River of Contrasts: The Texas Colorado

4: Another Colorado

Highland Lakes and Lady Bird Lake 101 4: Another Colorado THE HIGHLAND LAKES AND LADY BIRD LAKE “Who knew,” the ruddy-faced man seated in front of me whispered to his wife, “that bald eagles are really bald? That one doesn’t have a single feather on its ugly red head.” His wife lowered her binoculars and said doubtfully, “That’s a bald eagle?” Meanwhile, the enthusiastic birdwatcher had pushed her way out of the cabin and onto the foredeck of the Eagle II to misidentify more birds. I scanned the sky, “Oh look!” I called and pointed. A dozen sets of binoculars snapped to the section of sky above the limestone canyon. “Oh heck, it’s just another turkey vulture.” I announce. The couple murmurs to each other. “Bald eagles aren’t bald,” she says with satisfaction. “But turkey vultures are,” he replies. I’m on the Vanishing Texas River Cruise1 with a group of birdwatchers and tourists; we are cruising up the limestone canyons at the head of Lake Buchanan , the first of the Lower Colorado River Authority’s (LCRA) Highland Lakes. Our boat, the Eagle II, is a big, broad vessel with a shallow draft and a glass-enclosed cabin protecting us from the raw January day. A few hardy souls stand outside in the drizzle and wind scanning the skies for bald eagles, osprey, and other winter residents of the canyons. Ferns embellish the cliffs near the waterfalls. Slender trees and shrubs, cactus, yucca, clumps of wiry grasses, and other determined survivors knot their roots into crevices and narrow pockets of soil along the rock face. Highland฀Lakes฀and฀Lady฀Bird฀Lake฀to฀Longhorn฀Dam Highland Lakes and Lady Bird Lake 103 We retrace our way downstream through the limestone canyons until the river merges into the giant reservoir like a neck sloping into shoulders, collarbones, and breast. Somewhere in the depths, the river channel snakes through a granite bed, the spine of the Lake Buchanan beast that spreads its broad sternum up to the pale wintry sun. The reservoir spreads its waters over red and pink granites. Some of the oldest rocks in the country, they are the result of a collision between ancient continents nearly a billion years ago. The impact pushed up mountain ranges, crushing and heating volcanic and sedimentary rocks to create metamorphic gneiss, and schist. Molten rock bulged up through the cooling layers to form giant, dome-shaped, pink granite batholiths. For nearly 200 million years the rolling humps and mounds of granite, gneiss, and schist eroded into layers of sediments. Then shallow seas deposited thick layers of limy creatures to create the ubiquitous Cretaceous limestone of Central Texas. About 10 million years ago, the earth shuddered and heaved the entire Edwards Plateau up nearly 2,000 feet above sea level (the Balcones Escarpment is the edge of the plateau). Since then, the rivers and streams have cut and scoured away the layers of softer limestone to reveal the harder Precambrian granites and igneous rocks beneath. The Llano Uplift is this roughly circular bowl of exposed granites ringed with gneiss and schist, and surrounded by higher and younger limestone. The Colorado River continues to erode and sculpt the river corridor even as dams fill the canyons with water and slow the currents. Out of the protective canyon, the wind pushes the waves into a heavy chop. A ribbon of silvery driftwood—whole trees stripped of leaves and bark by previous floods—lines the shores at the high water mark. Even the hardiest of the birdwatchers has retreated into the close, warm air of the cabin. We look down and across the lake: 30 miles long, 5 miles wide, and 22,335 acres of surface. The lake holds 285 billion gallons of what looks like plain old H2 O—rainwater, creek water, river water, spring water—but it is actually power: hydroelectric, political, nuclear, steam-generated, coal-fired, and economic power. The kind of power you plug an appliance into and the kind that forms and directs local —and sometimes national—government. In Texas, whoever controls the water holds the influence to direct the lives of just about everyone and everything downstream: ranchers, farmers, businesses, cities, towns, industries, and power plants. The behemoth that juggles all of this—not always successfully and not 104 Chapter 4 always equitably—is the Lower Colorado River Authority. Although the Colorado River figures...