Skip to main content

A Gneiss Weekend

I'm trying to catch up on a slight backlog of blog posts here - this weekend away actually took place back in June, but I never got around to writing about it. To be honest our weekends away tend to follow a predictable pattern which you are probably getting used to: realise on Friday that we have a free weekend, book a last-minute motel, drive several hours to some unexplored piece of Texas, visit a state park or two, spot some wildlife, and back to the city again. But this one was somewhat different in that the piece of Texas we went to was underground.


To be precise, Longhorn Caverns State Park, a stunning subterranean selection of stalactite clusters, smooth sculpted rocks and glittering calcite crystals. Our guide was a 21-year veteran of the caves and took us on a slightly longer route so that we got to appreciate even more of the wonders. Not least of these is that the caverns are 68F year-round, providing a welcome relief from the 95F heat outside. Before air-conditioning the relief must have been even more profound, and the locals have used the caves for various purposes over the years, including a church, a Prohibition-era speakeasy and dancehall, and a gunpowder manufacturing plant during the Civil War. You can still have a wedding or party there today, which is certainly unique, if perhaps a little gloomy.





Next day we were up on top again, sailing along the Colorado River with the Vanishing Texas River Cruise. The Colorado, which is not to be confused with the more famous river of the same name running through the Grand Canyon, is the longest river entirely within the borders of Texas, running for about 600 miles down to the Gulf. In the Hill Country, where we were, it has been dammed into a series of reservoirs. Our cruise boat was chugging its way across the highest and largest of these, Lake Buchanan.
At first the guide seemed concerned only to point out the various housing developments and holiday sites around the lake shore, but as the trip went on we spotted herons, egrets, pelicans and cormorants. As the boat slipped into the narrower confines of the river proper, we rounded a corner and were suddenly confronted by a pretty waterfall, all the better for being completely unexpected. Here we paused to let off a handful of kayakers. They splashed onto the marshy shore with their boats and belongings, and the cruiser was just pulling away again when they realised they'd left their paddles on board! Whoops...








The nice pun in the title refers to the fact that around this area there are various lumps of pinkish rock sticking up out of the landscape. These are known as gneiss islands, and support unique microhabitats for rare plants and animals. In Inks Lake State Park we followed a trail across some of these "islands" and admired some of the flora and fauna, though we aren't good enough naturalists to know if we were looking at anything particularly unusual. We're naturalists enough to appreciate the contrast between hot rock and cool lake, however, and plopped thankfully into the latter after trekking across the former. Aaaaahhhh....




Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mr White Watson of Bakewell

Once upon a time, back in 1795 or so, lived a man who was always asking questions.  The kind of questions like, "Why is glass transparent?" or "Why do fruit trees grow better in that place than in this place?" or "What does the earth look like underneath the surface?"  This last question was one that he was particularly interested in, and he went so far as to work out what the rock layers looked like where he lived, and draw little pictures of them.  Now he was a marble sculptor by trade (as well as fossil hunter, mineral seller, and a few other things) so he thought it would be even better to make his little pictures in stone.  That way he could represent the layers using the actual rocks they were composed of.  Over the course of his lifetime he made almost 100 of these tablets, as he called them. Then he died.  And no one else was quite as interested in all those rocks and minerals as he was.  His collection was sold off, bit by bit, and the table...
Post a Comment
Read more

Growing things

For those of you who are interested in my attempts at balcony gardening, I thought I'd update you a little. For those who aren't, don't skip this post. You may find something else of interest. Apart from the ever-present herbs, tomatoes and cayenne peppers are on the go this year. The peppers are really on the go - we went away for a week and came back to find them twice the size as when we left. Now they're producing fruit which is growing at a similarly rapid rate, though none has ripened to red yet. I realised I should have given you some kind of scale, so I just went out and measured. They're about 22 cm long, or 8 1/2 inches for you non-metric types. I may have to find out how to dry peppers if they all ripen at once. A couple of tomato plants are looking pretty healthy and beginning to flower. A few died; one, apparently, by being eaten whole by a bird, a trouble I've never had before. I had two seedlings left so used those as replacements, b...
2 comments
Read more

Back on the Portway: Smalley and Morley

I didn't by any means feel I had fully explored the Erewash Valley, but I had completed my planned routes and got some idea of the transport, industry, and general geography of the area. It was time to return to the Portway. There are lots of -leys around here. Smalley, Morley, Mapperley, Stanley, Horsley. The suffix means "woodland clearing", and although there are not many woods around any more, it doesn't take much imagination to think of little villages among the trees. I started in Dale Abbey (or should that be Daley Abbley?) where the monastery once dominated the surrounding area. I've been to Dale Abbey several times but never actually walked through the village before. There is a neatly trimmed pub, an old chapel, now a church known as The Gateway, and a house with an odd lumpy corner which I realised must be part of the ruined abbey. A field path led me up to the main Derby-Ilkeston road. I crossed it and followed a couple of horses along a single-track l...
Post a Comment
Read more