My trip to Colorado was going to be a long and flat drive, so I decided I would split it up. I drove to Lake Meredith and Alibates Flint Quarries National Monument in northwest Texas. Joe Yogerst and Robin Young had an excellent bit on WBUR Boston NPR's Here and Now titled "A Guide to the Best Summer Lakes" early on in July...so I decided it would be good to find a lake of my own.
On the drive my uncle recommended that I listen to the Dallas NPR podcast KERA's "Think" by Krys Boyd. It's a great show, and what's more, one of the episodes I listened to was about "The National Parks in Peril." Krys brought on Terry Tempest Williams, an environmentalist, who talked about her book "The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America's National Parks." The 49 minute show took the audience through countless topics including how Glacier National Park's glaciers had been reduced from hundreds of glaciers to only 15 glaciers today, about how drilling in the Bakken Shale formation is threatening Theodore Roosevelt National Park, and historical tidbits covering the President Abraham Lincoln and the founding of the first national park (Yosemite) up to President Obama's legacy of creating federal lands like Bears Ears National Monument. It turned a boring drive through the Texan hill country into an existential crisis.
Now, while I was at the lake I did find a campsite at the Harbor Bay campground, very close to several lakeside trails. The South turkey creek trail and harbor bay trail were humming with wildlife. Ants (small red ones and big old black ones) scurried all over the place. Brown and grey mosquitos lurched, and grasshoppers jumped out of the way as if listening to the procession of my footsteps down the path. After finding a spot that was a breeding ground for thousands of ants...(because I had no other options really), I jumped into the tent. Then out of the trees started the chorus of beetles, very similar to a fire alarm you would hear in middle school drill. But needless to say, sleeping by the lake had it's beauties.
