I just know that, at 120 CFS on the South Llano River at Junction and 262 CFS downstream on the main stem near Mason, the Llano is fishing very well right now, and that it has the conditions in its favor. The numbers don’t lie: with a CFS gain downstream where no rain has fallen, we can deduce the springs along the North Llano River, the tributaries, and the main stem are all discharging. The springs on the Llano are relentless in a way most other rivers on the Edwards Plateau can’t match. Also, the Llano’s streambed composition—gravel riffles and granite boulders being more prevalent than limestone folds slicked with green algae—makes it easier to fish on a hot, mid-August day. Will verify conditions later this week. Please stay posted.

Another one that has me raring to go is the tantalizing flow of the Nueces. Over the past five years, I have fished the Nueces many times during this drought, including the hot, hot summer of 2023. Flows were miserable, but discernible. Now, the river is still moving at 321 CFS, a month after the July inundations over all these areas. The Nueces really benefited as a watershed!

It’s been a hectic week for me, but not, unfortunately, on the water. I was last on a river with a fly rod in hand on my home waters, giving a “learn fly fishing” introductory class to a delightful couple (both fast learners) on the Pedernales River this past Saturday. The water was warm, with no detectable swooshes of cold spring water that usually accompany warm Hill Country river water, and there was a veneer of slippery algae on the rocks. Flows as of 6 p.m. last night on the Pedernales were down to 25.4 CFS. This is not the preferred 125 CFS, but it’s August, and winery venues are thirsty for water use.

Unfortunately for the Pedernales, the big wine venues along U.S. 290 with operations adjacent to the river have a bad (and technically legal) habit of sinking shallow wells near the banks to draw out river water, contributing to reduced flows. And the fertigation introduces phosphorus and nitrogen that pump the algae up. It’s not the apocalypse—yet—for the Pedernales, but the river is on the decline due to Fredericksburg’s ever-increasing popularity. San Antonio was once a town that increased in popularity until its artesian springs were pumped dry 100 years ago… Now the San Antonio River is effluent discharge from wastewater plants. Yay.

Some things to bear in mind as you wonder whether you should get out there with a fly rod: triple-digit heat takes a toll. I have fished with a hydration system on my back all these years, and I recommend them. A one-gallon stainless steel jug of ice water, a 64-ounce hydration pack, and an ice chest full of cold cans of sparkling water or still water will go a long way toward preventing heat exhaustion or worse. And the fish? Bass thrive in hot water. Guadalupe bass, specifically, seem to thrive all year—the largest fish out here that’s liable to take your fly in late November through late February. But in the summer, everyone is on: Rio Grande cichlids, carp tailing in warm, scummy eddy pools along clay banks, and largemouth bass at their best. Go early or late. Many of these rivers are a serious drive, even for someone like me already living in the middle of it. Consider camping—weekdays are empty now that school’s back in session.

Fall bassin’ is right around the corner—hang in there. If you can catch the baitfish migration along the lower to mid-Gulf Coast, I strongly recommend it. That will be on until at least mid-October.

We’ll see y’all out there. —Ben

Hiking into the mouth of Santa Elena Canyon at Big Bend National Park this past January, I basked in a warm sun and watched the Rio Grande course muddily down toward Lake Amistad. I was struck by how happy my wife and our children were.

Lynette kept saying “Oooh, this is so beautiful!” in a giddy tone of voice as we crunched along the trail to the riverbank. The towering bluffs above us on the Mexican side, and to our north on the Texan side, were a sight to behold.

“Is that Mexico right there?” some of the younger children kept asking, incredulous that they could throw a rock into another country.

“Yes,” I was happy to reply.

I was struck by a border that didn’t need guarding. That didn’t need a bollard wall, because it was so remote that the country itself did the work.

On August 5, federal contractors hauled heavy equipment into that same stretch of park and began clearing the riparian brush at the foot of the canyon. The project is called Big Bend 4—a $1.72 billion contract, awarded in May to an Albuquerque subsidiary of energy-sector construction contractors Kiewit Corporation. About 17 miles of vehicle barrier and something on the order of 205 miles of patrol road are supposed to be cut through the wildest country left in Texas. In June, the Department of Homeland Security waived 28 environmental laws to clear the way. Pink survey ribbon now runs where willow and mesquite stood in January.

The Big Bend sector accounted for about 1.3 percent of border apprehensions in 2025. Inside the national park itself, the figure was 0.045 percent — four hundredths of one percent.

I am from the Rio Grande delta, on the Texas-Mexico border. I take the contract, the bulldozing—all of it—as a personal affront. I feel it viscerally. My wife Lynette is outraged, and chances are, you are outraged. This is a crime, but it’s yet another example of a long history of environmental degradation in American history.

My Grandma Rosa died when I was a sophomore in high school, a day before her ninetieth birthday, in a trundle bed on the floor of the ranch house she had had built by braceros in the early 1950s.

Rosa Eubank Christensen was from another era. She was my dad’s mother, born in 1902 on a ranch near the railway stop and post office at Antelope Gap, Texas — about halfway between Lometa and Goldthwaite, a little closer to Lometa, not far east of where Highway 183 runs northwest to southeast to connect the two hamlets.

Grandma Rosa reminisced about more things than I can list here, but interspersed with the bandits and the hurricanes and the cattle was always the beauty of the country.

“I am from the Hill Country,” she’d say proudly. “We had hills and cricks and rivers. It was beautiful.”

She was twelve when the family left Goldthwaite in 1914 for a farm in the Rio Grande delta just west of Brownsville. She had been diagnosed with tuberculosis, and the family doctor told them a hot, humid climate would improve her chances. Her father and mother sold their share of the ranch, packed their belongings onto the train, and rode south through Austin all the way to the station on the Texas-Mexico border.

They called it the Magic Valley then. The Texas Rio Grande Valley is not a valley at all — that was a marketing scheme. It is a hot, humid, table-flat clay and loam delta of astonishing natural beauty and an ecosystem that has been coming apart from upriver dams and road construction for more than a hundred years.

“Before the Army cleared most of it, the willow breaks on both sides of the river were a mile wide,” she’d say. “It was incredibly beautiful down in the willow breaks. It was like a jungle.”

She meant the stands of native black willow along the river bends near Bluetown, where the farm was, grown up thick like a jungle that she and her brother played in. In August 1915, as the Border War between Mexican insurgents and General Carranza’s regulars flared onto the Texan side of the river, the Army troops deployed along the border began clearing my grandmother’s willow jungle.

That was a hundred and eleven years ago, and the willow breaks were cleared in the name of border security. They were soldiers with orders, in a place where people were there was an active military insurgency on American soil. My grandmother said her farmhouse was used as a rally point by “bandits” on horseback from Mexico after they had crossed the river on nights lit by the full moon. In college, I lined up the night-time attacks by Mexican insurgents on Army outposts and the Norias Division of the King Ranch with the U.S. Naval Observatory astronomical data, and lo and behold, they were conducted during full moon nights. The insurgents never attacked my grandmother’s farmhouse, just riding silently into the night after assembling, my grandmother said.

Drive US 281 west of Brownsville today — from the Tractor Supply in south Brownsville that doesn’t stock the mower blade you need to the Tractor Supply in San Benito that does (like I did a couple of weeks ago), taking the longer border way to show your children the land — and you can still see a few native stands of black willow. Only a few. You can also see miles and miles of 20-foot-tall steel bollard wall running somewhere through my grandmother’s old farm, where the Eubank family kept the dairy that supplied San Benito with much of its fresh milk.

The ranch where I was raised and the house I grew up in were Grandma Rosa’s projects, built through the late 1940s and 1950s after she had been widowed by a murderer. She was still growing that place the way a suburbanite puzzles over the morning Wordle — block by block, right up until her death.

The circle driveway on the west side of the ranch house had dark mafic Packsaddle Schist rocks the size of big watermelons, set in a circle—a ranch cul-de-sac. Her brother B.G. hauled them down from the Goldthwaite country as a present, to remind her of where they were children. She kept a piece of the Hill Country in her driveway for sixty years.

Five wind turbines now stand on that ranch, 287 feet from base to nacelle, part of a field of dozens at the San Roman Wind Farm west of Laguna Vista. My parents made that decision as stewards of the two and a half sections Grandma Rosa assembled over four decades. I don’t have a financial dog in that fight anymore. The turbines were well-intentioned. They were the responsible, forward-looking choice. My parents had wanted to leave the income source to their kids and grandkids. For my dad, there was the added bonus of keeping local towns and municipalities from annexing his property.

But when those enormous, bird-killing contraptions of so-called “green energy” reach the end of their service life in 30 years, the blades — fiberglass composite, non-biodegradable, over 100 feet long get buried in the plains somewhere above the dwindling Ogalalla Aquifer. Meanwhile, out in the Eagle Ford and the Permian, those flares you see burning off the horizon are natural gas — clean-burning, low-emission, genuinely valuable fuel — set on fire because in the rush to drill we never built the infrastructure to carry it to a power plant or a home.

I don’t think this is at its core a political argument. I don’t like it when people frame this as a one-side-versus-the-other political fight. It’s not.

The medieval scholastics, led by the colossal human mind of Thomas Aquinas, formulated the philosophy of natural law. This was at its core a philosophy of happiness, that begins with considering what was good for humans, and what led to human happiness. It was the order of God’s universe, according to Aquinas, that was good for humans and fosters our happiness. Aquinas taught a synthesis of classical Greek thought, chiefly Aristotle, the Christian Bible, and reconciled them with the teachings of the Christian church.

The land, according to Aquinas, could be owned. But degrading it and despoiling it the way we have in the past 400 years, since the “Enlightenment” rejected the philosophy of natural law and enabled industrialization and the commodification of God’s dominion, is immoral.

The opposition at Big Bend is of course bipartisan. That’s the good news. People do care, at the end of the day, about America the Beautiful. I mean, we’re Texans, right? And these are feds? Render a letter to Caesar and Pilate. Tell them what we think about wind farms along the Devil’s River and bulldozers in Santa Elena Canyon. At some point, we have to act. I have written many letters to Senators Cornyn and Cruz, and emails to U.S. Congressman Chip Roy about environmental issues. If you don’t know who your representatives are, start here.

We should not stop at Big Bend. Big Bend is visceral because it is beautiful to all of us, and because bulldozers at the mouth of Santa Elena Canyon are what they call in Austin and Washington bad optics. But the willow breaks near Bluetown were beautiful too, and precious few people outside my family ever knew they were there in the first place.

The Old Republic Journal is for an ethos of America the Beautiful. It is for public land held in common, and it is for a morality that re-constitutes the whole person living in a whole landscape. That requires genuine stewardship.

My great-uncle hauled a truck-full of rocks from the Hill Country to the extreme southern tip of Texas so his little sister could look at them and remember their early youth spent among the hills and creeks and junipers. They were dark brown and not really much to look at, the same as the ones in front of the convenience store catty-corner from the town square in Goldthwaite. But they were a physical sign of her heritage, and, at the very least, so is the land we love.

We’ll see y’all out there. — Ben

Where the first precious spring-fed trickle rises in the northernmost head of a rugged, juniper-choked canyon, there is a remote place of dramatic natural beauty. There is water here, much of it tucked out of sight from well-used walking trails. About two hours from the nearest metropolis, this rugged, public Texas property is a perennial favorite of weekend visitors for much of the year. Yet its cold, clear pockets remain almost completely ignored by fly anglers.

From what I can tell, it occurs to almost no one that this drainage constitutes a legitimate fishing destination. Its varied waters fish delightfully well—a fact that might surprise any fly-angler the first time a big, hungry largemouth comes to hand after a pole-bending scrap.

Read more

You have scarcely sauntered into the field, but since stepping out of your air-conditioned car you noticed how hot and humid it is! It’s September in South Texas, you remember. Clutching your brand-new Mossberg 500 12-gauge—the second cheapest shotgun on the rack at the big-box store—with the improved cylinder choke screwed into the threaded muzzle, you feel self-conscious in the brand-new coyote tan and orange bird-hunting vest you bought at the big box outdoors store. You are sweaty and nervous. You have never hunted birds before and now you are in South Texas, miles from home, sweat streaming down, only one practice session on clay pigeons in your experience. But you learned to break the bright-orange clay discs. So… maybe you’ll hit some birds today?

With some difficulty, you manage to twiddle and squeeze bright orange foam hearing protection earplugs into your ear, pulling at the top of your ear and working the plug in one-handed. It’s a hassle, but you can feel them expanding and the world going quieter. Then you notice your heartbeat. You can hear it in your ears now.

You put three shells in the tube magazine of the shotgun, struggling to push the red plastic shells into the tube through the magazine well. You YouTubed how to plug the magazine with a wooden dowel, so you’re all set legally: the Mossberg’s long tube, normally capable of holding five shells, now allows just two in. You rack one into the chamber and slip one more into the tube. Three shells. You’re legal, and you’re ready for your first shots on birds.

You open your folding camouflage stool and set it on the ground, flipping up the backrest and starting to settle down when you hear somebody’s muffled yell: “Bird! Bird!”

You turn around and look up to see a flight of white-winged doves coming in low, flying with impossible erratic eccentricity, weaving and dipping and rising a few feet above the low mesquite-tree tops. Without hesitating or thinking, you shoulder the shotgun, cover a bird that presents an easy target almost directly at your 12 o’clock and squeeze the trigger. And squeeze the trigger.

“The hell?” you think to yourself. “Did I not feel the shot?”

Then you notice the safety is still in the SAFE position.

“Idiot!” your sometimes harsh inner voice chastises you. But instantly, you notice something else, an interesting observation that relieves your harsh self-criticism: you didn’t flinch when you pulled the trigger. You braced and pulled the gun in tight for the shot, but you didn’t flinch the moment you pulled the trigger. You didn’t even close your eyes. The inner voice has nothing to say about this, but you know, and it feels good to know.

A friend nearby shot his two shots from a two-barreled “over-under” 28-gauge, downing a bird from the flight in the cleared sendero in front of him. He didn’t notice your novice error. (You learn later when a seasoned veteran tells on himself about making the same mistake with lots of self-deprecating laughter that everyone does this on occasion, regardless of how “veteran” they are. You shudder to think of doing this with bigger-time prey, like the trophy elk of a lifetime!)

“Good shooting!” you call to him, genuinely impressed.

You scan the horizon and see a paired flight approaching in the distance and sound the alarm to the half-dozen dove hunters dispersed along the north-south sendero, all facing into the afternoon sun: “Birds! Birds!” There is no telling what sector of the sendero they’ll fly over. Just then, there are multiple flights, coming in across almost the entire sendero. It looks like everyone will get a shot. You realize suddenly you will get another shot.

You flip the thumb safety on the pump gun forward and take a breath. You shoulder the gun, looking down the barrel and cover an approaching bird, cover it up with the muzzle and fire once. Nothing. You cycle the pump with your forward hand, shucking out the spent shell and racking a fresh round into the chamber. It misses, so you repeat the process while still locked in on the same bird.

Your second shot causes the small bird to stop mid-flight and arc to the ground nearby. You are mesmerized. You walk over to it, because you are now a casual dove hunter and do not own a retrieving gun dog, and pick it up. It is warm and impossibly soft in your hand, and its head lolls limply down, leaving a small smear of blood on your hand as you deposit it into the open pouch on the back of your vest.

“Hey good shot!” offers your adjacent buddy, picking up his own bird. “Isn’t that your first dove?”

“Yeah, it is!” you reply, a little more enthusiastic than you had intended to sound.

“Congrats! There’ll be plenty more where that came from!”

You walk back to your spot and start to reflect a little after inserting another shell, chambering it, and inserting the third. But you don’t have time to reflect, because more birds are coming.

- If you decide to buy a shotgun, brave the heat, and join a true Texas Tradition: Turn to OldRepublicOutdoors.com (or email Ben) to book your spot and read on.

- To stay indoors where it’s safe and air-conditioned: Close this page and get on Slack to read about tomorrow’s 8:00 AM work meeting.

Dove hunting is important for many Texans because it is the most accessible way to hunt in the state that I can think of.

All you need is a place to go (and there are many), a shotgun (any shotgun from a .410 to a 12-gauge will do) a modified or improved cylinder choke, three or four boxes of shells, and somewhere to put your downed birds where the ants won’t get into them.

With the season opening September 1 state-wide, the choice awaits you, especially if you want to go on your first dove hunt and still haven’t. Some shooters balk because of getting rained out with fairly predictable Labor Day weekend rains. Some because they don’t know if they can hit the side of the barn with a shotgun.

If you have never been dove hunting, listen to me when I tell you that you should go. You should go with friends, first and foremost, even and especially if none of them have ever gone. You should not just go on opening weekend, which can be a lot to process once you’ve reached the property, especially if you’ve never hunted dove, or been hunting at all.

Also:

1. If you don’t have a shotgun yet, buy the cheapest one you can find. I shoot a 12-gauge because I knock down more birds with that, but I see hunters fill their limit with a 28-gauge gun.

2. When you buy the shotgun, buy a Texas hunting license. You have to hunt with it (you can do it online and access it from your phone now, too). You need to purchase HIP certification. Don’t worry, there is nothing to qualify for—you just answer questions about last year’s dove hunting.

3. Buy the plug for a magazine-tube gun and put it in! It is the law, and you don’t want an expensive fine killing the vibe.

4. Learn to take the breast out of the dove (surprisingly, you may need a pair of pruning shears or heavy-duty scissors only), and the dove breast off the bone.

5. Then, learn to make jalapeno dove-breast poppers. According to Texas lore, the poppers you see at HEB—sans dove breast meat—were invented by dove hunters using dove breast meat. The breast medallions are also fabulous sauteed and served over Mexican rice as well.

6. Don’t neglect the choke. You don’t have to understand it to know it makes your harvest percentages go up. You have to use “modified” or “improved cylinder” choke. If you have an over-under, choke both barrels. It does not require a gunsmith.

7. Get some practice on sporting clays. A good dove hunting operation will offer coaching and an opportunity to learn leading and follow-through on clays before you hunt.

I am an adult convert to hunting. I didn’t go on my first dove hunt before I was in my early 20s. I finally caved under the constant nagging pressure of a hunting buddy who insisted we shoot dove. It wasn’t even September; it was the second season in December. I am glad I went because that first hunt was some of the most fun I have ever had in the field.

I have hunted dove most years since that time. I’m not the best I’ve seen (a South Padre Island surfer friend of mine wears that crown), and I’m not the worst I’ve seen (not naming names here, lol). The constant action is what hooked me. None of this sneaking around in the brush for hours looking for a big meat animal.

If you’re interested in an accessible, high-action, social form of hunting, dove hunting can’t be beat. It’s like a video game, but real life. And you get rewarded with tasty morsels and you can really appreciate the value of ice-cold beverage at the end of a hard afternoon, the way our blue-collar grandfathers and great-grandfathers did. Some things need to be kept alive, and I believe Texas dove hunting is one of those worthy traditions.

Hope to see y’all out there. -Ben

Editor’s Note: At The Old Republic Journal, we feel it necessary to have a strong understanding of place. The Hill Country rivers we fish today run through valleys with surprisingly lurid and bloody histories. Before Mason County was known for rock hounds, rock stacking, and cattle ranching, it was the campaign ground for one of the most violent ethnic wars during Post-Civil War era Texas: the Mason County War, or Hoodoo War.

According to an old rural aphorism, some men “just need killin’.”

It may be more helpful to point out that some men are best left the hell alone. One man’s killing, on a beautiful Mason County afternoon in early May of 1875, triggered a paroxysm of violence in the Llano Uplift worthy of a Quentin Tarantino movie.

That man was a small-time Mason County cowboy named Tim Williamson, foster father of respected Texas Ranger and Comanche fighter Scott Cooley. Williamson and his wife took Cooley in when he was a small boy sick with typhoid, shortly after he had been ransomed back from Comanches. Cooley had been orphaned in the raid where he was captured. Williamson, then a young married man with no children, nursed Cooley to health and raised him to adulthood as a son. The Williamsons never had any children.

During the American Civil War that raged between 1861 and 1865, most German settlers of the central Texas Hill Country were known Unionists who had remained loyal to the Union and were largely despised during the postwar era by their beaten Texas Confederate neighbors.

Because of the Great Texas Cattle Drives to railheads in the Midwest, cattle blew up as a big-money asset in Texas by the 1870s. A good way to frame the dynamic in Mason County was that there was suddenly a “beef rush” on. This brought Anglo settlers into contact with the Germans via the Great Western Cattle Trail, which by the late 1870s had surpassed the Chisholm Trail to the east in volume.

Cattle theft became rampant across the state. Money-hungry, broke, desperate young men with excellent cowboy skills and a horse could swipe a herd of cattle and take them north along the trail with an efficiency a meth addict cutting a catalytic converter out from underneath a Toyota Tundra could only dream of. However, out-and-out cattle theft, due to the practice of branding a stamp of ownership into the cowhide, was not widespread.

A practice common amongst both German and Anglo settlers in the Hill Country river valleys across the Edwards Plateau—so-called “mavericking,” or claiming and branding unbranded calves in the finders-keepers playground of pre-fenced open range ranching—provided the friction that lit the Hoodoo War aflame.

Imagine the Llano Uplift from Fredericksburg north on Highway 16 to Llano, and then out west to Mason, north to San Saba, and east to Marble Falls, before it was when the ranches were fenced. This open country was frequently shared as cattle range—but not always. In fact, some of the earliest adopters of barbed-wire fencing were German settlers around Fredericksburg and Mason. It was the Anglo cattle drivers who scoffed at the concept and routinely cut fencing that appeared along their routes.

In western Mason County, especially, where you can follow the Llano River into the deep valleys and bluff country, fences weren’t a thing—likely owing to the granite—and cattle ranged in the river and stream valleys all year. While a bred cow might have somebody’s brand, the calf it dropped in March or April was thought of by maverickers as up for grabs. Even to the uninitiated, you can see where the practice of riding up and opportunistically branding a longhorn bull calf nursing off a calf with someone else’s brand was unethical and constituted out-and-out theft. But it was widely practiced, and it proved a scourge for anyone not keeping close enough eye on their ranging herds.

German and Anglo ranchers alike picked off the calves in those open-range days as they grazed with unattended herds in the valleys west of Mason. As I mentioned, helped along by this competition for maverick calves, ethnic and political tensions over the societal wounds of the Civil War ruptured a vein of murderous hatred during the difficult “Reconstruction” period and even after.

Part of the regional cultural milieu in the Llano River Valley were some fairly big-time German ranchers—stern Methodists and ardent Freemasons—who began to feel losses to rustling. Some historians think losses to ranchers during the period due to theft were fairly minimal. But during the late beef rush of the 1870s, that’s not the way the German ranchers in the Llano Valley saw it. They were so mad they could have killed somebody.

In 1875, Mason County Sheriff John Clark, a former Union soldier who collaborated with Republican Reconstruction policies, had wandered in from Missouri after the Civil War. Likely related to the Hoersters of Mason County on his mother’s side, Clark found many friends and followers and a sense of belonging in Mason, and had been elected sheriff.

On February 17, 1875, Sheriff Clark arrested nine Anglo-Texan cowboys for driving a herd of branded cattle, charging them with cattle rustling. Four of them promptly escaped from the Mason County jail. Next day, however, Peter and Elijah “Lige” Baccus, Abe Wiggins, and Tom Turley—who hadn’t gotten away—were taken from the Mason County Jail by a Texas-Deutsche (German-American) lynch mob and hanged by their necks from a Live Oak at the southern edge of town, where US Highway 87 runs into Mason now.

Texas Ranger Lieutenant Dan Roberts managed to cut down Turley, who was still alive, but the other men were dead. One man, Charley Johnson, managed to escape the mob’s grasp on the way to the oak tree and got away, walking into Roberts’s camp days later with sore feet and harboring a severe animus. Thus began the Mason County War.

After this lynching, a shaky peace prevailed when presumptive target and respected Mason County pioneer Tom Gamel took his men to meet Sheriff Clark and a group of more than sixty German-Americans for a truce. The Germans reportedly promised no more lynching.

Only a couple of weeks after the lynching, in March 1875, Clark arrested a small-time Anglo cowboy named Tim Williamson at his home in Loyal Valley, between Fredericksburg and Mason, charging him with cattle rustling. Clark had previously had a verbal altercation with Williamson’s wife over a tax matter. Williamson made bond, but a few days later, Mason County Inspector of Cattle Brands and Hides Daniel Hoerster had his bond revoked. “Big Dan” was himself a known mavericker, so his motivations were suspect when he revoked Williamson’s bond after Williamson was alleged to have sold a maverick yearling calf to Carl Lemburg. Lemburg, like many other ranchers, bought unbranded maverick calves for five dollars a head.

Hoerster accompanied Sheriff Clark and Mason County Sheriff’s Deputy John Worley^[i] to arrest Williamson at his home in Loyal Valley. They had gotten only a short way along the road back to Mason when about a dozen men led by Peter “Bad Man” Bader met the Sheriff’s posse.

In a dastardly crime worthy of his nickname, Bader shot the unarmed Williamson dead after Deputy Worley (allegedly) shot Williamson’s horse from under him.

And that’s how former Ranger Scott Cooley became embroiled in the Mason County War. Cooley’s ensuing vengeance was most of what we remember about the Mason County War. Word reached Cooley that Williamson had been killed while he was bivouacked near Menard with Company D of the Texas Rangers. Eyewitnesses said that when he heard the news, he fell to the ground and wept in the dust. After regaining his composure, he swore a solemn vow of revenge, riding away from his service with the Rangers for good that morning.

In a time before grand jury proceedings were sealed, Cooley went to Mason to observe the legal goings on over Williamson’s murder. He would exact his vengeance with clear-eyed professionalism after gaining ample workable intelligence by watching the proceedings. At the Mason County Courthouse, Cooley hid his grief as he sat in on first-hand testimony by Bader and Worley themselves about why Williamson and the others had to be killed.

In one of numerous examples of why the idea that “the law is blind” is a phony one, the Mason County grand jury declined to indict anyone—not even Bader. Cooley left Mason for a month; he told friends he needed to have a gunsmith “fix” one of his pistols.

When he got back to town, Cooley tracked down Deputy Worley working on a well at Doc Harcourt’s homestead south of Mason. He reportedly asked Worley for a drink from the well, and when Worley bent down to dip the bucket in, he killed the deputy with a gunshot to the head, cursed him, emptied the other five cylinders into his body, stabbed him a couple of times with a Bowie knife, and took his scalp.

Quick to attract accomplices, Cooley soon found an able sidekick in none other than John Peters Ringo, known to history as the notorious gunfighter, Johnny Ringo. The inner circle of the rest of Cooley’s gang consisted of brawling Irish brothers John and Moses “Mose” Beard, and George Gladden, of Burnet County.

On August 19, 1875, Cooley killed Bad Man Bader’s brother, Carl, and scalped him, in a case of mistaken identity. On September 2, Joseph Miller was killed, and a suspect was never named. The killing seemed random, and no connection to Cooley is known. Even without a known motive, historians are probably correct to suspect Cooley and his gang.

When Cooley’s men, Moses Beard and George Gladden, were subsequently led by a man named James Cheney into an ambush by Sheriff Clark and about 60 Germans, Beard was slain and Gladden escaped with nine gunshot wounds, including to the arm and face. Bad Man Bader cut a finger off Beard’s hand to get to a gold ring.

This ambush turned out badly for the German vigilance committee—and even badder for Bad Man Bader. The Beard brothers were well-connected in Burnet and Llano Counties, and Cooley’s gang grew rapidly as Anglo men began flooding to Cooley’s side.

Sometime after Beard was killed, Peter Bader was shot down and lost his scalp. Historians don’t know for certain who the gunman was. George Gladden was arrested and charged with Peter Bader’s murder, but it was almost certainly Cooley. Before he was slain, Bader, rightly in fear for his life, had moved his family into Fredericksburg, planning to sell his belongings and move to Florida. He never got the chance.

On September 25, 1875, Cooley, Johnny Ringo, and about six other gunfighters rode blithely into Mason, stopping at Cheney’s home in town. Unaware of their motivation, Cheney chatted with the men when they stopped at his house. He invited them in for coffee, and they accepted. As Cheney washed his face in the washbasin on his front porch, Johnny Ringo shot him down. It was Ringo’s first documented killing in his career as a famous gunfighter.

Just four days later, Big Dan Hoerster, who had parted ways with Clark’s “posse,” was blasted off his horse by John Beard, who shot Hoerster in the throat with buckshot in broad daylight as Hoerster rode in front of the barber shop in the Mason Courthouse Square. Cooley knelt in the street beside Hoerster’s corpse and cut away his scalp.

A gunfight ensued in the town, with Cooley and Ringo and the gang exchanging fire with some Germans who had seen Hoerster killed. The band escaped, but one of Cooley’s men, William Coke, was apprehended days later by Clark and his men. Clark sent Coke back to Mason with some posse members and he was never seen again, with Clark claiming Coke had “escaped.”

After Hoerster’s killing, Sheriff Clark lost his nerve. Cooley had come to Mason bent on killing the sheriff, and Clark knew it. Sheriff Clark found himself the subject of a grand jury investigation by Texas Ranger Major John B. Jones and the district court in Mason County. However, due to local intimidation and personal sympathies of the grand jury members, Clark was “no-billed” for several extrajudicial killings and false imprisonment. The charges were dismissed, and Clark fled back to Missouri, where he spent the rest of his days as a low-profile farmer.

Cooley and Ringo were arrested in Burnet by Sheriff A.J. Strickland on December 27, 1875. As they were shuffled between Burnet, Travis, and Lampasas County jails to keep them from being sprung by their gang, things looked grim for the pair—until a large band of their Anglo-Texan supporters broke them out of the Lampasas County jail. Cooley and Ringo parted ways after the breakout, with Cooley heading south to Blanco County to lay low and Ringo on the lam in the Hill Country until his recapture in November 1876 in Llano County. Ringo remained in jail for the murder of James Cheney before his charges were ultimately dismissed in 1878 and he headed for Arizona.

In late October, 1881, Ringo was allegedly a leader of a gang of outlaws feuding with Deputy U.S. Marshal Wyatt Earp, and Earp’s brothers and associates in Cochise County, Arizona. While he wasn’t actually present for the infamous “shootout at the OK Corral,” Ringo was affiliated with the Cochise County Cowboys while there.

Cooley died after suffering violent convulsions on the summer evening of June 10, 1876, as he drove his wagon east from Fredericksburg towards Johnson City. He had just had dinner at the Nimitz Hotel—which is now the National Museum of the Pacific War. A known epileptic, Cooley had either suffered a massive seizure that killed him, or he had been poisoned. The cause of death was listed as “brain fever.”

Just 24 years old, Scott Cooley was buried in the Miller Creek Cemetery, on the north side of US-290, three miles east of the US-290/US-281 intersection south of Johnson City, only a few miles from my homestead.

His gravestone is inscribed:

Scott Cooley

1852 1876

Texas Ranger

Thank y’all for reading. And now you’ll know when you’re out there fishing around the James River. We’ll see y’all out there. -Ben

^[i] For standardization, I adopted the spelling used by Margaret Bierschwale in her book, The History of Llano County, except in the spelling of Johnny Ringo’s name. Bierschwale uses the accepted spelling attributing Ringo’s surname as “Ringgold.”

It was a sunny morning, October 11, 2021. My father’s 91^st birthday. I had said goodbye to him through a window earlier that year on April 17 as he lay dying in one of those crummy “memory care” facilities. It was Covid, and I couldn’t hold his hand, give him a hug, or anything a son might be allowed to do if Covid restrictions hadn’t been in place. His death was a painful loss rather than the proper goodbye I wish I could have given him.

The day after he died, on April 18, 2021, I went fishing in a back bay on the lower Laguna Madre and caught my first snook on the fly in a narrow mangrove channel, where the snook was feeding aggressively. Immediately after releasing the snook, I caught a bruiser redfish with the same fly. I am a believer, so I was grateful that fishing had given me something to hold onto when I couldn’t hold my father’s hand.

Then, I was fishing the Pedernales on dad’s birthday that year. My son Daniel and I were in my Flycraft raft, out to catch Guadalupe bass and largemouth and Rio Grande cichlids like we enjoy doing. We were using Daniel’s fly, which is the Hill Country fly I use almost exclusively.

He called it the Chips ‘n Salsa because every fish from the Pedernales to the San Saba and the Nueces wants to snack on it. The genius of this fly is its ability to mimic three primary warm-water food sources for the Hill Country fish we all love to catch: damselfly nymphs and small crawfish, with some “frogginess” thrown in on a variation with rubber legs for good measure.

We had hardly started our run, with me at the oars, when we both spotted a huge blue catfish on the surface, just below some overhung pecan branches near the bank, river left.

“Is that a catfish?” my son asked me at the same time I was saying, “Dude, that’s a big catfish!”

He tried a few casts with a Chips ‘n Salsa fly on his Scott Flex 4 WT as it lay suspended on the surface, to no avail.

“Nah, I don’t know what I’m thinking. I have no business trying to catch that thing,” he said.

“Take the oars and give me the rod,” I said.

I watched the cat and noticed it had one gray eye on the side Daniel had been casting. It was blind on that side of its head. I flicked the fly to its good eye and it opened its mythical mouth and inhaled the fly. I set the hook and told Daniel I was on.

“Get me to the middle of the river!” I urged.

I fought the fish for 45 minutes on that tiny American-built 4 WT while Daniel cheered me on and simultaneously admonished me not to break his rod. I fought it like I fought bull redfish I caught on Rat-L-Traps at the end of the north jetty of the Brazos-Santiago Pass at South Padre Island with light spinning rods when I was a conventional angler in my youth. Namely, I kept the fish’s head up and horsed it away from any obstructions. We were both out of the raft on the sandy bank river right when he landed the fish, hanging more than halfway out of the net.

That’s the only fish I ever killed on the Pedernales, because Daniel said there was no way it was going to survive that fight and I agreed. We took it straight from Fredericksburg to TPWD inland fisheries in San Marcos to have it weighed because I thought it might be a state fly record. It wasn’t.

It weighed 31 pounds, 8 ounces and was 44 inches long. I had caught it on a tapered Rio Bass leader with 12-lb tippet—and the Chips ‘n Salsa of course.

I put the fish and stats on my Instagram over @pearlsnapflyfishing and it was immediately picked up by a sports guy at USA Today, who contacted me and did the write-up. He asked me what tippet I had used and I told him 12-lb. He said it appeared likely I had a 12-lb tippet class fly fishing world record with the International Game Fish Association. I looked into having that verified with them, and a couple days later I clipped the leader off next to where I had snelled it onto the fly line and sent it by mail to IGFA in Florida, where they confirmed the record.

For what it’s worth, we filleted the catfish and wound up with pounds and pounds of thin fillets that ate quite well indeed.

##The Recipe

The Chips ‘n Salsa fly can be tied in everything from a size 10 to a #1, and we like Gamakatsu stinger hooks. The materials are common and easily found at a shop like Sportsman’s Finest in Bee Cave or Living Waters in Round Rock. Daniel and I still tie the Chips ‘n Salsa together, the way my father and I bonded over grueling manual ranch labor clearing mesquite off fencelines or fire-branding calves in the summertime. Here is how you can put some of your own in your fly box:

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In the summer, and especially at full moon or bright moon, fish feed when it’s cool, overnight and around dawn, retreating to deep pockets under shady banks before mid-day. Rio Grande Cichlids—the only native tropical cichlid in the United States, only found in Texas—will find well-shaded underwater caves and structure in the faster water, often sharing it with the State Fish of Texas, the Guadalupe Bass—“Texas Trout.” Like trout, Guads love faster, aerated water, average in the 12-inch range, and are favored for the way they take flies with slashing and aggressive attacks, frequently jumping during the fight the way trout will.

Largemouth are going to be in their holes, under their shade branches along the banks. And carp will be cruising sandy-bottomed flats mid-river and in reedy flats, but feeding activity is more pronounced when it’s not midday.

To test this theory, I pulled up to the low-water crossing on the Pedernales just before noon this past Tuesday, a section that was still receding following the flooding that occurred 10 days previous. I was out to prove to myself that I could catch fish on a hot mid-summer day, with temperatures pushing into the mid-90s and the sun a-blazing near its zenith in a clear blue sky.

I put the electronic key fob in the console and detached the spindly analog entry key, zipping it into the hip pocket of my wading pants. I threw on the old, weather-worn George Strait Resistol palm leaf cowboy hat and a largemouth bass-patterned neck gaiter. My sun gloves rounded out the necessary sun protection.

I dropped the tailgate of the pickup and hopped up with my wading boots and neoprene gravel guard stockings, two pieces of gear that have transformed the experience of wading rocky streams. If you don’t already have them, and if you wade streams more than once per year, seriously consider buying a pair of wading boots and gravel guards. I consider them essential gear because of the protection they offer to feet, and the sure grip that prevents painful wipe-outs and banging a shin on limestone.

As I slipped the boots on, I looked up into the pecan tree I had parked next to, pausing to admire cedar fence posts plastered to it above my head. I admired the 100 yards or so of wiped out fence along the riverbank before tying the boots and folding the neoprene over the top of them. I hopped down and got my rod case out, carefully removing a Scott Radian 5/6, lining up the ferrules and snugging the four pieces into one lovely length of rod. I pulled the old TFO 4/5 reel out and seated it on the rod, coaxing the tapered co-polymer leader from the spool until I was into the fly line proper. Doubling the fly line over, I threaded it through the ferrules one at a time, careful not to skip one. With the line and leader threaded through, I laid the rod and reel down in the bed of the pickup and got my starter fly out.

I was badly in need of tying up a new batch of flies, but, pressed for time, I grabbed a variant of my go-to pattern invented by my son Daniel: the “Chips ‘n Salsa.” Without exaggeration, it’s a favorite eat for every fish in the Texas Hill Country. I have never, ever fished with a better fly, in any water.

The last time I tied up flies, I got lazy and omitted the black Palmered hackle near the bead-chain eyes, so it wasn’t a true Chips ‘n Salsa, but a hastily tied guide-fly version. I tied it on, locked the truck, stuck the fly box in my right breast pocket. A bit worried about leaving my hemostat behind, I crossed the farm-to-market road and stepped into a shin-deep river flowing at approximately 140 CFS. It was warmer than I expected.

Mid-summer hits sometime about the third week of July. Technically, the 2026 Hill Country flooding was tapering off right at the mid-summer peak, which couldn’t have been a better setup for fly fishing enthusiasts of the region. God-willing, we are seeing the El Nino shift starting.

I looked downriver past the bridge and saw a 50-yard section of sycamores, pecans, and cypress trees plastered down flat and brown, exposing a section of flood plain river bed I never knew existed. It resembled a scoured, brown wasteland—a reminder of the power of these streams. Upriver, there were downed trees, but not very much human flood debris, a notable exception being a rather large, white hot tub sitting high on the bank river left. The river-adjacent landowners had not yet started trying to rebuild their riverside fences, and this flood took out robust and lengthy sections of river. I will remind everyone here yet again: the river does not give a damn about anyone’s fences.

When stalking upstream from an access, looking for suspended bass that show like electric pickles in gin-clear water, it’s nice to have the sun above to your back—even a high sun. That way, if fish are looking your direction, they have to look through a lot of glare before they can make out your lumbering form stalking their way. With the sun in your face, that dynamic is reversed, and fish that you still haven’t spotted will flee away, little torpedoes darting to some farther pool. To catch them, you must give them time to “reset.” If you see a nice fish you’d like to catch settle in the next pool upstream, and you know you can find it, you’re better off waiting 15 minutes, because fish tend to be very unlikely to take a fly directly after they’ve been spooked. Unless they’re sunfish or smaller Rios. Panfish are aggressive and always ready to give you a chance.

Change flies often if you want to catch more fish. I caught a small largemouth within a minute of starting my Tuesday wade, so I “got the skunk off,” which means I am free to go as hard or as easy as I want.

The “skunk-off” bass in the first five minutes. Photo by Ben Christensen

I personally enjoy getting lost in my fly casting, presenting to every point of the clock ahead of me, with 12 o’clock being straight upstream—and even a few downstream from around 7 and 5 o’clock—before moving on. When I am honed in on my casts, I almost never change flies, and it can take me a half-hour or more to get bored with the meditative practice of walking upstream, fly casting as I go. Even though I’ve fly fished avidly for nearly a decade and a half and my casting is decent, as I walk and cast, I notice my casts get better: less hurried, unforced, and far more accurate.

The Pedernales on Tuesday. Photo by Ben Christensen.

I had gotten a quarter-mile upriver from the low water crossing and had just high-sticked a tiny sunfish out of a cave when I finally got bored enough to tie on a big popper (the Rios I was after had spotted me and retreated deep into the cave, not having any of it). I grabbed a black, plastic-headed popper (one day I will learn to spin deer hair, I promise) and tied it on, having found a likely looking shaded hole.

With my well-honed cast, I gently placed the popper on a bare patch of bank about two inches from the river, and popped it onto the surface water. After two pops, I got a fantastic blow up—and a miss. My heart jumped and my pulse was off to the races, pumping away as the twinge of adrenaline started to disperse through my veins.

I caught two smallish largemouth bass in the 10-inch range like this, but they gave me vigorous fights with jumping as I prefer. My concerns about not having my hemostat were unfounded, as the head of the popper made extracting the hook from perfect lip-hooked sets very easy. I took some pictures for this publication and realized that it was getting hot.

Largemouth on the popper. Photo by Ben Christensen

Summer is a good time to test the water, and experience firsthand where the fish are. A hung fly on some limbs overhanging a shady hole provides an excuse to wade into the middle of it, scanning for toad largies hastily leaving the area. Wading into a hole to dislodge a fly as well as our quarry is sometimes unavoidable. It spoils the fishing in the hole for at least a half hour, but the silver lining is, it gives the fly angler necessary firsthand experience about fish and their cover.

Finally, even though we celebrate stream flows in the hundreds at mid-summer, when they are usually stuck at two or three CFS, there are spots all over this region that fish consistently and well, even in the lowest water. While many, I admit, devolve into a morass of algae and dead water unsuitable for fly casting, some ripple along over limestone and fish still charge out from holes to take a fly, or slam a popper on the surface.

Don’t let this heat stop you. Get out early if you can, try poppers and hoppers along the banks, and get after it! It’ll be fall bassin’ before we know it. I will leave you with some stream flow numbers on some of my favorite Hill Country Rivers

Current Hill Country Stream Flows (as of 6:00 PM yesterday):

Pedernales River (near Johnson City): 103 CFS

Pedernales River (near Fredericksburg): 120 CFS

Llano River (near Mason): 551 CFS

South Llano River (at Flat Rock Lane at Junction): 178 CFS

Guadalupe River (near Bergheim): 438 CFS

Nueces River (at Laguna): 761 CFS

We’ll see y’all out there! -Ben

The brush still smelled like rain, and the plants had awakened with scents of spice, and the earth smelled of fertility. The remnants of Tropical Storm Bertha had blown ashore Thursday morning with a burst of rain and wind while I was trying to fish the baitfish migration miles north of the town of South Padre Island, leaving Friday’s dawn weather unseasonably cool. The large orange sphere of the sun hung a few degrees off my left shoulder, not high above the low green canopy of scrub brush.

As I walked south around a low mesquite, I had the wind on the left side of my face, blowing gently south by southeast. Around the other side of the cascading veil of green mesquite, not 10 yards in front of me were two nilgai, tan coats lit red by the morning sun, with tell-tale black manes and white patches on their faces, a female and a large weaning calf on a game trail quartering to my right. The larger lead cow was obscured from shooting by a veil of green and woody thorn plants, but the calf was quartered towards me. Busted! Exactly the situation I try to avoid when I am out hunting on foot, like I do when I am provisioning meat for my family.

Busted. I expected the thing that usually happens in a scenario like this: cows start that dogged trot along the trail, picking up speed as they head for some far horizon, asses low, pushing a lope while front legs high-step from a gallop to a dead run.

Only the big blue bulls are stupid and macho enough to stand there long enough for you to shoot. I once filmed a client who aimed at a bull from 40 yards with his rifle resting on a tripod for a full 96 seconds while I urged him to take the shot and gave him every kind of encouragement while the bull stood broadside to us before it decided things were too weird and finally ran off. The client never took the shot. “I’ll get the next one,” he said confidently, and you know how that went for him.

I knew if I got three seconds to set up a shot I’d be lucky. I dropped the tripod I was carrying in my left hand that nilgai hunters use to prop heavy-caliber rifles, with bull barrels and enormous rifle scopes for long-distance shots. I had my Remington .300 Winchester Magnum slung over my right shoulder. Luckily, I had dialed the scope all the way back to 4X magnification, so I wasn’t looking at a tick on a patch of fur if I got a suboptimal close-up shot just like this one. At that moment I hated having to use a scoped rifle for a safari-style hunt on foot through the Texas veldt. I had already vowed to buy a Winchester Model 70 Safari in .375 H&H Magnum with iron sights if I ever got the bread for it. That would have been the perfect rifle for this scenario.

The calf looked intently at me from about eight yards, quartering only slightly to my right, its bright eyes processing me, just starting to tense with alarm. I brought the heavy rifle to my shoulder, acquired a sight picture through the scope of his fuzzy brisket, made no conscious adjustments to windage or elevation, and sent a shot home before any of us had had more than about a second-and-a-half to think. The round found its mark and the young animal—a bull with two nubs on his head—shuddered and collapsed, kicking out as his vitality left him on the game trail where he had fallen. In about eight seconds, the scene returned to stillness. After gauging his weight by pulling on his hind legs, I decided I’d go get the tractor.

Nilgai bull calf, ready for field dressing. Photo by Ben Christensen

I try to hunt with the sun at my back and the wind in my face. When I am guiding clients, statistics and a high pressure to get our shot typically demand a good sit in a box blind overlooking a game trail, as we don’t bait nilgai. When I am hunting for meat, I will often sit a while, but I prefer to stalk along the senderos I have bulldozed on the place over the years, laid this way and that to account for various arrangements of wind and sun.

If I spot quarry without busting it and sending it running for the horizon, and I can’t kill it at that same instant, I work out a plan to kill it based entirely on wind direction and the position of the sun in its diurnal arc. That’s exactly what I had done with these two animals Friday morning. I had seen them at 100 yards to the east down my longest east-west sendero. I saw them cross the sendero heading north as I walked east, but with neighbors to consider and a round that likes to travel, I planned my stalk. I cut north to my main north-south sendero on a path to intercept the pair.

I set up my tripod and rifle overlooking the main north-south sendero and stood for 40 minutes waiting for them to show. When they didn’t, I realized they were grazing along browse lines in the brush to my east, so I walked east into the brush, knowing if I spotted them I’d have to be quick on the draw. We had run out of nilgai meat about six weeks ago, and my wife had ordered more, and it’s my job to deliver the groceries however I am able. I knew she would be thrilled to receive a tender young nilgai bull calf with the body size of a full-grown Michigan white-tail buck.

I grew up on the cattle ranch that took up two-and-a-half sections of hard and thorny coastal South Texas land. The way things shook out, I inherited the old horse pasture, which is the prettiest and most accessible piece of the whole thing. It sustained our remuda of horses before it was used for anything else. I grew up dodging rattlesnake strikes out there and watering the horses with a green garden hose in an old enamel bathtub when I was a boy. The bunkhouse I built on the place is 10 miles from South Padre Island. Friday afternoon, after I had field dressed and split the carcass and deposited it in the chest-freezer I use for chilling harvested meat, I watched Elon Musk send another rocket into space from the second-story roof of the bunkhouse.

Dressed and ready for splitting. Photo by Ben Christensen

I’ll see y’all out there! -Ben

You may have been expecting a “fishing high flows in the Texas Hill Country” sort of dispatch this morning, but I’m unpredictable, even to myself. I got to Old Republic Ranch about 10:30 pm Tuesday night and fished the baitfish migration off the beach north of South Padre Island Wednesday morning.

Hill Country rivers can be fished right now, even if they’re a little blown out. But this baitfish migration has been calling my name in the worst way. I haven’t fished a summer migration since I was a poor conventional sap with a spinning rod. Because I’ve been fly fishing fresh- and saltwater for years, I figured it was about time for some beach run-and-gun. Therefore, I write this in my ranch house from the long, narrow table I threw together before the clients arrived for a group dove hunt one year.

As I write this, I am listening to Charley Crockett, my favorite still-living cowboy singer. Crockett is from San Benito/Los Fresnos. I thought it was novel this evening as I drove to Bass Pro Shops in Harlingen and realized as I was passing through San Benito on my shortcut there that I was listening to Crockett on Apple Music, recalling his San Benito ties. (If you haven’t checked out Crockett’s music yet, you’re missing out).

I’d be lying if I said I hated going to Bass Pro. The Harlingen “fly shop” section is derelict and sad, certainly. If you are a fly angler, you must patronize only local fly shops. Thing is, there is not a fly shop that serves the lower Laguna Madre. Bass Pro in Harlingen is all we have. But they have the saltwater fly selection I require.

When I got back from picking up my flies—2/0 J-Rea’s Cuda Killers in chartreuse, 2/0 Ehlers’ Bottle Rockets in white and copper, and 4/0 Bunker Bait in olive/white and chartreuse—I drove through the pasture on a whim and jumped a nilgai cow, unmistakably huge and red compared to a white-tailed doe. My rifle was in a case on the backseat of the truck, and I stopped the truck, put it in park, unzipped the case, pulled the rifle out and charged a round into the chamber. Although this felt like an eternity, as I turned around, she was only then slipping into the thorn scrub about 40 yards away. I drove around helplessly trying to bring her up again, but I imagine she bedded down as survival demanded. It would have been fantastic to harvest some nilgai meat on this trip. I may get some yet.

Old Republic Ranch Wednesday evening. Photo by Ben Christensen

The shark cruised by to look at me about five minutes after I fell off my inflatable kayak into the cool, sandy green Gulf waters. It was about five or six feet long. The thing about sharks is you always know you’re looking at a shark, even when it’s just a dark mass moving through the water. Sharks know when they’re looking at losers—and losers like me can feel that cold side-eye even from 10 or so yards away.

But instead of feeling like I was in a bad neighborhood, it was like seeing a cardinal when you’re out deer hunting. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but cardinals and deer are never far apart. And sharks and other more fly-friendly pelagic apex predators hang together.

I was right past the “UFO” (an old oil platform lifeboat) that marks the nude beach, a few miles north of Cameron County Beach Access #6. Four-wheel-drive is mandatory for the sugar sand beach driving, so I am thankful for the War Elephant, my 2014 Ram 2500 heavy-duty diesel four-wheel-drive pickup. I am also thankful there were no nude sunbathers out. They are invariably unappealing in their leather skin, and they look like they’re wearing white swimwear—until you realize they’re not. The effect, frankly, is more shocking than watching a large-ish shark cruise by your inflatable kayak 150 yards from the beach.

But I digress. Before I saw the blacktip shark, I was standing on my inflatable kayak. It is not a cheap yellow inflatable, but one of those high-end jobs with the same material fly fishing rafts are made of. I was filming the beach, the color changes, grabbed a quick selfie as the video on my iPhone rolled, and then a wave tumped me into the drink. I managed to maintain grip on my iPhone and my fly rod—a TFO Mangrove 8-weight—and climbed back into the kayak as the phone kept recording video. It was great. I laughed and shut off the recording, and promptly put the wipe-out on Instagram this afternoon. If you don’t follow me on IG @pearlsnapflyfishing, you can follow me if you like and watch the video on my Story. Total fail.

A still from my submerged fly reel and rod, complete with bubbles. Photo by Ben Christensen

I caught two remarkably similar skipjack—about 18 inches—on a 2/0 epoxy-head rain minnow with a blue tinsel tail and a greenish head.

I caught one out past the third sandbar and one up in the surf very close to the beach. Catching skipjack on a fly rod reminds me of that crass joke where the punch line is about riding a moped. Ridiculous but fun. Skipjack are a heck of a lot of fun. Sure, I wanted schoolie tarpon or a fat bull redfish. But I didn’t get skunked. And I have more flies for tomorrow’s dawn attack.

We’ll see y’all out there. -Ben

In terms of global geography, the Balcones Escarpment is a modest affair. These central highlands of Texas rise sharply from the plains and prairies below, but only for a few hundred feet of altitude to the vast, south-, southeast-, and east-sloping Edwards Plateau, which was once the ancient continental shelf of southern North America.

NASA satellite photo illustration of the Edwards Plateau. Retrieved from https://assets.science.nasa.gov/dynamicimage/assets/science/esd/eo/images/imagerecords/151000/151149/iss068e033243.jpg?w=720&h=700&fit=clip&crop=faces%2Cfocalpoint

Typically, towering mountain ranges such as the Rocky Mountains form what is called an orographic barrier. This physical phenomenon affects weather in distinct, predictable ways. The peaks block precipitation-bearing clouds, causing arid western-slope climatic conditions, while ensuring the eastern slope gets ample rainfall.

Although not the true orographic barrier of the Rockies or the Andes, the limestone ramp of the escarpment provides a weather-enhancing physical feature that sends warm, moist tropical air masses from the Gulf of Mexico rolling upward from the low, flat coastal plains to the south and east, launching them high into the atmosphere above the 20 million-acre plateau. Here, they sometimes collide with cool, dry air masses marching southward from the arctic.

Sometimes, tropical moisture streams in through the back door from the west, coming ashore above the Pacific Coast of Mexico, where landfalling hurricanes fall apart. The remnant moisture streaming across the Rio Grande into our Texan skies doesn’t need any orographic enhancement to wreak hydrologic havoc when it collides with cool fronts above the Edwards Plateau.

This weather, either the warm, humid Gulf air enhanced by topography or the tropical moisture from the Pacific, frequently triggers staggering flash floods. Rain during these weather-makers can reach 30 to 50 inches (2.5 to 4.2 feet). Floodwaters are sluiced along with the downward slope of the plateau into gullies, ravines, and canyons that funnel the escaping water downstream, where they cascade through the canyon-cut escarpment. This drainage action transforms otherwise gentle Hill Country creeks and rivers into cataclysmic chasms of raging, gray-brown water choked with uprooted pecan, cypress, and sycamore trees. As a consequence of these dangerous geographical and climatological factors, Texas leads the nation by a large margin in flood-related deaths.

A bridge over the Pedernales River this past Friday, July 17. Photo by Ben Christensen.

Every road that leads you to every fishing spot in the Texas Hill Country is susceptible to flooding. While I haven’t counted them, I guess there are hundreds of signs throughout the Edwards Plateau—a plain, yellow diamond and black lettering, warning us in all caps: “Road May Flood.” In the middle of a drought such signs might draw an eye roll, but don’t get caught far afield among these signs during any persistent rainfall.

The region at the hem of the Balcones Escarpment, and all the Texas Hill Country, is known as “flash flood alley.” This includes the area encompassing I-35 from Dallas-Fort Worth to San Antonio, and along Highway 90 west out to Uvalde. Managers of the Alamo City, which has suffered massive damaging floods throughout its history, invested in amazing flood mitigation infrastructure including a massive, 24-foot-diameter flood-control tunnel deep beneath the entire three-mile reach of the Riverwalk through downtown. Austin’s propensity to flooding was a primary motivation for the construction of the five Highland Lakes that stretch all the way from Inks Lake just south of Colorado Bend State Park southeast into Lady Bird Lake in downtown Austin.

Per example, the Llano River was once known for the abundant, centuries-old pecan trees crowding its banks, providing ample cooling shade the way they still do along the Colorado River around San Saba. But the June 14, 1935 flood of record—the worst recorded flood on the Llano to date—erased them. A 43-foot crest scrubbed the bankside groves—and the dirt that nourished their roots—the way you would blast lichens from a sidewalk with a pressure washer.

During that event, tropical moisture inundated the area that includes the topographical divide between the west-flowing Llano and the south-flowing Frio and Nueces, overwhelming their headwaters and compounding a disastrous, multi-river flood. The North Llano, a favorite tributary of mine, reached a peak I can hardly imagine—28 feet.

This water piled into the Llano’s mainstem, washing away the bridges in the towns of Llano, Castell, Hedwigs Hill, and over the Colorado on the south side of Marble Falls. This same flood inundated much of Austin, on the Colorado River downstream, which peaked at 41.2 feet. This was just one foot shy of what was the worst flood in Austin on record, in 1869.

According to a 1937 U.S. Geological Survey report of the flood, which peaked on the Llano at 388,000 cubic-feet-per-second (CFS), “thousands” of pecan trees were lost in the ’35 flood, scouring the soil to the rock.

The Nueces and Frio also took it on the chin. A steel railway bridge west of Uvalde was swept away where the flood waters peaked at 36.9 feet. That surpassed the previous record set in June, 1913, when the Nueces rose to 29 feet in Laguna at 213,000 CFS. By comparison, USGS Stream Gauge 08190000, the Nueces River at Laguna, crested at 21.51 feet this past Thursday, July 16 at 3:10pm local time.

On June 18, 1935, cut off by the flood, Camp Wood residents had to rely on food supplies dropped by air. The 1935 flood killed 30 people, but folks upriver were considerate enough to use the telephone to call folks downriver and warn them, allowing people to move to higher ground before the crest hit.

The Pedernales River’s Flood of Record

September 11, 1952, saw the worst-on-record flood on my beloved home waters, the Pedernales River. I remember being riveted by the late Alvin “Bunny” Weinheimer’s firsthand tales of that one. At the time, Bunny, who died in December, 2020, at the age of 90, worked with his father at Stonewall’s landmark Weinheimer & Son general store (which is still in business in Stonewall, owned by his daughter, DeAnn Hampton). He recounted the water coming all the way up to Highway 290, stranding motorists who had to climb into trees, clinging onto limbs to keep from being swept away. He told me of one family who had lost a young son in the flood and how heart-rending it was. That flood killed five people.

The 1952 Pedernales River flood of record saw a maximum crest at a mind-boggling 40.8 feet and 441,000 CFS. By comparison, this past Thursday’s peak reached 34.32 feet.

It is my personal belief that you can tell old timers’ riverside ranches from newer owners because of the way many properties along the Pedernales River around Stonewall have fences that: one, actually retain livestock, and two, end at least 50 yards up from the river. I noticed several fences plowed flat by the floodwaters, and others that were installed well away from the bank only had dried grass hanging off the barbed wire strands when I checked the crossings this past Friday morning.

If you know Fredericksburg-area farmers and ranchers like I do, you know they aren’t keen on paying for fences that they’re going to have to re-build every time there’s another flood!

The river doesn’t give a damn about fences. Photo by Ben Christensen.

The Guadalupe River

Unfortunately, we can’t get away from the flood metric that matters most of all when comparing historic floods on the Guadalupe River: human lives lost.

This past Thursday, July 16 at 5:10am, the Guadalupe registered a crest of 37.69. This time, all but Mark Steward, a beloved 1979 graduate of Westlake High School killed in this week’s flood, got out of the way.

The worst flood, of course, was the July 4^th, 2025 event that caused the heart-rending loss of 119 people along the Guadalupe alone. The one that claimed 27 campers and the camp administrator of Camp Mystic. The one caused by a tremendous deluge of water that occurred most severely between 1:00am and 5:00am. Last year’s flood was the most massive flood for which we have USGS flood gauge data, with a crest of 39.61 feet at USGS 0816620 near Center Point. That’s the gage downstream of Camp Mystic (which was nestled in and along a canyon on the South Fork of the Guadalupe), and downstream of more than a half-dozen campgrounds that were packed on that Fourth of July, which fell on a Friday.

Before last year’s flood, the deadliest flood on the Guadalupe happened July 17, 1987. In that flood, when a school bus and a van carrying 39 teenaged campers from Pot O’ Gold Camp, located two miles upriver from Comfort on the Guad, were swept away. Ten of the teenagers drowned. Like last year’s tragedy, that flood was an overnight event. Unlike last year’s tragedy, by 4:35am Camp Mystic reported all their campers were safe.

Y’all stay safe out there. -Ben

Tuesday I tried to fish one of the road crossings over the Pedernales River not far from Fredericksburg.

I haven’t fished this particular spot in a while, relying on a spot rich with Guadalupe bass, Rio Grande Cichlids and carp that’s my Number 1 honey hole. This is maybe my number four spot, but it’s pretty.

Well, when I went, it was anything but pretty. The sycamores and cypresses on the bank were pretty as ever—dressed in the deep, dark summer greens of mid-summer. But the water was algal snot. I pulled up algae on my fly with every cast, so I kept working farther downstream, looking for clearer water (I hadn’t waded upstream because the water was completely matted with mucous-colored algae there.) The banks were a lot brushier than they had been.

Mid-July Pedernales River crossing, earlier this week. Photo by Ben Christensen.

The June rains that fell on the Pedernales had provided a thorough flush that gouged the shallow wading flats I had previously relied on to keep my car key keyless entry fob dry. When those key fobs get wet, they play hell on trying to get into your car and the whole alarm thing.

I was sternum-deep in this Rambo jungle water when I gave up. I needed my kayak anyway, and a few blue cats and carp and Rios weren’t about to play with my gunked-up fly.

I headed to McDougall’s Crossing, which is my favorite limestone sight-casting-for-Guads spot that features shallow gin-clear water over a ridged, slabby limestone bottom. The bass show as electric pixel-tattooed torpedoes of yellow and green and the sight casting is sublime there. It was late afternoon and I decided then to write a technical, mid-summer piece for my Fishing the Texas Hill Country in the Middle of Damn Summer series about how to work the sun and glare that will have you sight casting like a boss to the fish.

The Myth of the “Bad (For Fish) Flood”

But then the July flood anomaly happened. The excessive rainfall we have seen in the western Hill Country, specifically the Nueces and San Antonio River Basins, but synoptic in its regionality, is an anomaly because we had more than four inches in June. That marks two purgative floods for the Hill Country in as many months. That is indeed an anomaly, and I had one reader reach out and tell me he immediately thought of last week’s Old Republic Journal piece on El Niño and its typical impacts on Texas.

These back-to-back deluges provide an opportune time to explore aquifer recharge and groundwater drawdown patterns that affect summer stream flows.

Same Pedernales River crossing, Wednesday. Photo by Ben Christensen.

The reality of floods: Outside of loss of human life, and (to a far lesser degree) property, floods are wonderful for the rivers themselves. I’ve heard talk about Hill Country floods being bad for the wonderful warmwater cornucopia of the region’s fish: largemouth and smallmouth bass, Rios, carp, gar, and the panfish. But that’s bunk. Not only my decade-plus experience of actively fishing the Hill Country speaks to this: Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD) fish population survey conducted in 2025 after devastating July floods showed fish populations were robust only a couple of weeks afterward.

Floods are vital to waterway health. The slippery algal slime on low, exposed rocks that are dangerous slip hazards for anglers get scoured by limestone and granite sands, reducing hazardous build-up. The algal snot gets flushed completely, and fly-catching weeds and rattelbrush get scoured away and pushed as flood debris to the higher banks up-gradient. With it the pulse of water, too, the build-up of anaerobic phosphorous concentrations from winery fertigation and hay fertilizers is carried away and diluted into the lakes and reservoirs downstream, so that people can shower and brush their teeth and have drinking water. You know, like get cleaned up to go on a weekend winery date to Fredericksburg.

Groundwater Drawdowns and Algal Blooms

The algae builds up because of synthetic fertilizers used on the numerous vineyards around Fredericksburg, and large hay operations using synthetic fertilizers. I’m not going to editorialize on this right now. But a gazillion vineyards flanking the Pedernales River as it snakes along Highway 290 between Johnson City and Fredericksburg get bragging rights on the mats of algae.

They also own a piece of a new, troubling drawdown pattern in groundwater. After the 2015 flood, the Pedernales River took several months to go back down to single-digit flows. Now, the river goes back to 1.4 CFS in a month’s time. This isn’t due only to the wineries and venues drilling multiple shallow wells along the banks of the Pedernales River, which they can legally do. Or to the countless exurban ranchettes of 5, 10, or 20 acres (like the one I live on, where the well is nearly 400 feet deep and vigorous recharge happens, as evidenced by the turbidity in my well water, even at that depth, after heavy rains). More time does not have to pass for us to tell how many “straws in the ground” will dry up wells. It’s already happening.

The data shows us the abrupt dwindling of Pedernales flows even after flood events, comparative to the years following the 2015 flood event and that year’s El Niño fall and winter (our last), are due to a lack of winter rainfall and sufficient groundwater recharge.

The Recharge Dream Scenario

The dream scenario for double-digit CFS stream flows through the Middle of Damn Summer: “super” El Niño winter. Mild, rainy cold front stacks on mild, misty cold front, for months. Soft, small-dropping rains and mists patter for days on end upon the rocky land, seeping relentlessly into every fissure and crack of the rocky landscape, soaking and saturating caliche pockets, causing the rivers and streams to flow continuously over faulted recharge zones.

With no La Niña event to ruin the party, the Pedernales River’s flows clear and cool through the next summer, with a solid, wet spring and steady, helpful autumn rains. The following year, the weather, returning to neutral, offers an extremely wet fall, with massive October floods on the Pedernales and Llano. Then, another neutral year or two, and we would have classic, all-time flows, preferably for the entire Hill Country.

Recent History

The 2015-2018 weather pattern was just like our dream scenario above, but by 2019, a hot, dry summer started to dry everything up. The 2020 winter was a La Niña winter, like the one we just came out of in winter, 2025-26: warmer and drier.

The summer of 2021, when I was up north with my family running the Box R Ranch outdoor recreation program near Pinedale, Wyoming, it was a normal summer with steady rainfall. I remember having to pay a guy to mow my lawn in Johnson City because my mother-in-law, who was house sitting, would call to tell me it was getting overgrown every few weeks.

A Canary in the Middle Trinity Aquifer Coalmine

By 2022 we were in severe drought, one of the hottest summers on record. Jacob’s Well, a canary in the Middle Trinity Aquifer coalmine that developers are in fact mining (according to geologists, it has a miniscule recharge rate and is essentially, like the Ogallala Aquifer, an ancient water source that is being mined, with no real recovery expected in our lifetimes). By 2023 well and aquifer levels had dropped drastically. We had a moderate recovery with spring rains in 2024, but late summer was dry.

So here we stand today: a super El Niño event is lining up for the fall of 2026, dropping us into a wetter summer pattern marked by these sudden June and July floods.

The coming winter and spring will tell the real story. I am keenly interested in how flows out of Jacob’s Well respond. Can a powerful El Niño winter revive it a little? Historically, the answer is ‘yes.’ But I suspect the long-term data will show that Jacob’s well and the Middle Trinity Aquifer will remain in a world of hurt.

But we can explore those dark waters another time.

I’ll see y’all out there. -Ben

Five years ago, I landed a book deal—my first and only in a half-century of wanting to be a writer. I secured it through a friend, who had published an award-winning fly-fishing guide to the Austin area. Now we were going to do a series! A few other guys and myself were going to write up various areas, and I was assigned the beautiful Texas Hill Country.

Inauspiciously, the first summer of the project, I got a dream job managing the outdoor recreation program of an old dude ranch near Pinedale, Wyoming, which took me away from Texas from May of 2021 through the end of August, guiding private fly fishing and teaching people how to shoot. That started me on the project on my back foot, but I was soon hard at work.

The author, teaching rifle safety and marksmanship at the Box R Ranch, Cora, Wyoming, summer 2021.

I had fished the Hill Country pretty thoroughly before the book project, but nothing like the full-time job I worked in doing so for the next two-and-a-half years. I fished an area the size of Maryland, pushing out nearly every morning from Johnson City to fish everything from the little creek under the Espada aqueduct in south San Antonio to Pecan Bayou south of Brownwood, and out to beautiful Haby’s Crossing on the Nueces a little way north of Uvalde.

I pored over my big and much beloved DeLorme Atlas & Gazetteer Texas road atlas and Google Earth. Sometime during the project I went all in with OnX’s Elite tier, wrestling with issues like legal access. I fished every accessible reach and stem and tributary of public water on the San Antonio River through San Antonio proper, the Medina, Nueces, Frio, Sabinal, upper Guadalupe, Pedernales, Llano, Colorado, and San Saba I could legally access. I fished a lot of spots a lot more than once.

But as I worked on it, I began to have misgivings. This was a hot-spotting project at its core. It was a guidebook—with coordinates—to the entire treasure chest of public Hill Country water. The idea of giving out literal, precise coordinates to every low-water crossing and public access to the entire Texas Hill Country did not immediately strike me as bad, or even unethical when I started the project.

Somewhere in the Texas Hill Country. Photo by Ben.

Talking to fly fishing friends of mine, a few were blunt about the ethical difficulties hot spotting the entire Hill Country presented. At the time I had some of these conversations, however, I was so fired up about legal access and wealthy land-owners blocking a lot of it that I thought I’d be contributing to the opening up of some of our statutorily protected waterways, so I shrugged it off at first.

Then, the project got really difficult. I missed a lot of deadlines. The project was ENORMOUS). I kept having to push submission deadlines back, delaying the book a full year. A lot of the local color I had written in was edited out, leaving a really boring fly-fishing road atlas that I just couldn’t be proud of bearing my name. My book was nothing at all like the book my buddy had published and won awards with. I wasn’t looking for awards, but I couldn’t be happy with the edits that had sucked all the flavors out of the book.

By the time the economic considerations caught up with me and I needed to go back to work teaching school (I got a job at Llano High School teaching history), I had pulled out of the project.

I was devastated. I had a lot riding on that book. I felt diminished in front of everyone who had cheered me on, not least my children and my wife. But I felt, in the end, it had been a principled stand against pouring years of my life researching, exploring, and having the time of my life out for an anonymous public, counting on everyone to do the right thing by these rivers and streams.

As one friend framed it, how could I be sure bow-fishing enthusiasts wouldn’t use my book to find more access to carp? The idea makes me queasy!

So I want to reassure readers: Old Republic Journal will not be intentionally hot spotting any of the waters we fish. More often than not, I’ll let you know what river, and maybe even what part of a river I am fishing, and how things are going. But I will not be giving out coordinates, secret honey holes, etc. You’ll have to earn those yourself.

I put in hours and bloody hours of really tough research, got into conflicts with landowners, spent a small fortune on fuel and local restaurant fare, and so should y’all. While I trust readers to do the right thing, the internet is an open page lying out on the table for everyone to see.

Like the land rushes of old, where everyone pored over a map to find the best places to live their lives or dig their gold, AI programs scrape the digital landscape, leaving precious little that is special and exclusive anymore.

I’ll do my best to keep every bit of water I report on somewhat of a mystery, so other folks can choose their own explorations and exploits with a fly rod.

We’ll see ya out there!

-Ben

On a hot afternoon in late summer four years ago, I eased the huge, silver Ram heavy duty diesel pickup (the War Elephant) along one of those “private—no river access” roads. It’s a caliche road used by about a dozen people too many for the sign to be enforceable in reality, leading to my favorite parking spot under some overhanging Live Oak shade branches alongside the Pedernales River.

I was only so bold because, during previous fishing outings at the spot, the occasional stranger driving by invariably waved and smiled at me. Had I been wearing long rayon-polyester basketball shorts, a Jimmy Buffett Cheeseburgers in Paradise tank-top stained by blood-bait and gas station pizza sauce—rigging a leader with three treble hooks instead of assembling a Scott 4WT—I wouldn’t have been so fortunate. Sometimes even the fly rod doesn’t prevent that thing we all hate—the angry Nearby Neighbor slowing down and rolling down the window to ‘talk.’ But that’s another story for another day.

To my utter shock and dismay, a cursory drive over the concrete bridge revealed no water whatsoever. All that remained was sun-bleached algae clinging to darker dolomitic limestone rocks like a river’s farmer tan. I couldn’t help but study the dry bottom of the river I’d once scanned only through a nice layer of luminous, moving green water. I noticed the way the rocks sloped down in a serration, running uniformly to the southeast regardless of which direction the waterway turned. I was fascinated but horrified. Before this, I had assumed the Pedernales was spring-fed enough to be fishable in all conditions, at all reaches, all the time—the way the South Llano and the main stem of the Llano River have been so far.

A faulted recharge reach of the Pedernales River, August 2022. Photo by Ben Christensen

I have enjoyed a little more than 13.5 years living in and fly fishing the Texas Hill Country. Congratulations to me: that translates to almost one entire drought/non-drought duration cycle.

This is more exciting for me than you might think. I am a weather nerd. I got that way by studying under Dr. Jim Norwine, professor emeritus at Texas A&M University, Kingsville, who has lent important contributions to understanding regional variability of El Nino in Texas. It’s no overstatement to say he is the lead figure-outer of how reversals in the cross-Pacific winds off the coast of Colombia, Ecuador, and Chile impact the dry-wet seesaw we call “hard times and good times” in Texas. Norwine and his peers in academia, of course, refer to it as the “El Niño-Southern Oscillation,” or ENSO.

Norwine is a classic professor type. As I remember, his clothes were shockingly wrinkled, even to my 17-year-old dorm-dwelling self. I recall something of an underbite, a mad academic wildness in his eyes, a lower lip that hung down when he spoke, and a habit drifting into somewhat extreme tangents. He tended frequently to murmur-laugh after his words tapered off, recalling something he thought was funny that only he seemed to be in on, like a crazy man. He was my first exposure to a True Academic, and I will always be exceedingly fond of the courses I took with him.

Dr. James Norwine, Texas A&M University, Kingsville. University Photo.

The man is sharp. With me at least, he had the unyielding talent necessary to keep an almost non-functioning hyperactive youth—to whom classroom boredom seemed to come rushing in immediately—completely engaged. I remember frantically taking notes for more than a full hour, developing my own college shorthand just to keep up with his meteorology lectures.

The following semester, in Norwine’s intro to climatology course, he had me carefully graphing out and projecting models of soil-moisture surplus and deficit using graph paper, a green map pencil, a red map pencil, and a big, slate-gray TI-84 calculator. For the first time in my life, I felt competent. I felt like I was understanding and computing deep scientific and mathematic processes, (even if they were actually quite basic).

But it was mostly long-form work, sort of like a 14-year dry-wet Texas precipitation cycle.

If you want to understand Texas climate fluctuations, you must understand El Niño/Southern Oscillations. Most basically, an El Niño weather event typically results in a much wetter, milder winter for Texas. If it isn’t rudely interrupted by the reversal of the pattern that scientists jokingly named “La Niña,” it will continue into a wetter summer pattern as well, resulting in above-average rainfall. Typically.

El Niño refers to the Christ child, whose birth (you may be aware) is celebrated on December 25, right around the winds these winds typically begin to slacken and reverse, spelling temporary disaster for South American Pacific fishing (my Ecuadorean father-in-law is one of them). As long as the trade winds blow westward, causing a rich upwelling of cold, nutrient-dense water to circulate from deep in the eastern Pacific, the fishing is good. That is a neutral year. An El Niño pattern undoes that: slackening the normal winds and sometimes reversing wind direction in the Southern Pacific, causing upwelling to cease.

A La Niña event, on the other hand, is a major boon for South American commercial fisheries, because it’s a forceful trade-wind pattern that makes that nutrient-rich upwelling even more intense. For Texas, the misfortune of South American fisheries usually translates to ample rainfall for agriculture, surface water collection, and us—fly anglers and our beautiful streams.

While it’s helpful to remember “El Niño wetter, La Niña dryer, neutral normal,” as a rule of thumb, there is massive variability. Like a Mandelbrot set—those old Chaos Theory fractal models—there are swirls within swirls, branches splitting, things spinning off to do their own thing, and variables ricocheting off other variables.

For instance, Norwine helped pioneer the idea that the way moisture is retained in the soil can influence, prolong, or truncate regional drought—a process known as soil moisture-precipitation feedback. That’s what he had us modeling with map pencils. That’s where you go deep down the research hole and things get dark, because manmade modifications to the landscape are generally deleterious to rainfall and groundwater retention, accelerating climatological degradation.

And that’s not even getting to the effects of the unfathomable amounts of carbon dioxide the Chinese have pumped into the atmosphere over the past couple of decades with their concrete clinker kilns for several behemoth dam projects.

I will talk about groundwater degradation and Texas Hill Country land development in a later article, but Dr. Norwine’s work taught us that what you do to the earth redounds into the clouds and rainfall patterns. I remember being struck by his introduction of the idea of urban “heat island” effect and how it alters regional weather. Again—for another day.

For now, I want to sit in silent optimism. Climate modelers are anticipating a very strong “super” El Niño for winter 2026-2027. The implications are nothing short of potential aquifer recharge and river replenishment. I have tolerated enough days of single-digit cubic-feet-per-second (CFS) discharges in the Pedernales River since late 2021; I could use some steady chuggin’ 20-something CFS at least. As it is, a good rain puts us up to around 8,000 CFS on the Pedernales, followed by a sharp drop back to single digits in about 9 weeks if no more noteworthy rainfall occurs. The curve down used to be a more gradual slope, but times have changed.

If you want a quick snapshot of the health of Texas Hill Country streams without navigating the U.S. Geological Survey’s dashboards, a good hack is to check the U.S. Drought Monitor Map. From there, look at the individual lake levels for Canyon Lake (Guadalupe River), Medina Lake (Medina River), and Lake Buchanan (pronounced ‘Buh-CANNON’—I know, it offends my ears too) for the Colorado River Basin, which includes the longest Texas-only river, the Colorado, as well as the Llano River.

As of July 7, 2026, the southeastern swath of my home turf in Blanco County in moderate drought, and my homestead above the Pedernales (no direct access, sorry) is categorized as ‘abnormally dry,’ even after some outstanding May and June rainfall. West of us in Gillespie County, there is no drought, and the same goes for Kimble and Kerr counties, where the Llano and Guadalupe play.

Canyon Lake is 61.1% full, which is a good, sound number for late July, especially when anticipating a super El Nino event and a wet winter ahead. Lake Medina is 9.0% full, the highest it’s been since late August 2022. Recent rainfall brought that notorious leaky, evaporative bad idea of a lake back up to its current level only about a month ago. Buchanan is sittin’ pretty at 99.3% full.

However, for the next edition of Fly Fishing the Texas Hill Country in the Middle of Damn Summer, we will look at how sharply these water bodies draw down from otherwise robust volumes.

And that mile-long stretch of dry riverbed on that day I got river-skunked? I’m a geology nerd too, so I knew it was a faulted recharge zone, with the water simply flowing underground somewhere. I climbed back into the War Elephant and headed upriver to McDougall’s Crossing near Stonewall and fished the slimy algal pools at the low-water crossing. I don’t remember the fish I caught, but I never get skunked on the Pedernales. It’s not braggin’ if it’s true. We’ll see ya out there. -Ben

To commemorate America’s 250^th birthday yesterday morning, I fished the Pedernales. Caught four Guadalupe bass (tooth-patch on the tongue), and at least twice as many panfish, and it was as exhilarating as ever. Get on it!

I am a fly angler, like my maternal grandfather and great-uncles and great-grandfather were. The Levings men were Yankees, Minnesota and Wisconsin born and raised. North woods, Cloquet and Superior—muskeg country. Not the broad sunlit uplands of the southern reaches of those states.

That’s wild rice and Boundary Waters country. Birchbark canoe and Menominee and French ancestors’ country. But the Levings name was first spelled the -ings way by a clerk writing down my 9^th great-grandfather, Noah Levens’s name on a New Hampshire militia roster in 1779.

Noah enlisted in Walpole, New Hampshire, and was an ardent Patriot. He was the great-great-grandson of a Puritan named Charles Levins, who settled Roxbury, Massachusetts in 1631, and still lies buried there with a tombstone above his grave.

A memorial plaque in the town square of Walpole, New Hampshire, I visited last summer.

This very day, we celebrate 250 years of our American Republic. Having been born in 1976, I just celebrated my own 50^th. I know the history deeply and well; I have plumbed the depths of the Federalist Papers and Washington’s brilliant military strategy, with Franklin and Adams and Jefferson in Paris getting the French on board with the cause. It was a dastardly and wild plan that should never have succeeded.

But it did. And we should all be glad it did.

I celebrate this country that has nurtured my existence. I used to be conflicted about having served overseas in a rather imperialistic role, reminiscent of the British themselves, and as an infantryman to boot!

But when I read Thucydides’ wonderful account of the Peloponnesian Wars (or a translation of it), I realized the inevitability of some nation or other fulfilling the role of a hegemon. Someone always plays the leader of a regional empire, and, if not Athens, Rome, Spain, Britain, or the United States, then a despotic Persia, Carthage, Napoleonic France, or Prussia would have been happy to do so. China would be happy to do so now.

But I digress. I would be remiss not to urge everyone to the most ardent patriotism, whether discerned after reading a lot of history, or merely jingoistic. Regardless of the cause for your patriotism, I hope the result is efficacious: civic duty in the forms of military service, regular voting, and speaking up at local government meetings about things we care about. Writing our representatives in congress about thoughtless expansion of data centers and energy infrastructure without addressing the underlying consumption problem.

We’ll see ya out there. -Ben

If you’re reading this, you may know me from our community over on Instagram at @pearlsnapflyfishing.

For a few years now, we’ve relied on Instagram to share our experiences, when we had time. But the algorithms aren’t enough. We all know they favor quick trends over deep engagement—noise over signal.

Old Republic Fly is an intentional step up from that model. This is our new, independent, direct-to-inbox home for the dedicated fly angler. I’ll say it out loud right here: I want to share some stories with y’all, not just a few photos or very short video snippets. I started out as a journalist in the late 1990s, and I believe long-form narrative beats a 14-second snippet any day. Especially when it comes to connecting us to one another. We still like the idea of keeping folks updated via select socials. We just think it’s time to write and create longer and more in-depth and more meaningful stories. Actual stories, not just a picture or video snip telegram.

What You Can Expect From Old Republic Fly:

• Deep-Dive Technical Content: Real strategies for all kinds of fly fishing: warm water, cold water, and saltwater. Things like rigging for coastal winds and warm-water entomology. Where to catch snook in the mangroves in Texas waters, and when you should try. But also, why you should try.

• Unfiltered Field Notes: Honest gear reviews? Mmmmmaybe. But definitely our thoughts on ethics, conservation, and advocacy. Stream notes, too.

• Exclusive Resources: Downloadable packing checklists, stream guides, fly recipes, and member-only resources designed to help you spend more productive time on the water.

This platform belongs to the community we’ve already begun building. We hate spam as much as y’all do, and we’re trying to build a little distance from the algos. I just want to tell y’all some stories. If you value independent angling media and want to join us for the long haul—or double haul, as it were—drop your email below to subscribe. Thank you very much.

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