In 1541 the explorer Coronado sent a letter to the King of Spain, which said in part “I reached some plains so vast that I did not find their limit anywhere I went...with no more landmarks than if we had been swallowed up by the sea...there was not a stone nor bit of rising ground nor a tree nor a shrub nor anything to go by.” In 1852, U.S. Army Captain Randolph Marcy, exploring the headwaters of the Canadian and Red Rivers, echoed Coronado, writing “It is a great American desert...much elevated...very smooth and level...without a tree, shrub ...to intercept the vision...the almost total absence of water causes all animals to shun it: even the Indians do not venture to cross it except at two or three places.” In 1972, we were living in Oxford, England, where my husband was a visiting fellow. One afternoon in early July we were playing croquet with friends on the college grounds when a phone call came from a man named Bob Colmer, who was chairman of the English Department at Texas Tech, asking if Jeffrey might be interested in joining the department. While my husband knew of the existence of Tech, neither of us knew anything about Lubbock, other than it was somewhere in west Texas. An English friend, whose field of study was American History, explained that Lubbock was in the middle of the Llano Estacado, or Staked Plains; an area so desolate that even the Indians wouldn’t live there, and urged us not to go. A year later, pulling a small U-Haul trailer with a Volkswagen Beatle up the Caprock escarpment, we made a left hand turn in Amarillo and headed for Lubbock and our new home.
The Llano Estacado, which covers 37,500 miles, an area larger than New England, is one of the largest tablelands on the North American continent. It is a high mesa or plateau, ranging in altitude from 5,000 ft to 3,000 ft, sloping at a rate of ten ft per mile from the northwest to southeast. It covers 33 Texas counties and its area north to south is from Amarillo to Midland-Odessa, and west to east from four counties in far eastern New Mexico to the Caprock escarpment. The bedrock of the area is a hard caliche layer formed when surface drying caused calcium carbonate-laden water to rise by capillary action, where it evaporated, leaving the minerals to cement the otherwise fairly loose sandy sediment. The Llano is semi-arid, with an average annual precipitation of 18 to 20 inches. Because of the prevailing hot, dry, southwest winds and average mid-summer temperatures above 85 degrees, much of the precipitation is lost to surface evaporation. While there are numerous playa lakes, the high mineral content of their water means that there is almost no useable surface water for irrigation. All of the water which makes agriculture possible in the region is mined from the Ogallala Aquifer and deep well fields, and is used much more rapidly than it is replenished. Because of the nature of the deep geological formations at the northern part of the Llano, snow melt from the Rockies is not available to recharge and thus sustain the Aquifer as a permanent water source.