“The early Spaniards who visited this land called it ‘Llano Estacado,’ or the ‘Staked Plains.’ But nobody knows for sure exactly what they meant.”
Metz, Leon. A Roadside History of Texas, Mountain Press Publishing, Missoula, MT, 1994. Page 387.
I always imagined, purely from my aesthetics, that the term referred to the grand arroyos and cuts, the washes and gullies, the way the water – at one time – cut and coursed through the sediments. Then again, maybe not.
“Nine thousand years before the rise of the Roman Empire, humans worked and lived on the Llano.”
Metz, Leon. A Roadside History of Texas, Mountain Press Publishing, Missoula, MT, 1994. Page 388.
Clovis Point? Clovis Points (named for Clovis, NM).
Yeah, my best recollections were classic rock, classic “art” rock, or “prog” rock, while navigating a tiny Hybrid vehicle back from Colorado in the late summer (Texas) or early fall (Colorado). At sunset, I was in the canyon lands, the deep arroyos and gullies that mark the eastern edge of the “staked” plains. The deep cuts and furrows revealed the purple and red earth, ochre and orange, set against the long shadows of a late summer sun, low in the sky behind me, as I chased the ribbon of a highway east. Homeward bound. For some reason that music effectively worked with the visual background, enhanced the colors. Mountains gave way to plains, and plains stretched out – it’s, like, 6 hours of nothing of note between Amarillo, Lubbock and the rest of (Eastern) civilization.