Following the creek downstream from Hamilton Pool

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In this scene from my August 19th visit to Hamilton Pool Preserve, you’re looking at a portion of the creek that flows out of the famous pool and continues more than half a mile through woods before emptying into the Pedernales River.

The tree behind the triangular boulder and the tall trees in the distance that you also see reflected in the creek are bald cypresses, Taxodium distichum. Bald cypresses can grow to be huge, but we rarely see any like that now because German and Anglo settlers in central Texas in the mid-1800s cut so many of them down for the trees’ wood.

Here my primary subject was the boulder, but if you’d like to see some bald cypresses in their own right, you can check out a photograph from 2007. For a less clear view (that’s a novelty, right?) you can see a bald cypress in fog. And if you’d like to exercise your imagination, there’s even a bald cypress “rainbow.”

© 2013 Steven Schwartzman