The bigtooth maples along the Sabinal — the relict trees that turn Lost Maples brilliant in fall, how to know them, and the narrow window of peak color.
Look at the trees crowding the canyon around you now, down along the water, and pick out the maples — because these are the stars of the whole show. The bigtooth maple, sometimes called the Uvalde bigtooth maple, and you can know it by that classic maple leaf: five lobes, like a spread hand, with big coarse teeth along the edges. In the green of summer they blend right in with the oaks and the walnuts and the cypress. But come the cool nights of late October and November, and they catch fire — turning gold, then orange, then a deep glowing red, canyon after canyon of them, reflected in the still green pools of the river. It is a genuinely breathtaking sight, and it draws people from hundreds of miles.
Here's the thing about maple color, though, and it's why folks watch the park's reports so anxiously each fall: it's fickle, and it's brief. The trees need just the right run of warm sunny days and cool crisp nights to turn their brightest, and a hard early freeze or a windstorm can strip them bare in a day. Peak color usually lands somewhere from late October into mid-November, but it shifts every year, and a great year and a poor year can be a week apart. When it's on, though — there's nothing else like it in Texas.
Reach up and feel a maple leaf between your fingers as you pass. These particular trees have a remarkable story — they are, in a real sense, refugees, stranded here far from home a very long time ago. Boone's been waiting to tell you exactly how. Keep walking up the river.
Photo: Wing-Chi Poon · CC BY-SA 2.5
