A Hole in the Prairie

I had a rather uneventful weekend, so I decided to take a random adventure yesterday and visit a place I haven't laid eyes on since living out here. The interesting thing about the Llano Estacado is that it is home to one of the flattest counties in the United States, yet just 6 miles outside of Lubbock, the earth opens up and there's a big hole with water and subdivisions in it. Strange, huh?


Buffalo Springs Lake sits just a few miles southeast of the Lubbock "metro area" as the TV weatherman calls it. Some of you may have also heard me talk about Ransom Canyon which is just north of BSL. Both are canyons carved into the prairie that are home to several large scale lake homes (and some not-so large scale lake homes). The main difference between the two is that you can take boats to Buffalo Springs and you have to pay $5 to get it the gate. There was a really nice girl working there yesterday who told me I didn't have to pay when I said I would have to write a check (I never carry cash).

I went to church yesterday, went home, read some of North and South and then decided to go for a little hike in Lubbock's little not-so-Lubbock attraction. It's really odd, because one minute you're driving along on a flat terrain, you make a turn, and suddenly it's like your hundreds of miles away from Lubbock.


They were also having the Buffalo Springs Lake Half Ironman Triathlon yesterday - a 70.3 mile race of unimaginable human endurance. While the race had started at 6:30 a.m., people were still racing when I began my hike at 3:30 in the afternoon. I saw the finish line timer and it said 8 hours or something insane like that. I wanted to post some pictures from last year, but I wasn't allowed to save any of the images. I think they want you to buy them or something crazy like that. It's a shame, because I found a picture of a guy in the race who clicked his heels when he saw he was getting his picture taken.


So anyway, I went on about a 2-hour hike around the rim of the canyon. I was hoping to see something neat, but all I really saw were beaten down cactus, rocks and some white trash people out on the lake who were blasting tunes like "Killing Me Softly" by the Fugees, or "Nemphomaniac" by Jason Boland. Classy, huh?

So, unfortunately, I don't really have any cool looking pictures to post. It was a relatively uneventful hike, at which I was waiting for a rattlesnake to jump out at me at any point. Thankfully, I did not have such an encounter. If I had, I would've likely killed myself running away from it by falling off the edge of the canyon. The funny thing about that is if I had fallen off the edge of the canyon, it would've been into someone's back yard.