Texas Hill Country?

The Texas Hill Country is a region of Central Texas, USA, that features rolling, somewhat rugged, hills that consist primarily of limestone.The Hill Country terrain can be seen in San Antonio’s northern suburbs and Austin’s western suburbs. The region is the eastern portion of the Edwards Plateau bounded by the Balcones Fault on the east and the Llano Uplift to the west and north. The terrain is punctuated by a large number of limestone rocks and boulders and a thin layer of topsoil which makes the region prone to flash flooding.

Several cities, including Austin, San Marcos, and New Braunfels were sited in the flat areas immediately to east of the Balcones Fault line where rivers flow across it, because of the limits of river navigation.

Due to its karst topography, the area also features a number of caves, such as Inner Space Caverns and Natural Bridge Caverns. The deeper caverns of the area form several aquifers which serve as a source of drinking water for the residents of the area.

It is largely drained by tributaries of the Colorado River (Texas), including the Llano and Pedernales rivers, which cross the region west to east and join the Colorado as it cuts across the region to the southeast, emerging from the hills west of Austin.

The area is also unique for its fusion of Spanish and Central European (German, Swiss, Austrian, Alsatian, and Czech) influences in food, beer, architecture, and music that form a distinctively “Texan” culture separate from the state’s Southern and Southwestern influences. For example, the accordion was popularized in Tejano music in the 19th Century due to cultural exposure to German settlers.

In recent years, the region has emerged as the center of the Texas wine industry.

he geography of Texas covers a wide and far reaching scope. Occupying about 7% of the total water and land area of the U.S.[1], it is the second largest state after Alaska, and is the southernmost part of the Great Plains, which ends in the south against the folded Sierra Madre Oriental of Mexico. Texas is in the south-central part of the United States of America, and is considered to form part of the U.S. South and also part of the U.S. Southwest.

The Rio Grande, Red River and Sabine River all provide natural state lines where Texas borders Oklahoma on the north, Louisiana and Arkansas on the east, and New Mexico and the Mexican states of Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León, and Tamaulipas to the south. Austin, the state capital, is farther south than all other US state capitals except Honolulu.

By residents, the state is generally divided into North Texas, East Texas, Central Texas, South Texas, and West Texas, but according to the Texas Almanac, Texas has four major physical regions: Gulf Coastal Plains, Interior Lowlands, Great Plains, and Basin and Range Province. This has been cited as the difference between human geography and physical geography, although the fact that Texas was granted (and retains to this day) the prerogative to divide into as many as five U.S. states may be a historical motive for Texans defining their state as containing exactly five regions.[3]

Some regions of Texas are associated with the South more than the Southwest (primarily East Texas and North Texas), while other regions share more similarities with the Southwest than the South (primarily West Texas and South Texas). Even the northwestern part of the state seems to have more in common with parts of the United States (Kansas and Nebraska) that are considered “midwestern” and never “southern”. The size of Texas prohibits easy categorization of the entire state wholly in any recognized region of the United States; geographic, economic, and even cultural diversity between regions of the state preclude treating Texas as a region in its own right.
, and Modified Marine are the three major climatic types of Texas, with no distinguishable boundaries. Modified Marine, or subtropical, dominates the majority of the state. Texas has an annual precipitation range from 60.57 inches (1,538.5 mm) in Jasper County, East Texas, to 9.43 inches (239.5 mm) in El Paso. The record high of 120 °F (49 °C) was reached at Seymour on Aug. 12, 1936, and Monahans on June 28, 1994. The low also ties at -23 °F (-31 °C) in Tulia on Feb. 12, 1899, and Seminole on Feb. 8, 1933.

Most of Texas is under direct threat from drought, heat, hail, high winds, flash floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes. Select areas occasionally suffer from dust storms, river floods, snow and ice. Amarillo has the highest average wind speed in Texas at 14.3 mph (23 km/h).
With 10 climatic regions, 14 soil regions, and 11 distinct ecological regions, classifing regions becomes problematic with differences in soils, topography, geology, rainfall, and plant and animal communities.[8] The geographic center of Texas is about 15 miles (24 km) northeast of Brady in northern McCulloch County. Guadalupe Peak, at 8,749 feet (2,667 m) above sea level is the highest point in Texas. The lowest being sea level where Texas meets the Gulf of Mexico.[9] Texas has five state forests and 120 state parks for a total over 605,000 acre (2,450 km²). There are 3,700 named streams and 15 major river systems flowing through 191,000 miles (307,385 km) of Texas. Eventually emptying into seven major estuaries, these rivers support over 212 reservoirs.

Texas is so large in its east-west expanse that El Paso, in the western corner of the state, is closer to San Diego, California than to Beaumont, near the Louisiana state line; Beaumont, in turn, is closer to Jacksonville, Florida than it is to El Paso. Also, Texarkana, in the northeastern corner of the state, is about the same distance from Chicago, Illinois as it is to El Paso. The north-south expanse is similarly impressive; Dalhart, in the northwestern corner of the state, is closer to the state capitals of Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Wyoming than it is to Austin, its own state capital.