I had to go to Austin. It wasn’t that I wasn’t looking forward to going. I was. The happy vibe Willy Nelson once remarked upon can still be felt. There’s still a heckuva lot of charm there. Unfortunately, so much of it has been swallowed up by traffic, crowds, endless buildings, so on and so forth.

I would’ve stayed there. I would’ve let someone pay a ridiculous amount of money on my behalf to get a hotel around the Colorado for two nights. But that money wouldn’t come out of my wallet. Nope.

So I headed to Krause Springs (where Germans settled of course).

Someone showed me this private land back in 2007. As soon as I saw it, my mind raced to get out of Dallas. My mind raced to get down to the Hill Country. This came to pass soon enough.

It’s the Hills, yes. It’s also the cypress trees. At the end of the day, in my opinion, the Hill Country wouldn’t be what it is without the cypress trees. It’s the anomaly of their growing along Hill Country streams; it’s the way their upper branches reach out to hug the sun; it’s the enormity of their trunks and age; it’s something more I can put to words.

Simply put, they are beautiful trees.

(They are also known as “bald cypresses” because they shed their leaves, unlike other cypresses, and their scientific name is “taxodium distichum”. Arizona cypresses are “cupressus arizonica”. Where these trees grow naturally is below. FYI.)

However, not all cypresses are beautiful. Arizona and Italian cypresses are kinda’ boring. But the bald cypress that grows from the Frio to Maryland and from Louisiana to Indiana will always grab my attention… especially in this almost paradisaical landscape.

So I’m sharing some photos of this neat place.

Where Arizona Cypresses grow. There is a small dot in West Texas, at Big Bend National Park. I, personally, think it’s fascinating how this tree grows in isolated pockets of similar micro-climates. Flood??
Where bald cypresses grow. The furthest western dot is in Real County, Texas, along the Frio River.
The most inviting rope swing in all Creation. I wouldn’t want to post photos of myself doing it because I had my shirt off, and I wouldn’t want to drive the ladies crazy. Also, it just seems too vain to ask a stranger to take one in the first place.
The main swimming area below the falls, below the man-made pool.

C-Y-P-R-E-S-S
(Actually “bald cypress”)
(Or… “taxodium distichum”)

More cypress

The Krause’s, long ago, dammed up springs that used to flow over bluffs and into the rope-swinged, natural pool below (which is pictured above). This drizzling of water over the edge created the travertine formations you’ll see in the below photos. However, now, it’s a cold, man-made unnatural pool.

What much of the bluff below the above-photographed, man-made pool may have looked like. However, now, the streamlets are less numerous.

Don’t get me lying about precisely how travertine forms. Nonetheless, it is accrued sediments followed by lithification, as in stalactites. The travertine here evinces that the springs drizzled over the edge more in the past, as I said above regarding the making of the man-made pool.

Chicks

Killing time at this point. But it was fun to try different focal planes.

Not a snapping turtle