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More photos, some better'n than others. As fate would have it, we had occasion last weekend to drive north out of Boerne Texas, up RR 1376 past Luckenbach clear to Hwy 290, 1376 roughly running along the route most likely taken by Jack Hays in May of 1844, scouting north from San Antonio in search of Yellow Wolf and his marauders, crossing the Guadalupe and headng up to the Pedernales (both of which rivers run roughly west to east at this point).

Here's a high point about forty miles north of Old San Antonio, looking north to the Guadalupe River Valley, that actual river five miles north from this point...



You can at least get an idea of the scale of the country and the distances covered. In 1844 this was a sea of grass, enough to swallow up any party of sixteen men, riding boldly out against unknown odds.

Nowadays it ain't nearly as wild as the photo suggests.

This is just thirty-forty minutes west of the Austin-San Antonio corridor, and most of the land here is subdivided, as much as anyplace I've seen say in Connecticut, Pennsylvania or New York. More'n anything too there's TREES, not big ones, but everywhere: What happens to prairies when you overgraze 'em and don't let 'em burn.

Here's the river itself from the bridge, cose to the old fording place, lined as watercourses usually are at this Southern latitude with bald cypress.

The river channel itself at least might look about as it did in 1844. We are in the grip of a tremendous drought though, and this river is the lowest I've ever seen it.



Just north of the river, the hamlet of Sisterdale, a wide spot in the road...



Nobody knows for sure where exactly Hays was when he went to bat against all them Comanches, but you might've been able to hear the fracas from here. This is a pretty heavily travelled road nowadays; minivans and SUV's passing up to the antique shops and restaurants of Fredericksburg, motorcycles heading for Luckenbach, and the occasion swarm of spandex-clad cyclists.

Apropos of not much at all, a party of zebras along the way. The Texas Hill Country is sorta like a zoo, never know WHAT you're gonna see, most of it available for shooting. But hey, paid hunts behind tall fences keep a LOT of Texas ranches open, and not subdivided like everywhere else.





A guy riding a steer amid the ruins of Luckenbach...




Awww heck, it ain't all THAT bad, the propieters of that hamlet striving mightily to preserve the character of the place as popularity and population slowly strangle it. Here's the famous post office/general store....




The old gas pumps have been gone for at least ten years, but people still sign the building. Its just that I remember the place from a quarter-century back, before the surrounding fields were parking lots, and when you couldn't get yer picture taken sitting on a beeve. We would leave the bar in College Station at closing time, ride most of the rest of the night to get to Enchanted Rock for the sunrise, eat breakfast in Fredericksburg, and then fall asleep with a beer under a tree at Luckenbach to the strains of talented musicians holding informal jam sessions.

Anyhow, apparently too there's still some cool bikes show up on weekends, check out this '37 (at least in part) Triumph...

[img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v148/Sharpshin/24hrcamp/luchenbach3.jpg[/img]

But, they were setting up for a wedding amid the live oaks along Grape Creek (more accurately the bone-dry bed of the same) and festooning the oaks there with a rainbow of colored ribbon. Dunno if it was to be a same-sex ceremony, but we suspected so given the history of homosexuals elsewhere co-opting cool locations.

As it would turn out, along the lines of that same suspicion, we headed east on 290 east of Fredericksburg, said highway paralleling the Pedernales, Hays' turn-around point in late May of '44.

In the last quarter-century a succession of vinyards have grown up along this route now, and we stopped in at one open for weekend "wine-tasting" to pick up a bottle to try that evening.

[img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v148/Sharpshin/24hrcamp/windery-1.jpg[/img]

We was disappointed on two counts.

First off, despite the cultured-looking crowd crowding the inside and hanging out in the shaded yard out back listening to some guy (actually pretty good) play guitar and sing, there were few actual bottles of wine to be had, just some small ones. So, contrary to my expectations it weren't like a liquor store, only with wine.

Secondly, at least half the clientele were women.... who apparently preferred the company of other women.

Some were quite attractive and the whole thing might have been somewhat titillating except for that vaguely hostile aura that generally surrounds actual lesbians, especially crowds of actual lesbians.

I expect if you could have stopped the action at Walker Creek that long ago early-June day, and showed both sides just what would be transpiring around those parts 167 years down the line....


Anyhow, I dunno if those girls were a regular thing, or maybe just on a field trip out of Austin or something, but we were happy to roll on down the highway to the LBJ Ranch, now a State Park.

And.. hallelueia! There we found a sight familiar to anyone around those parts 167 years ago...

[img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v148/Sharpshin/24hrcamp/buffalo3.jpg[/img]

The business end of an old bull....

[img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v148/Sharpshin/24hrcamp/buffalo5.jpg[/img]

Birdwatcher