Texas’s Dying Swimming Holes | The New Yorker
On a typical day, at least twelve million gallons of water burble up from Las Moras Springs, more than enough to fill the million-gallon pool at Fort Clark, a former military post turned resort and retirement community in Brackettville, Texas. But last year, as drought seized much of the state, the springs slowed to a trickle, and then stopped flowing completely. For the first time in decades, the third-largest spring-fed pool in Texas sat empty. In 2019, Christina Bitter and her family had moved to Brackettville, two hours west of San Antonio, in part because they “fell in love with the pool,” she told me, swimming there so frequently that her daughter had “blossomed into this mermaid.” The first signs of trouble came the next year. Bitter had planned to celebrate her daughter’s sixth bi...
