Thursday, April 19, 2018

An Unusual World

We're in east Texas in the middle of the world's largest cypress forest.  Yep, there is such a thing as a cypress forest and it's in the middle of a lake.  Here's the baffling part.....when you look at a map of this lake like this:
So you think this is a pretty good-sized lake and it covers a lot of space and this will be fun to be on a lake this large and the lakescapes should be really neat.

Then you look at this map and think - whoa what there a drought I missed here?....didn't these folks talk about lots of rain in this area?  What in the world happened?

When one overlays the other it shows that almost half of the lake is missing or looks like half of the water is missing.  

But here shows what's really going on.  
All those green dots in there represent the forest.  Cypress don't grow on land, but they can't seed in the water.  That means that they had to seed on land and then grow in the water, so the water had to appear after the tree was seeded.  That answers the question why cypress trees last so long.  Some are even 400 years old.

This lake has a very active history and is the result of some very dramatic earthquakes, oil finds, and finally, conservationist have kept the area as much as possible as it was created.  The lake today looks very much like a fairyland as many of the explorers must have thought when they came upon the lake.

This is Caddo Lake in east Texas.  A few photos from a trip this morning.

As the lake became navigatable with riverboats hauling produce up and down the river, the lake had a path cut through it, and it really does look like the entrance to some huge plantation with rows of cypress on each side.

The sun setting gave us great light on this trip

And the sunset on the lake didn't hurt either

More interesting shots from Walt with the light from the sunset

Some of these scenes look so beautiful that they are almost unreal.  This was from this morning during a paddle boat ride we took, with Walt and me offering the paddling.  Needless to say that paddling a canoe is a team sport, not one in which either member are telling the other what to do!  We both need some paddling lessons.  Tomorrow we're taking a motorboat to save any more arguing about where to go and what to do!



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