Lake Meredith National Recreation Area, Fritch TX
Overcast Afternoon at Blue West, Lake Meredith, Fritch TX, May 11, 2012
Lake Meredith National Recreation Area is located on the shores of a Canadian River Reservoir near Fritch TX north of Amarillo TX.
Lake Meredith National Recreation Area, Fritch TX
- Verizon cell phone and broadband service - good signal and reasonable connection speeds.
- Go to the Lake Meredith National Recreation Area website
- Locate Lake Meredith National Recreation Area on my Night Camps map
- Check the weather here
Nights I've camped here
- Saturday, May 12, 2012 - Lake Meredith National Recreation Area, Fritch TX
- Lake Meredith is nearly dry, and has been for years. The Canadian River drainage seems to be suffering a severe drought. Ute Lake, where I camped before coming here, is also a reservoir on the Canadian and it too is nearly dry. Image: Camped at Blue West, Lake Meredith National Recreation Area, Fritch TX, May 11, 2012.
- Friday, May 11, 2012 - Lake Meredith National Recreation Area, Fritch TX
- Image: Camped at Blue West, Lake Meredith National Recreation Area, Fritch TX, May 11, 2012.
Teosinte and the Improbability of Maize
The ancestors of wheat, rice, millet, and barley look like their domesticated descendants; because they are both edible and highly productive, one can easily imagine how the idea of planting them for food came up. Maize can't reproduce itself, because its kernals are securely wrapped in the husk, so Indians must have developed it from some other species. But there are no wild species that resemble maize. Its closest genetic relative is a mountain grass called teosinte that looks strikingly different - for one thing, it "ears" are smaller than baby corn served in Chinese restaurants. No one eats teosinte, because it produces too little grain to be worth harvesting. In creating modern maize from this unpromising plant, Indians performed a feat so improbable that archaeologists and biologists have argued for decades over how it was achieved. Coupled with squash, beans, and avocados, maize provided Mesoamerica with a balanced diet, one arguably more nutritious than its Middle Eastern or Asian equivalent.