Chocolate Water
Spent most of Thursday driving around looking at the river. My river. The Pedernales. It runs through town, under highway 281. A powerful amount of rain fell west around Fredericksburg and gathered itself to run down the foothills of the Llano Uplift into the river. In Fredericksburg, the river crested at 34 feet. It spread out and lost steam as it got to slightly flatter ground. But it still rose to 25 feet in Johnson City.
I got a nice group of pictures, but there wasn’t much drama in town or down around the river. It seems most people live by but not actually on it. We were also lucky the big rise came in the afternoon and not late at night. There was plenty of advance word, which may have explained the small crowds at various access points I visited. Talkative folks, too, and they were happy to tell me how long they’d lived here and what they thought about the rise.
The news wasn’t so good on the Guadalupe. The crest in Hunt and Kerrville, upriver, was 20 and 16, while the crest downriver in Comfort and Spring Branch, was 35. Everyone along the river up there got rain. And there’s a lot of close to the river development, too. The only bright spot is Canyon Lake. There’s talk that it might go from 60% to full by the time all the water gets there. That’s the ying and yang of nature, for you. Happy mixed with sad and vice versa.