Camping with the animals at Fort Clark

When we were plotting our westward trek across Texas, we found an interesting campground at Fort Clark, right outside of Brackettville, Texas. We would have full-hook-ups at a fair price on land that was once a part of an old cavalry fort. Now this property is an interesting blend of old military buildings, nice old homes, rundown manufactured homes, and a campground. We were sold on the idea of staying for several days when we found out they were celebrating their annual Fort Clark Days. But we also found this unique place to be a good place to camp with the animals.

The bronze statue at the entrance is titled, "Empty Saddle" as a memorial to fallen cavalry soldiers.

It hasn't served in that capacity for 100 years. But as we sat in front of the old commisary for the Friday night dance, we had our backs to an active horse stable. You know you are in Texas when you are two-stepping to country music with the smell of horse manure in the air.

We saw a few horses at Fort Clark at the dance, but most of the animals were sighted from our motor home window. The first day we took a picture while sitting inside the motor home of an interesting mix of deer and birds.

The spotted animals are axis deer, an invasive species that originated from India. Originally brought to the United States to game ranches in 1932, some escaped into the wild and are thriving in Texas. We missed getting a picture of the older buck with a huge rack of antlers, but this little buck posed better.

We are used to fawns with spots to help them hide in the forest shadows, but this axis fawn will never lose its spots.

Another unique part of Fort Clark is the swimming pool. We arrived on a Thursday, when the weekly pool cleaning was taking place so it was closed. The process of completely draining it every week is easy because it is a spring-fed pool. On Thursdays the water that usually comes into the pool on a constant basis is diverted down the creek, along with the water in the pool that is pumped out. After the cleaning, the spring water is re-routed back into the pool to refill.

We were there on Thursday afternoon when it was refilling, and about one-third full. It won't take long to refill because Las Moras spring pumps out 12-14 million gallons of water per day. Because it comes directly from the spring, it is a constant 68 degrees. That sounds pretty good on a hot day in Texas.

This is the second largest spring-fed pool in Texas, so that means it is huge. Denisa is standing on one end, taking a picture of that tiny dot--that is Mark standing on the other end of the pool. This was still a military installation when the original pool was built in 1902. The commanding officer couldn't get official approval for the pool, so he came up with a plan. The "extra" concrete from a horse trough project was used for a swimming pool. So this is called the biggest horse trough in Texas. The current pool was built in 1939 as a WPA project.

Back at our campground, one of our neighbors sprinkled a generous circle of corn on the ground, and we had more animal visitors. The next day the axis deer didn't show up, but a whole herd of white-tail deer came to the feast.

Soon after, a flock of turkeys arrived. While the hens were busy eating the corn, the toms were strutting.

These two strutted and posed, and the deer backed away. We watched as the hens had their fill of corn, but these guys couldn't eat with their tails fanned out and their chests puffed up. When they finally deflated and started to eat, most of the corn was already gone.

We had a front row seat to all those animal sightings from our motor home parked in the campground. But if we wanted to go see even more animals, Fort Clark has miles of hiking/biking trails. The first evening we unloaded our bikes for a ride, when a brutal wind storm blew in. We had winds up to 60 miles per hour that rocked the motor home and even took roofs off homes in town. We were glad to see only toppled trash cans in our campground. We finally got to take that bike ride on the last evening that we were camping at Fort Clark.

Our bike ride took us through the trees and down to the river, where we spotted more deer. This is a unique campground, and we enjoyed camping with the animals at Fort Clark.