State of Wilderness

Country Drive: Fulshear to Bellville and Back Again

WIldflowers are starting to come out, the weather is fabulous in Texas, and these two things inspire us to get out and explore. Armed with cameras, binoculars, and the GPS, we set out this Sunday morning to celebrate God’s glory in what J calls his church – Nature.

We are having a coffee issue at the house, so our first stop is at the Essence Cafe in Fulshear. This is a full service dining cafe, but you can get orders to go, including delicious frothy sweet frappucinos, which we did get, and gourmet lunch boxes, which we didn’t. The lunch boxes may be an idea for the future, though: chips, cookie and a drink as well as your pick of gourmet sandwiches such as Country French, Smoked Salmon, and the like.

After this, we headed north up 359 to I-10, then a little west towards Stephen F. Austin State Park. We didn’t enter the park proper, but we drove right past the historical area commerating this public figure of Texas statehood, which was befitting since this weekend was the 176th Anniversary of Texas statehood. We should have stopped to pay our respects, like many others – the parking lot was nearly full – but we didn’t, thinking we might come back around. Instead, we got out nearby in a pull out for the Brazos River to let the dogs out for a romp, and find the Brazos River Run cache.

We were seeking birds, butterflies, and flowers today. Didn’t get any pictures of the first two but we did see quite a bit. The birds spotted were the usual suspects: doves, chickadees, wrens, cardinals, pyrrhuloxia, grackels, sparrows, blackbirds, turkey vultures, and a few gorgeous red tailed hawks that we watched circle about with our binoculars. I cannot even claim to be able to identify the multiple butterfly species we saw. Here are some of the plants and flowers that caught our eye:

Butterweed, surrounded by annual phlox

Some may be interested to learn that phlox engages in an interesting genetic interplay in Texas, by which the plant blooms red in areas near Austin in order to naturally prevent two species from interbreeding. See more info on that here.

Here is my favorite wildflower:

I really enjoyed the sweet acacia (species above) trees today on the horizon, although this species is apparently considered a trash tree. The little gold pom poms on the branches are really pretty close up, and the splash of color on the branches broke up the barrenness of the scrubby Texas plains.

Another sight that I found enchanting was the forests covered with a layer of buttercups shining in the sun. Here is J getting the shot I wanted while I took his picture from in the truck. J is the photographer, I usually want to just tell him what I think he should photograph. I’m the “artist”, he’s the “medium”. He would prefer not to get in and out of the vehicle, though, so lately he has been telling me how to take the picture, mechanically, so I can do it myself. I took all the pictures in this blog myself, mostly with his camera.

We had a great time exploring, and even hid a couple of caches while we were out there, and made plans for where to go next time we went that way. Next drive, though, I want to go further north, so we can capture some bluebonnets with our lens.

Bear Creek Park and Some Fun-gis

Monday was a holiday for me, but not for J. The kids were still gone, and I had no idea what I was going to do with myself. I considered some more mundane pursuits, but ultimately decided I really wanted to play outside, after spending most of Sunday indoors.

So I posted a thread on the Houston Geocaching Society forum, and next thing you know, I had the company of two fun guys on a Monday morning, and we set off to explore the inner boundaries of Bear Creek Park.

Bear Creek Park is on the west side of town, and boasts 2153 acres of fields and forests. It is a multi-use park, with soccer fields, equestrian trails, and even a little mini-zoo, with a small collection of exotic animal exhibits.

We started near this cache I had found years prior, and then walked back into the forest and in a huge circle for about an hour and a half, finding five caches. We were roughly near the equestrian area. This park is in a flood plain and with all the recent rain, it was downright swampy back there. Good thing we all had boots on. The water was ankle deep in places.

The caches near here named little piggy 1, 2, and 3 were very cute. There was a lot of bird activity going on, but I forgot the binoculars. Mossies were terrible.

There was a lot of fungus among us.

After this, we decided we were tired of the sloshing about and headed for what we thought was a drier series of caches: The Elements Series. This is a series of 100 caches along a reservoir, each highlighting a different periodic element.

We found about 15 of them, and would have found 20 except the water was too high, and the caches were now watercraft-accessible only, unless you wanted to swim with the snakes. This took us another couple of hours.

I saw many signs of wildlife out this way, but no actual animals except the birds. The bird activity was gratutious. I think I even spied a loggerhead shrike from a distance. At one cache, we spooked a flock of vultures that was about 50 members deep.

Fresh deer scat:

The feral hogs have obviously been wallowing out this way, and left deep impressions on the sides of the reservoir.

(and…the rest of the story will have to continue after a game or two of Uno with the boys and bedtimes)…

Simonton After the Storm

I thought we were headed to Lake Jackson today.

But last night, the long rumored storm that was coming finally hit. Or should I say this morning. About five am, we were listening to the wind and rain pounding the side of the house and talking half coherently about how bad it was supposed to be, and I was realizing that we were probably not going to the bird sanctuary and hiking today like we planned.

But we can’t stay inside long. We just aren’t made like that. So as soon as the rain stopped, around 10 am, we headed out to Simonton to check on some caches we placed out there last week.

This is the path near one of them, the third of three in a short series highlighting different views of the Brazos River.

Simonton is a sleepy little town about 12 miles from us. The city hall and fires station are about the tiniest ones I have ever seen, and mostly it is a farming community. There are some unique businesses around the area, and a lot of country roads. We like to drive around out that way looking for hawks, and lately we’ve gotten into hiding caches out there as well.

Usually the FTF (First to Find) competition is very steep in this area. When a new cache is published, you can be that within 15 minutes, the FTF hounds will descend upon it like vultures. But for some reason, this one has not been found yet. Perhaps because people assumed that the guy who went out to find the other two found it as well? He didn’t, because he slipped in the mud and it was raining and he didn’t look very hard. But it is there. Really close to here:

I am trying to figure out what plant that is with the pink buds, but that might take me a while. I am not very knowledgeable about plants and I don’t have a reference book.

The Brazos looked higher, but not by much, but the gullies and fields were full of water. Retention ponds were doing their jobs well. We think the sky must have dropped 6″ inches of water between last night and this morning. We stopped by this place below, were on the way out, we saw a woman and a child standing with umbrellas. In their place now were water birds, thinking this was a lake shore and not a sidewalk I guess.

The birds flew away as we got closer, so the perception of the water height is not as strong in this next picture, but you can see the egrets here:

This area is actually Fulshear, which lies between Katy and Simonton. We had breakfast there in the morning, at a place called All Stars, which has become like our favorite mediocre diner. It’s close and convenient to our country explorations.

Tonight we are headed to a geocaching meetup in the forest at night, in an area that is prone to flooding, so this should be interesting. We bought big galoshes in anticipation. Hopefully it will end up being something worth writing about as well.

HARNESS THE RIVER

I woke up thinking about water. I was remembering two places in Wyoming we had stopped at to watch water thunder down in its rocky prison and shoot out across a edge, making a waterfall. One was here, this picture above, which is probably a common stop in Yellowstone National Park (the North Rim of the Upper Falls), and the other below was a less common stop, somewhere just outside the Beartooth Mountain range northeast of Yellowstone.

In both places, I was impressed with the amount of force the rivers were generating on their fierce downward path. I had a passing thought of wondering how that power could be harnessed, as a form of natural energy. But I didn’t finish the thought in terms of what would happen to the river then, to these awe-inspiring views.

Lately I have been reading this book, Making a Difference, by Amy Irvine. It is essentially short stories about various environmental projects sponsored by the Outdoor Alliance, and their subsequent outcomes. I think everyone should read this book, because it inspires you to be aware of what is around you, and how one person really can make a difference in this world. It also is a primer on some of the environmental issues of our times.

Some of the stories center on water, on prevention of dams being built that would allow energy providers to harness the water as a source of energy. To harness the river would also prevent it from reaching those it actually does give energy to – the animals and plants that depend on it to fill a niche in their habitat. At the same time, though, we will need to look for cleaner, renewable energy sources. So is there a way to provide power in which both humanity and nature are the winners? Or at least where there are no losers?

Underwater wind turbines may be part of that answer. There are some other new low-impact answers out there as well, such as “power pontoons” and making the turbines in the dam more effective. From what I can tell from googling answers on the internet, it appears that the Department of Energy and the major players and innovators are trying to come up with solutions that keep in mind the environment while maximizing energy.

I’ve been saying for a while that the next major war will be fought not over land, or oil rights, or weapons of mass destruction, but over water rights. Only time will tell if my prediction is correct, or if humanity can find our way to balance the demand to sustain human life against the demand to support others in the ecosystem without fighting each other over it in the meantime.