of their amazing pies! @saraleejam Texas Water Safari We have been team captains for our son for five or six safaris [“River’s Edge,” May], and it’s almost as grueling as it is for the paddlers. You are in a constant hurry to fix their water and food and meet them at all the checkpoints, and there’s little sleeping. @mamcrow56 Slowpoke Farm…

If the idea of hitting a crowded neighborhood swimming pool has you uneasy this summer, consider taking a dip in one of Texas’ many spring-fed swimming holes. There’s generally more space to spread out, the natural environment makes for a prettier backdrop, and the non-chlorinated water is easier on the skin. It’s a luxury afforded to those of us lucky enough to live in Texas, which has more spring-fed swimming spots than any other state in the U.S. There are “pools” with concrete embankments, like at Barton Springs in Austin, Landa Park in New Braunfels, and San Pedro Springs Park in San Antonio. There are also natural bodies of water, like Jacob’s Well and Hamilton Pool in Wimberley and Dripping Springs, respectively. In total, these freshwater oases, sourced by more…

The Cable Cabin, a block east of Lindbergh Park, hosts up to 20 guests spread over the main cabin, which sleeps nine. There are also two classic RVs and two vintage Cavalier travel trailers. 201 N. San Antonio St., Camp Wood. 512-300-6656; cablecabin.net Arrowhead on the Nueces includes a large house that sleeps 12, a cottage that sleeps four, and five basic cabins. It sits on 7 acres along Old Faithful Creek and the Nueces, a half-mile north of town. 921 SH 55, Camp Wood. 830-597-4421; arrowheadnueces.com Mill Wheel on the Nueces offers a house, a lodge, and two cottages. $250 per night and up. 214 N. Nueces St., Camp Wood. 830-597-4411; millwheelonthenueces.com Los Rios Campground has cabins and dedicated river access, and it’s within walking distance of The Quince.…

Carolina Gold rice was introduced to North America in 1685 and became the most valued rice in the country by the time of the Civil War. South Carolina farmers grew it as a cash crop, producing millions of pounds. Without enslaved labor, though, commercial production collapsed, and this variety had nearly gone extinct by the 1920s. But now, thanks to a resurgent interest in heritage grains—ancient varieties of wheat that have minimal genetic alteration or hybridization—Carolina Gold rice is beginning to flourish again. Anahuac, a town of about 2,400 an hour east of Houston, is home to Harvest Grain Mills, owned by cousins David Kirkham and Donald Wilcox, who grow and mill organic Carolina Gold. Kirkham and Wilcox grew up farming rice with their fathers in Anahuac. Early settlers in…

Row, Row, Row Your Boat 1910 Texans have always had a reverence for water, perhaps because we live on the edge of where it’s abundant and where it is not. In this 110-year-old photo, Roy Brown rows with friends on the Guadalupe River in Kerrville. The Guadalupe flows 230 miles from western Kerr County to San Antonio Bay and has attracted human habitation for at least 5,000 years. “My great-uncle Roy was my grandmother Gussie May Brown’s older brother,” explains Leakey resident Jan Powell Wilkinson, who shared the photo. “His grandfather Joshua D. Brown was the first settler of Kerrville. Joshua moved from Kentucky in 1831.” The circumstances of this photo have been lost, but Wilkinson says Roy graduated from Kerrville’s Tivy High School the following year and moved to…