![]() “Most of those are no longer around in the Hill Country because of the degradation of the habitat. “It may be the last little haven where we have pockets of plants, animals, and fish species that were here tens of thousands, if not millions of years ago,” Adams said. All depend on excellent groundwater quality, a testament to the canyon’s health. Researchers surveying springs on the property have found isopods, blind freshwater shrimp, and a diminutive Eurycea salamander-slender, tiny-limbed, and befuddled-looking-that has yet to be scientifically described and is known to inhabit only one other spring in the region. “It may be the last little haven where we have pockets of plants, animals, and fish species that were here tens of thousands, if not millions of years ago.” īut Morrison calls Roy Creek Canyon an exceptional case: a relic stretch of forest in its final, stable form, biodiverse but not dense, with immense trees and plants-such as chinkapin, a species of passionvine-now rare in the rest of the state. They’re shaped by the underlying karst geology of the Hill Country: layers of primordial plankton skeletons compacted by the weight of time into water-soluble limestone, honeycombed by holes that filter groundwater throughout the region’s springs and aquifers. Such canyons-other examples can be found at the nearby Reimers Ranch and Hamilton Pool parks-are a defining feature of the Edwards Plateau, said Colin Morrison, an ecologist at the University of Texas at Austin who’s done fieldwork in the canyon. Rare Guadalupe bass hovered in the clear water, watchful, fins waving softshell and musk turtles skimmed the surface for lungfuls of air. Waterfalls dropped into a circular swimming hole 17 feet deep reflected light from the rippling pool slid ghostlike over the trunks of ancient cypresses. At the bottom, Roy Creek wound around vast limestone boulders dripping with crusts of moss and fragile maidenhair ferns. ![]() Butterflies drifted like scraps of confetti through sunbeams warblers flitted shyly through high branches. Here, the broad turban-shaped leaves of turkscap there, a red oak sapling or a shade flower. Adams pointed out elements of the understory as we passed. Hardscrabble ground gave way to carpets of dead leaves, bracken, and thick-trunked sycamores, walnuts, and oaks. When I met Lew Adams at the gate of Norsworthy Ranch-the Winn-owned property surrounding the preserve-grasses waved golden and brittle in the early morning heat, and the sun beat cruelly in the blue sky.Ĭlimbing down the steep stairway into the preserve felt like stepping back in time. The season’s usual storms had largely failed to materialize. I drove up to Roy Creek Canyon Preserve in late spring, at the end of Austin’s hottest May on record. But the canyon’s advocates warn the impacts could be dire-and might spell the end of the canyon’s lost world. The developers say they’re trying to pioneer an eco-friendly model of development in the Hill Country. State officials and university ecologists treasure it as an ecological field station, a lingering slice of the vanishing Hill Country.īut in the spring of 2021, the owner of the surrounding ranch, Dallas billionaire Steve Winn, announced the development of Mirasol Springs, a 1,400-acre low-density housing development that will encircle much of the parcel. It’s been a beloved gem of Austin conservationists for decades. Today, Roy Creek Canyon is a private nature preserve, stretching 50 acres along the border of Travis and Hays counties, a few bends of the road from the Pedernales River and popular parks like Hamilton Springs. “They basically kept it in as natural a state as possible.” “You can’t raise crops in it you can’t raise cattle and sheep.” Crazier still was the handshake agreement Red and Black struck: to leave the canyon more or less as they found it. “Everybody thought they were crazy,” said Lew Adams, Red’s son and the property’s current owner. Red and his best friend Herschel Black decided they liked the place enough to buy it. ![]() High enough that, in 1941, the canyon’s owner John Hunnicutt complained to a young Red Adams that the place was a money pit, a hole to swallow unwary livestock, and he’d just as soon be rid of it. The walls are high enough to keep the valley at a half-remove from the flow of solar time, the mornings coming late, the evenings early, shadows creeping out from their base to cloak the forest. Nestled in the Texas Hill Country, beneath chasm walls 200 feet high, grows a secret forest of tall timber, live oak and sycamore and century-old cypress, clustered around a spring-fed creek and rushing clear green waterfalls. A lost world sits at the bottom of Roy Creek Canyon.
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