Lens-Artists Challenge #412: Places Shaped by Water
What are the odds of hiking through a canyon that is younger than you are? I don’t know how often that chance comes along, but in the Texas Hill Country it does. Canyon Lake Gorge, roughly 55 miles (90 km) southwest of Austin and about halfway between Austin and San Antonio, did not exist before the summer of 2002. It was carved in a matter of days. I hiked it on a bright, cool morning in early December 2020, and the place has stayed with me ever since.
So when John set this week’s challenge to Places Shaped by Water, I didn’t have to think hard about what to post. John wants us to celebrate waterscapes in all their forms, where places shaped by water serve as subjects in scenes that give them character. You can read his entire post and see the breathtaking images he selected here.
The story begins during the week of June 28, 2002, when more than 34 inches (86 cm) of rain fell over the upper watershed of the Guadalupe River. Canyon Lake, the reservoir held back by Canyon Dam, rose faster than its floodgates could release water. On the afternoon of July 4, around 3:30 p.m., the lake reached the top of its emergency spillway and water poured over it for the first time since the dam was completed in 1964. That spillway is the wide concrete apron in the header image, with the lake sparkling just beyond it. Standing there on a calm day, with live oaks framing the view, it takes some imagination to picture a sheet of water racing across it.
The Guadalupe is no stranger to events like this. On another July 4, in 2025, the river rose more than 20 ft (6 m) in under an hour upstream in Kerr County, sweeping through camps and homes in the dark and taking at least 135 lives across Central Texas, among them 28 campers and staff at Camp Mystic. The Hill Country’s thin soils and steep limestone drainages turn heavy rain into a wall of water with frightening speed, and that is the same force that made this gorge.
This photo shows the downstream side of the spillway wall on the right, and the first two terraces the flood cut immediately below it, about 30 ft (9 m) down. Everything that once filled the space between the two banks — soil, pasture, trees — was carried away. The rectangular limestone blocks scattered across the floor weren’t tumbled here from somewhere else; the water plucked them whole from the bedrock along cracks already in the rock. Notice the houses on the ridge above. For those neighbors, the view changed overnight.
To give you a sense of that drop-off, here is a closer look at the edge of the same terrace. The stone steps and handrail lead visitors down to the next level of the gorge, and the large tilted boulder beside them is one of those plucked blocks, resting exactly where the flood left it.
Anything in the water’s path — boulders, roads, houses, mature oak trees, and all the soil in between — was swept downstream, leaving a gorge roughly one mile (1.6 km) long, 130–200 ft (40–61 m) wide on average, and as much as 45–50 ft (14–15 m) deep in places. The flood crested in about three days, but water kept spilling over the dam for approximately six weeks.
The flood also did something no excavator could have done on that scale: it stripped away the soil and loose upper layers and exposed the 110-million-year-old Glen Rose limestone underneath, laid down at the bottom of a shallow Cretaceous sea. Guides point out fossilized sea urchins with their spines still visible, clams, snails, fossil ripple marks from an ancient seafloor, and a clean cross-section of the Hidden Valley Fault, part of the Balcones Fault Zone. And then there are the dinosaur tracks. The three-toed prints are attributed to Acrocanthosaurus, a predator some 36–38 ft (11 m) long and weighing several tons that walked on its hind legs, much like a Tyrannosaurus rex that lived tens of millions of years later. Nearby are the rounder tracks of the sauropods it likely hunted.
Here is one of the Acrocanthosaurus tracks. Weathered limestone can be hard to read in a photograph, so I processed this one as a monochrome sketch to make the three toes and the deep heel stand out. To think that this footprint was pressed into wet mud when Texas was a tropical shoreline, and that a flood in 2002 was what finally brought it back into the sunlight.
Here are some numbers to show you the water’s power during that storm. The normal release from Canyon Dam into the Guadalupe River is around 350 cubic feet (9.9 m³) per second, which keeps the tubers floating below the dam. With the floodgates wide open, the dam can release about 5,000 cubic feet (140 m³) per second. At the peak of the 2002 flood, water was going over the spillway at up to 67,000 cubic feet (1,900 m³) per second, and some 185 billion gallons (700 billion liters) passed over it before the lake dropped back below the spillway.
That water moved an estimated 300,000 cubic yards (229,000 m³) of rock and soil, carrying some of it 2.5 miles (4 km) downstream. Piled onto a football field, that would make a heap about 140 ft (43 m) high. In this photo, you can see how the flood cut into the limestone layers like a giant staircase, each bed of rock forming its own terrace. The bright green channel in the foreground is not runoff; it is spring water. Where the flood cut down through the rock, it exposed the Trinity Aquifer, and water now seeps out of the walls, collects in the channels, and feeds algae and small creatures year-round. If my GPS recorded our hike correctly, the elevation change from the spillway to the bottom of the trail, where we exited, was about 160 ft (49 m).
Near the lower end of the trail is the Lagoon, a spring-fed pool with a turquoise color that looks out of place in the Hill Country. The color comes from the fine limestone particles and dissolved minerals in the water. The pool is home to fish, tadpoles, and frogs, and the layered cliff behind it reads like pages in a book, each band a few thousand years of ancient seafloor. The short video below features the Lagoon and a waterfall in that same area, where the spring water tumbles over a ledge about 15 ft (4.6 m) high.
The gorge is on land managed by the Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority, and since 2005, volunteers from the Gorge Preservation Society have helped protect it and lead visitors through it. When I visited, tours ran about three hours and covered the whole gorge. Today, the guided public tours run Tuesday through Saturday, last around two hours, cover about 1.25 miles (2 km) of walking, cost $20 per person, and are open to ages 7 and up. Along the way, you see the fossils, the fault, the dinosaur tracks, the aquifer channels, and the waterfalls. There are also shorter drop-in tours of the lower gorge, and a self-guided rim trail of about 1.6 miles (2.6 km) for $5 that needs no reservation. The entrance is at 16029 South Access Road, just below the dam next to the Tye Preston Memorial Library. Details and reservations are at canyongorgetours.com. Bring water and sturdy shoes; the rock is uneven, and there is very little shade.
Because the gorge is so young, geologists have treated it as a rare natural experiment. In 2010, Michael Lamb of Caltech and Mark Fonstad of Texas State University published a study in Nature Geoscience showing that most of the carving happened in just three days, and that the flood’s erosion was limited only by how much sediment the water could carry, not by how fast it could break rock. They even found teardrop-shaped islands in the gorge that look like features photographed on Mars, and they use Canyon Lake Gorge to help estimate how much water may have flowed there long ago. The lesson is not that every canyon on Earth was made in a hurry, but that some landscapes we assume took ages may have been shaped in a few violent days. That is an interesting thing to think about while you are standing at the bottom of one.
Walking out at the lower end, I kept turning that thought over. The 2002 flood itself took nine lives and damaged tens of thousands of homes along the Guadalupe. The gorge is beautiful, and I am grateful it is protected and open to visitors, but it is also a scar and a reminder of how much water this gentle-looking Hill Country can deliver when it decides to.
Sofia’s challenge last week, What Is It?, brought out great images. I hope you will join this challenge, too. Please don’t forget to use the “lens-artists” hashtag in your posts so people can find your wonderful challenge entries.
Next week, Beth will feature a new challenge. It will go live at noon EST in the USA. Tune in then to find out more about the challenge. Please see this page for more information about the Lens-Artists Challenge and its history. If you don’t want to miss any future challenges, please consider subscribing to the team members’ websites. Here they are:
- Tina of Travels and Trifles.
- Patti of P.A. Moed.
- Ann-Christine of Leya.
- John of Journeys with Johnbo.
- Anne of Slow Shutter Speed.
- Sofia of Photographias.
- Egídio of Through Brazilian Eyes.
- Ritva of Ritva Sillanmäki Photography.
- Beth of Wandering Dawgs.
That is the story behind the shots. For more like this, enjoy these related stories: Acrocanthosaurus, Canyon Lake Gorge, Landscapes, Lens-Artists, One Step, and Texas. Until the next shoot, keep chasing the light and the wonders it reveals.
- Posted for Pepper’s One Step at a Time #26.
Sources:
- Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority — Canyon Lake Gorge — https://www.gbra.org/recreation/canyon-lake-gorge/
- GBRA Canyon Lake Gorge — Guided Public Tours — https://canyongorgetours.com/public_tour
- Gorge Preservation Society — https://gorgepreservationsociety.org/
- Texas Parks & Wildlife Magazine — Birth of a Gorge (June 2008) — https://tpwmagazine.com/archive/2008/jun/ed_3/
- Texas Highways — The Fruits of a Flood: The Canyon Lake Gorge — https://texashighways.com/travel-news/the-fruits-of-a-flood-canyon-lake-gorge/
- Texas Co-op Power — Canyon Lake Gorge — https://texascooppower.com/canyon-lake-gorge/
- Caltech News — Caltech Geologist Investigates Canyon Carved in Just Three Days in Texas Flood — https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/caltech-geologist-investigates-canyon-carved-just-three-days-texas-flood-1628
- Lamb, M. P. & Fonstad, M. A. (2010), Rapid formation of a modern bedrock canyon by a single flood event, Nature Geoscience — https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo894
- U.S. Army Corps of Engineers — Directions to Canyon Lake — https://www.swf-wc.usace.army.mil/canyon/Information/Directions.shtml
- FOX Weather — Remembering Texas Hill Country: 1 year since the flooding disaster killed 135 on July 4 — https://www.foxweather.com/weather-news/texas-hill-country-flooding-disaster-kerr-county-heartbreak-loss-deadly-guadalupe-river-2025
- Wikipedia — Canyon Lake Gorge — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canyon_Lake_Gorge
- Wikipedia — Acrocanthosaurus — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrocanthosaurus
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Anita
What an amazing story behind these photos! It’s hard to imagine that this entire gorge was carved in just a few days. The power of water is incredible, and your photos make the place look both dramatic and beautiful.
Egidio Leitao
Thank you, Anita. It is mind-blowing to me what happened in such a short time.
Tra Italia e Finlandia
Che storia interessante e unica.
Egidio Leitao
Grazie mille.
Ritva Sillanmäki Photography
That jade green… great educational post. I liked this one Turquoise in the Rubble
Egidio Leitao
Thank you for writing, Ritva. I’m glad you liked that photo.
Wandering Dawgs
Egidio, thanks for sharing the story of this gorge with your words and beautiful images. We camped at a COE park on Canyon Lake in 2015. I didn’t know about the gorge when we were there.
Egidio Leitao
Beth, I’m sorry this gorge is not advertised as it should. You were so close to it. Thanks for writing.
Steve Schwartzman
I remember the news reports about this at the time. I have to tell people who aren’t from around here that central Texas is “Flash Flood Alley,” and not a year goes by without someone getting swept away by flood waters.
Egidio Leitao
You are correct, and the Guadalupe River is known for these disasters.
Terri Webster Schrandt
What a remarkable story about the new development of the gorge, Egidio! I had visited both Austin and San Antonio in 2006, and was struck by the immense limestone aquafers that abound there. Gorgeous photography!
Egidio Leitao
Thanks, Terri. It’s mind-blowing how that gorge came into existence.
I. J. Khanewala
What a fascinating story
Egidio Leitao
Thanks for reading and commenting on it.
Tranature - quiet moments in nature
Beautiful images Egídio and what an amazing story. The speed with which the water changed the landscape here is truly mind-blowing 😊
Egidio Leitao
Xenia, it is hard to comprehend just how much things changed in such short time. Thanks for writing.
Sofia Alves
I’m glad you picked this location, Egídio. Such an interesting place and beautiful now, after all the destruction.
Egidio Leitao
Nature created a remarkable place. Thanks for writing, Sofia.
restlessjo
The awesome power of nature. A remarkable demonstration, Egidio xx
Egidio Leitao
That’s the perfect way to describe it, Jo. Thanks for your note. xx.
Leanne Cole
That’s incredible Egidio.
Egidio Leitao
I agree with you, Leanne. It is amazing to walk through that place and see what changed. Thanks for the comment.
Vicki
Fascinating, Egideio. Loved the images and the story behind them.
Thanks for sharing. I might keep this window open to re-read tomorrow.
Egidio Leitao
I’m glad you liked the lost, Vicki. Sorry it was a bit longer than my usual posts.
photobyjohnbo
Well, Egidio, you topped my photo of Coldwater Lake, for the youngest geologic phenomenon in this week’s challenge. >grin<
I didn’t know the story of the gorge. Thanks for sharing it.
Egidio Leitao
It was a bit long for my usual posts, but it is an amazing thing that happened just a few years back. Thanks for the feedback.
klh048
Interesting story and I think you are right that some canyon landscapes were created quickly due to some catastrophic deluge or geologic event. I’ve seen some evidence of that out in the desert but more noticeable from drone or satellite images. Great images.
Egidio Leitao
Thanks for your insights and note. I appreciate the feedback.
Pepper
What an amazing place! The photos and also the video are wonderful.
Egidio Leitao
Pepper, the place is incredible. Thanks for reading and commenting. I might go back later this year for another visit.
Steve Hyde
Another wow from me Egidio. Brilliant challenge response and I appreciate the amount of work you’ve put into this 🙂
Egidio Leitao
Steve, many thanks. It’s a fascinating story and place to visit.
Anne Sandler
Wow, nature sure has a way of putting us in our humble place. Beautiful images!
Egidio Leitao
Anne, I think nature continues to warn us. Thanks for writing.
loudlyzealousf398f4aeb7
Brilliant. Your images are splendid but if I’m honest, I more enjoyed reading your narrative. Thank you so much for sharing all that interesting information with us. Great post! pp
Egidio Leitao
Thank you, Pam. I guess because you used a different email, your comment had to be approved. Anyway, I appreciate your feedback.
margaret21
What a remarkable story. But I sense that these once-in-several-lifetime stories that rewrite the maps may become increasingly common unfortunately.
Egidio Leitao
Yes, it is remarkable. Also, as you point out, these events appear more common nowadays. Thanks for your comment and for reading a longer-than-usual post.