Armand Bayou & the Bay Area's Wild Edge

Wedged between the Johnson Space Center and the tank farms of the Bayport industrial belt lies one of the most improbable landscapes in Texas: thousands of acres of coastal prairie, hardwood forest, and slow tidal bayou, kept wild in the middle of a metropolitan area. Armand Bayou is the largest urban wilderness preserve in the country, and this drive traces its edges and its history — the prehistoric campsites left by the people who ate oysters here for centuries, the old churches and cemeteries of the farmers and rice growers who settled the bay area, and the coastal preserve that a handful of determined citizens fought to save from the bulldozers in the 1970s. It's a tour about the wild margin that survived at the seam of the space age, and about the deep human history that ran through this marsh long before any of it. Watch for alligators, roseate spoonbills, and the bison herd the preserve keeps to graze the restored prairie.