Alongside the Clovis Highway and underneath Loop 289 on the northern edge of Lubbock, is a 336-acre archaeological and natural history preserve.
Lubbock Lake Landmark is a National Historic Landmark, a State Archeological Landmark, and an item on the National Register of Historic Places. It is run by the Museum of Texas Tech University and operates with the goal of understanding what the Southern High Plains looked like before European settlement came to the region, while not disturbing archeological evidence of human life from almost 12,000 years ago.
The archeological importance of the land was discovered in 1936, when the city tried to rejuvenate the underground springs.
For a time, land was a joint venture between the City of Lubbock, Texas Parks and Wildlife and the Museum of Texas Tech.
Sterling Trevey is the historic maintenance supervisor at the Lubbock Lake Landmark. He said that in the 1970s and ‘80s, the city allowed folks to drive ATVs on the land, so when he arrived in 2000 there were many white trails with no growth.
As of 1998, when he graduated, less than 2% of Lubbock County was “intact native rangeland,” and the Landmark is part of that number.
Trevey has witnessed 25 years of growth and progress toward the goal of recreating the land before settlement. One difference, he noted, is that in accounts from early European settlers, they describe the land as a sea of grass. Looking at the Landmark now, especially after rainfall, there are a lot more flowers than they mentioned.
The difference is that now, there aren’t animals grazing the land.
“Historically, the plants are accurate,” he said. “But we are missing any type of large or small herbivores.”
There were, of course, prairie dogs feeding on the flowers, but also antelope and bison.
Today, the Landmark is still home to quail, doves, bees, butterflies, beetles, and a “stellar” population of the threatened Texas horned lizards, thanks to the large population of red harvester ants. The ants are a primary food source for the horny toads and they disperse native seeds across the landscape.
“We've had mule deer out here, coyote, gray fox, red fox. Wild Turkey occasionally,” Trevey said. “And being in the Yellow House draw system, we don't always have those species here permanently, but they migrate through.”
Since minimizing canopy and tree-cover as part of its conservation, Trevey said the land has flourished.
“Things that had been dormant in the soil for years finally had a chance to come out and start to thrive,” he explained. “Creation as a whole has kind of fixed itself.”
Some of the plants at Lubbock Lake Landmark are western wheatgrass, silverleaf nightshade, American basketflower, lemon horsemint, chocolate daisy, mesquite, yucca, and black willow.
The Landmark team has even reintroduced little leaf walnuts, which were recovered in the archeological record of the land.
“That's just listing a few,” Trevey said. “We've got everything from short grass to mid grass to a few of the native tall grass species, all four intact here, and those would be big bluestem, little bluestem, Indian grass, and switchgrass.”
With so many prolific plants, and no grazing, Landmark staff use prescribed fire to manage populations and encourage more diverse ecosystems of grasses and wildflowers. The team uses controlled burns on certain sections, 30 to 60 acres in a year.
These burns are also accurate to what the land would have experienced historically.
“We know that that happened,” Trevey explained. “Whether Native Americans intentionally did them, which we know that that was true. We also know that if man were not on this planet, just natural causes of dry lightning during times of drought and heat would ignite this prairie.”
Trevey recounted a time he thought the team might have made a mistake in managing the land.
In December 2010, the area had record-setting rainfall over the year, providing lots of fuel for a burn. But two weeks after burning about 80 acres, a haboob hit and Lubbock County entered one of its worst droughts. By the end of 2011, with only about three inches of rain over the year, he thought they killed it.
“Just bare ground on these 100-meter, foot-long transects, there's nothing,” he recalled. “Looked like the surface of the moon.”
They decided to hold off on reseeding, and see what the next year would do. And in 2012, the land surprised them.
“We could not believe what we had seen,” he said. “King of the short grass prairie, blue grama had dominated the upland, the wall, the margin and the axis of that burn site. And that just told me something about the resiliency of these native, native plants that have been here for thousands of years, they have evolved with this.”
The Landmark team works to control invasive species, though there’s no getting rid of them, and other plants that start to get out of hand. He said the work never ends.
“We don't want to create a landscape to where we feel we've gotten it to this climactic point and then walk away. That's one of the worst things we could do, actually,” he explained. “Plants are all competing, but you're going to start having what, what we would call more, maybe undesirables that are going to take root and they're going to take hold. So it's taking steps each year. We're just, we're just really following the land and doing what the land is telling us to do.”
He said that humans could not recreate the ecosystem on their own, without nature guiding them.
“You can't put a price tag on that at all,” he said.
The Landmark works with wildlife researchers whose goals align with their own and with archeological researchers, investigating and educating the public on the land’s history. Staff with the Landmark believe they have recovered less than 5% of the total archeological material on the site.
As the Lubbock Lake Landmark works to recreate what nature looked like before settlement, nature itself may be shifting to more align with what the region experienced in that time.
Trevey said that black bear populations are moving toward the Panhandle from the Rocky Mountains and outward from Big Bend.
“And it’ll be interesting to see, in time, if they actually come together,” he mused.
While the bears might come back to the Panhandle eventually, and the Landmark staff have reestablished many native plants, one potential reintroduction has been a hot topic of discussion in Trevey’s time with Lubbock Lake Landmark: bison.
“It has been discussed a whole lot over 25 years,” he said. “We've even gone as far as going up to Caprock and talking with the herd manager there to see how is it that they get by with the liability of having that open to the public, which is very simple: they consider it wildlife.”
The main concern with having bison at the Landmark, is if they wander out of the boundary and onto Loop 289 or U.S. Route 84, and the solution is an expensive one.
“It would have to be a 100% sound, secured perimeter around the site to be able to do that,” Trevey said. “To me, anything is possible.”
Lubbock Lake Landmark welcomes guests year-round on its trails – totalling almost 5 miles – and to its exhibitions, during operating hours: Tuesday through Saturday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m.
From March through September, it also offers night hikes. You can find upcoming events and trail details on the Lubbock Lake Landmark’s website.
“You do not know what's lying literally just right outside the loop,” Trevey said.
Lubbock Lake Landmark is located at 2401 Landmark Drive.
