SAN JACINTO RIVER – The San Jacinto River rises at the San Jacinto Dam on the southern rim of Lake Houston in northeastern Harris County (at 29°55′ N, 95°08′ W) and flows southeast for twenty-eight miles to its mouth on Galveston Bay east of Houston (at 29°41′ N, 94°59′ W). Both Lake Houston, a 12,000 acre-feet municipal reservoir, and the river below it are formed by the confluence of the sixty-nine-mile-long East Fork and the ninety-mile-long West Fork of the San Jacinto rivers.
The source of the North Fork San Jacinto River is on San Jacinto Peak in the Mount San Jacinto State Game Preserve and Wilderness Area. The Pacific Crest National Scenic Trail crosses the upper river. Above its confluence with Fuller Mill Creek there is a picnic area, fishing access and a trail to lovely waterfalls. While there is no camping in the river corridor, there are four campgrounds nearby.
The river supports habitat for many at-risk species, including mountain yellow-legged frogs, California spotted owls, the rubber boa and the San Bernardino flying squirrel.
The San Jacinto River drains an area of 3,976 square miles with almost two million acre-feet of runoff. Nearly level terrain is surfaced by clay and sand that support loblolly pine-sweetgum, loblolly pine-shortleaf pine, water oak-elm, pecan-elm, and willow oak-blackgum woods along the river’s bank. The Houston Ship Channel, built in 1914 to link the Port of Houston with Galveston Bay and the Gulf of Mexico, runs through Buffalo Bayou and the lower course of the San Jacinto River. The river proper is navigable for about twenty miles above its mouth. Commercial shipping traffic in the main channel renders it unsuitable for recreational purposes, but nine-mile-long Lake Houston, a multiple-use reservoir constructed in 1953, is a major recreational facility. A number of suburban communities and industrial towns cluster along the river and have exhibited considerable, even dramatic, growth, much of it stimulated by the opening of the ship channel.
Lying in a zone of perennial dispute between rival Spanish and French colonial empires, the San Jacinto River has had a lengthy history. By the early eighteenth century French traders from New Orleans had infiltrated the largely unexplored Spanish territory west of the Mississippi River as far as the San Jacinto, where they engaged in a lively commerce with the local Indians known as Orcoquiza. The San Jacinto was probably the river called the Aranzazu by Capt. Joaquín Orobio y Basterra, commandant of the Spanish garrison at La Bahía, who first explored the region for the governor of the Province of Texas in 1746. Between 1751 and 1772 priests from Nuestra Señora de la Luz del Orcoquisac Mission and the San Augustín de Ahumada Presidio near the mouth of the Trinity River widely explored this section of the Texas coast.
from New Hotel Travel http://ift.tt/1Wl1eU7
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