San Angelo & the Concho Valley

A show cave on a Sutton County ranch, opened in 1960 by cavers who wanted to stop the damage, and dense with helictites that grow sideways in every direction.

A 7,677-acre park around O.C. Fisher Reservoir on the edge of San Angelo, where four Texas landscapes meet and the state's official longhorn herd grazes beside a bison paddock.

Four miles of lit trails along the North Concho through downtown San Angelo, rebuilt after voters taxed themselves in 2004, with gardens, sculpture, a river stage and stocked trout.

Three floors of ranch-country history in Ozona, the only town in Crockett County, housed in a burned-out 1926 church rebuilt as a hospital and courthouse annex.

The stone post at the forks of the Concho, headquarters of the Tenth Cavalry from 1875 to 1882, saved by a woman with a museum and now a city-run landmark of 23 original buildings.

An 1855 post on Live Oak Creek above the Pecos, on the lower road to El Paso, where the army's camels passed three times and Buffalo Soldiers held off an attack in 1867.

The post Sherman called the prettiest in Texas, home to soldiers of all four Buffalo Soldier regiments and then to a town that lived in its buildings until 1973.

The upstairs rooms on Concho Avenue where a brothel ran from 1902 until the Texas Rangers closed it in 1952, shown on short guided tours with most of the furnishings original.

The ruins of the largest Spanish presidio in Texas, built in 1757 to guard a mission to the Lipan Apache, where the Comanche and their allies first turned back Spain's frontier.

A free art museum on the Concho beside Fort Concho, founded in the fort's 1868 quartermaster building and known nationally for its biennial ceramics competition.