After a solid decade of trips out to the ranch, I know haven’t come anywhere near understanding or even listing the wonders and mysteries out there. Some may think “mysteries” a bit extreme, but it fits. They don’t have to be big mysteries, and unraveling observations to make sense of them works as well with understanding plant behavior as it does with solving murders. I’ll admit, though, that if Agatha Christie hadn’t added a big scoop of murder to them, her Miss Marple stories wouldn’t have quite the oomph.
In this case, the mystery starts with the background. One small portion of the ranch lies right on the Brazos River, and the fauna and flora of that area is typical for any similar area in the state alongside a steady source of water. The main trees are oak and cottonwood, with lots of scrub between the big ones. In spots, the right spots, you can even find wood ferns growing in that scrub.
However, taking a look at an elevation map of the ranch, you’ll see that it doesn’t make a smooth progression from riverbank to full desert. It effectively has four distinct levels from the entrance to the river, with long flat plains leading to each narrow and steep trail to the next. Anyone foolish enough to travel any distance along the ranch without 4-wheel drive would be walking back before too long, and a couple of the trails are getting rough enough that even an all-terrain vehicle needs a steady and calm hand to get up them. In the process, the ongoing erosion of old Pennsylvanian sub-period seabed produces distinctive habitats, with pockets of oddness in each one.
Another bit of background: while the ranch has been in the Czarina’s family for forty years, its history goes a lot further back. Six years ago, my father-in-law went on a trek of idle curiosity, intending to track down what showed up in old maps of the property as, quite literally, “the lost quarry”. A large limestone deposit near the entrance to the ranch had been used quite extensively in the late 1960s and early 1970s for building and landscaping stone, and a second saw extensive use in the late Fifties. The Lost Quarry, though, was a quarry for a particularly dense and tough sandstone used for the reconstruction of the Palo Pinto County Courthouse from 1940 to 1942, necessitating a full WPA work camp in the vicinity during that mining and construction. The general area comprising the Lost Quarry was well-marked, but the specific traces of it were extremely hard to find on the ground. It’s not that the quarry area was buried per se, but that instead it was inundated with recent explosions of mountain cedar (Juniperus ashei. With the trees in the way, it’s hard to see much of anything, especially after seventy years. In addition, the WPA crews did a very good job of cleaning up their messes when they were done, so not much other than a few wooden fences remained when they were finished. Seven decades later, even those existed only as chunks.
But did they? When we finally found the quarry, the tipoff was finding spoils piles roughly where the crews had been cutting the stone in preparation for transport. Mostly hidden in big stands of mountain cedar, these were now sporadically-lit rubble mounds, further hidden in weeds, cactus, and greenbriar. Oh, and they were covered with ferns.
The popular perception of ferns holds that they’re denizens of dark, moist, soggy areas, and Texas, as always, makes a liar of that perception. Texas boasts many species of desert-loving fern, even if many are obscure or inobtrusive, so this isn’t that big a surprise. The problem, though, is that these ferns are only found in this one spot on the ranch. Why should this spoils pile matter so much?
Well, the explanation is easier than you may realize. The sandstone making up this pile is very dense, so the core of the pile retains coolness as the outside heats up during the day. As the heat radiates off at night, the loose arrangement of the pile draws in outside air, and nighttime humidity is much higher, especially when the constant daytime southern wind lays off at night. That marginally more humid air enters the core and the moisture condenses on the cool rocks in the core, and you have an air well. It’s not enough water to keep humans alive, or even supply water for animals other than the occasional rattlesnake or spadefoot toad. For the ferns, though, it’s just right, and the thick spreads of mountain cedar all through the area discourage cattle, deer, or most other grazers from stripping the ferns right down to the soil line.
And as an extra, while the use of the term “Lost Quarry” leaves all sorts of implications, I’m sad to say that the Lost Quarry has no dinosaurs in it, fossilized or otherwise. Any fossil beds in the area dating from the Mesozoic Era were probably eroded away long before the last ice age, and every rock in the vicinity indigenous to the area dates to the Paleozoic. Depending upon your definition of “dinosaur”, the area may have some after all: what allowed me to find the Lost Quarry on this trip was being startled by a roadrunner so big that I was wondering if the ranch was raising acrocanthosaurs. The ranch already looks like the shooting location for a Ray Harryhausen movie, so this would just be par for the course.