This whole world'd be a barren waste
Without the taste of water, cool water
Every thing you'd see would be parched and dry
And souls would cry for water
Cool, clear, water
Keep a-movin', Spring, do your Salado thing
Nature's blessings bring
And quench the burning land with water
Look there, can ya see that big, green tree?
Where the water's runnin' free
And it's waitin' there for me and you?
Next to enchanted flow, you know that I will go
Can't resist the pull of water
Cool water
In evening or by dawn, where the little fishes spawn
And Nature plants her lawn by water
Water, water, water
Keep a-movin', Spring, do your Salado thing
Nature's blessings bring
And quench the burning land with water
Look there, can ya see that big, green tree?
Where the water's runnin' free
And it's waitin' there for me and you?
Cool, clear, water
Cool, clear, water
A gem of central Texas, the springs of Salado run clear and cool, showing Edwards Aquifer dynamics in action. Karstic limestone features vugs and voids, capillaries that move water as likely below/through ground as over it. Water appears and disappears throughout Central Texas, especially here on the edge of the Hill Country where the limestone uplift is sheered off by the Balcones Fault Zone, and opens onto the deep soils of the Blackland Pairie on down to the Gulf.
Here in Salado, many springs erupt from the limestone -- tinged with that peculiar shade of green that limestone saturated water gets.
Some of the springs are connected. According to local history (see full article Cave underneath Stagecoach Inn by Clay Coppedge below) it was great sport to drop apples in the spring cave under the Stagecoach Inn then go over to what is now Sirena's spring to watch them pop out again.
Even during the height of the drought, the springs kept running -- though the mermaid Sirena was high and greatly dry (see photo from April 2009). ((Note: in 2016 the statue was removed for repairs and has not -- as of 8/27/2016 -- been returned. Mention in your log if she reappears! (
visit link) ))
Perhaps the best thumbnail history dedicated to the importance of Salado's Spring water can be found on the Salado Creek historical marker (see also Waymark Code: WM8VD5):
Marker Number: 4493
STATE HISTORICAL SURVEY COMMITTEE TEXAS
* * *
SALADO CREEK
Gushing limestone springs, abundant fish, flowers, and trees have long made the banks of Salado Creek a good home site.
Indians camped beside stream; Spanish explorers named it; the first Anglo-American settler was Archibald Willingham, 1851.
College and town of Salado were built on creek, 1860. Stream once had 8 mills, thus was county industrial center. Chisholm Cattle Trail crossed it, as did Dallas-San Antonio Stage Line.
The 35-mile creek is one of many which rise at the Balcones Fault--an outstanding North American region of springs.
Recorded Texas Natural Landmark -- 1967
Further Reading ==============
Handbook of Texas Online (
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SALADO, TEXAS. Salado is a picturesque, historic village on Salado Creek just east of Interstate Highway 35 between Waco and Austin in southern Bell County. The clear, bubbling springs of the creek, which made it a favorite camping ground for Indians thousands of years before Spanish explorers arrived in Texas, have had much to do with the development of the area. Salado Creek was the first designated Texas natural landmark in 1966.
Temple Daily Telegram
Cave underneath Stagecoach Inn by Clay Coppedge
Published: July 30, 2007
(
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Steps lead down into a cave underneath the Stagecoach Inn in Salado. Rebekah Workman / TelegramSALADO - Of the more than 3,000 caves dotting the subterranean landscape of Texas are a few in which no one believes gold or other ill–gotten loot is hidden somewhere within.
The cave underneath the Stagecoach Inn in Salado is not one of those caves.
Ever since Frank and Jesse James and Sam Bass first made appearances around here in the middle of the 19th century, rumors have abounded, as rumors do, that there is gold in “them thar” caves.
If even a fraction of the rumors are true, the James brothers and Bass hid more loot than they ever could have possibly stolen.
So many legends and so much folklore have come out of the cave underneath the Stagecoach Inn that some people are skeptical about the existence of the cave at all, sort of like the smidgen of skepticism that surrounds the tunnels that run underneath the city of Temple.
The cave is there all right and it’s been there a long time. It’s not the cave it used to be - parts of it have been walled in at least once over the years and it is closed to the public due to safety concerns - but it’s typical of hundreds of Central Texas caves in the Edwards Aquifer.
The cave is a little waterlogged right now with maybe eight feet of standing water. That’s not a bad thing because that is how aquifers get recharged, and aquifers are responsible, directly or indirectly, for most of the water that we use.
John Anderson, CEO of the Stagecoach Inn and the Mill Creek golf course, showed the cave to an inquisitive reporter and photographer last week.
From the top of the old, slippery stone stairs that lead down into the cave he shined a flashlight on the floor of the underground chamber.
“Now you can see there’s definitely water down there,” he said. “I was showing this one time and stepped in water up to my knees. Twice. The water is so clear and so still that you usually can’t see it.”
The last dozen or so steps leading to the cave floor are covered with that clear spring water. In caves like these, surface runoff makes its way through fractures, sinkholes and sinking streams within the recharge zone. Because of that the Edwards Aquifer is considered an unconfined aquifer because water enters and exits freely.
This year, more water is entering these caves than is leaving. A lot more.
“Usually, if you’re standing on the floor, you have no sense of the roof of the cave directly above your head,” Anderson said. “Look at it now. It looks like there’s not even room to walk around down there.”
The cave has a spring, one of a series of springs along Salado Creek and its tributaries that are part of an underground stream.
One of the favorite pastimes of yore was dropping an apple in the cave’s spring and running to what they called Big Boiling Spring near where the Serena statue is now and watching the apple pop up at the top of that spring.
Generations of children fortunate enough to enjoy a mostly unstructured childhood, including former Lady Bird Johnson press secretary Liz Carpenter, have talked and written about using the cave as a playground.
Johnnie Gidley, 58, remembers taking FFA (Future Farmers of America) field trips to the cave in the early to mid–’60s.
“It went a lot farther back in those days,” he said. “You could only go so far because the water pooled up farther in.”
Other stories persist, too. Gunpowder for the Confederate Army was supposedly buried there during the Civil War. A hundred years later the cave is said to have been designated as a bomb shelter in case of a Russian nuclear attack. The cave would have to be a lot bigger than it is now to fulfill either of those purposes.
Which leads to an interesting question: How big was the cave before it was walled in?
The answer depends on whom you ask.
Anderson said a former maintenance director told him that he remembers a portion of the cave being filled in with dirt in the late 1970s. That jibes with Gidley’s recollection of exploring a much bigger cave there in the mid–’60s.
But Anderson said 92–year–old Wilbur Foster, a maintenance director at the Stagecoach for many years, remembers part of the cave being filled in some time in the late 1950s.
Both accounts could be right. Gidley’s recollections reflect other memories from the same era. And Foster probably knows more about the Stagecoach Inn than anybody else alive because he spent so many decades intimately acquainted with its inner and outer workings. Without knowing for sure, there is no reason to dispute any of those accounts.
One thing all accounts, both oral and written, share in common is that no one ever found any gold in the cave.
If the gold was ever there in the first place, which is doubtful, somebody found it and never told anybody, or it washed away in one of the periodic floods that occur on Salado Creek every few years.
Even the hope of finding buried gold in the cave has all but disappeared now, but the legends, stories and genuine memories of the place will endure for a long time to come.
Another article from the TD briefly references the cave in the artcicle: "Legends of famous guests, buried gold give Stagecoach Inn allure" by Harper Scott Clark Published: August 4, 2008 (
visit link) "Foster said guests at the inn would go in search of gold purportedly buried in a cave beneath the original Inn. “I had to build a little house over the entrance and lock it up,” he said. The cave containing a spring was discovered sometime after the civil war and was used as a source of drinking water for the hotel.
For Geologic Background, geocachers are encouraged to visit GC26DNK CTU – WATER FROM A STONE (Edwards Aquifer), quoted in part:
Particularly susceptible to “chemical weathering processes” (e.g. this rock dissolves in water), the Edwards Formation is, in a word, perforated. These holes vary from the microscopic to full-on cavern systems, and karst features are typical throughout the Formation.
More importantly to THIS site: all those holes create a network of pipes and straws, which water LOVES to travel THROUGH rather than over.
“The key to why the Edwards is a good aquifer lies in the fact that the limestone was exposed, extensively eroded, and then covered over again with new limestone formations. When the Edwards limestone was exposed, erosion created cavities and conduits and made the limestone unit capable of holding and transmitting water. When it was covered over again, the new sediments were relatively impermeable and formed a confining unit.” [Edwards Aquifer Website: (
visit link) ]
In other words, the Edwards Aquifer is like a Brillo™ pad between two plates. And where the edges of this rocky sandwich are exposed, say, by a creek canyon, the water leaks on out.
Again, quoting the Edwards Aquifer Website (
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“Because the movement of water in the Aquifer is highly complex, the waters we pump from the ground and drink are a mixture of waters of many different ages. In some places water moves only a few feet a day, but in other places water may move 1000 feet a day or more…. The average residence time for water in the aquifer is around 200 years, so much of the water that San Antonians drink today probably went underground around the time of the American Revolution.
“In all karst aquifers, most of the water storage occurs in the matrix, and most of the water movement occurs in conduits. In the Edwards, there are many large caverns, but one should not picture the underground reservoir as a vast pool. Rather, think of it as a saturated sponge with pipes. The rock matrix has many pore spaces similar to the holes in a sponge, and some of them are connected by well defined conduits through which water can readily flow. Pores that are not connected to other pores or to a conduit cannot provide much water. The measure of pores that are connected and can provide water is called effective porosity.
“Water enters the Aquifer easily in the