My muscles shake as I climb up the inside of a seemingly endless vertical tunnel, stopping at platforms along the way to catch my breath. Alongside a handful of companions from Invenergy and a photographer, I make my way up a 300-foot wind turbine near the West Texas town of Stanton. On this 2019 trip, we’re led by Jake Thompson, manager of the clean energy company’s wind farm.

On 100 acres of land outside Temple, an agricultural revolution is underway. And it doesn’t require a tractor, a plow, or even a shovel. Last summer, Revol Greens, the largest lettuce greenhouse grower in North America, opened a sprawling 20-acre facility in the Central Texas town that can produce as much as 24,000 pounds of lettuce a day. To put that into perspective, that is almost the equivalent of how much lettuce can grow on 1 acre of traditional farmland in an entire year.

As Texans got a front-row seat to a magnificent total solar eclipse this month, interest in astronomy has reached a record high. But stargazing in this state is fantastic all the time, not just during eclipses. You only need to travel just outside of the state’s major metropolitan areas, where pitch black night skies are punctuated with swirls of galaxies and planets, to experience some of the best stargazing around. These resorts, motels, and dude ranches are the perfect places to stay if you are a budding astronomer—or have one in the family.

Ask a Texan if they know where La Grange is and they’ll probably tell you one of two things: “I’ve driven past there,” or “Like the ZZ Top song?” Yes, La Grange’s claim to fame is the Chicken Ranch, the famed brothel with “a lotta nice girls,” as ZZ Top mumbles in the song that shares the town’s name—the same brothel that the movie The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas is based on. But the town has a rich history beyond the Chicken Ranch. Its growth was fueled by an influx of Czech and German immigrants in the mid-1800s, many of whose descendants still reside in the area. The Fayette County Courthouse looms over the town square, which is lined with restaurants and boutiques perfect for picking up tchotchkes. Over the past decade, La Grange’s new businesses have proven the small town is more than just a place to pass through on a drive between Austin and Houston. It’s well worth stopping a night or two to experience what the community has to offer.

Just 18 miles west of Waco lies McGregor, a slow-paced suburb with a charming downtown area. This town of 5,300 people has hosted some of the region’s favorite personalities, such as former president George W. Bush, who has a ranch in nearby Crawford, and Chip and Joanna Gaines of Fixer Upper fame. The McGregor House, a Victorian home transformed into a vacation rental, was once featured on the TV show. (At the time it was a bed-and-breakfast called the Magnolia House.) It’s been a quiet town for most of its history, except for when it was home to a munitions factory during World War II. Then, in 2003, SpaceX began testing rocket engines at a facility just to the southwest, occasionally disturbing the peace in this sleepy town.

Like finely tuned hot rods, the models gleam in the brightly lit showroom. While their designs and styles are all different—some feature shiny chrome that sparkles under the recessed lighting and others bear sturdy black paint and brass accents—they’re all here to inspire and catch fire. But...

Nordean Nouiouat moved from Algeria to Texas 25 years ago hoping to give his family a better life. A father of five, Nouiouat has achieved what he set out to do, and is helping a new generation embrace their American, Texan, and Muslim identities. “This country—this state—has offered us so many possibilities. We must do our best for America and for Texas,” he says, standing at the entrance of the Islamic Center of Irving in March 2023.

The sweet, malty aroma of steamed rice greets you as soon as you hit the parking lot at SuTi Craft Distillery in Kennedale, about 10 miles southeast of Fort Worth. Following that buttery bouquet inside, you’ll find vintage memorabilia that evokes a bygone era: a rotary phone, a hand-crank phonograph, and an Akai reel-to-reel tape recorder warbling doleful Vietnamese blues from the 1960s. Beyond the public tasting room, in the 2,500-square-foot warehouse, co-owner and brewer Suy Dinh stands atop a ladder perched over a fermentation tank where he monitors the conversion of rice into the niche liquor of his homeland. In addition to those tanks, his tools include a still and a mash tun, the equivalent of a humongous rice cooker capable of steaming 650 pounds of rice at a time.

I swore I wasn’t going to buy anything at the Austin Record Convention, the biggest record sale and swap meet in North America. But while flipping through a bin of albums marked Willie Nelson in September, I saw a rarer-than-rare album that’s one of Willie’s most unusual: Danny Davis & Willie Nelson with The Nashville Brass. I ponied up 10 bucks. It wasn’t for me, it was for my friend John Spong, host of the One By Willie podcast.

Framed by the vastness of the Chihuahuan Desert, a lone man faces the camera. All around him, rough hills roll off into the distance. Clouds trail across an enormous sky, and mountain peaks decorate the horizon. “My name is Shaun Overton,” he says. He grins, then points to the barren ground at his feet. “And I’m turning this into a desert forest.”

A vacant lot just south of downtown Dallas is all that’s left of one of the most influential regional professional wrestling companies in America—the arguable birthplace of mainstream wrestling as we know it today. That lot once housed the iconic Sportatorium arena, long-since demolished. There, starting in the 1960s, wrestler and promoter Fritz Von Erich led what would become World Class Championship Wrestling and launched one of the sport’s most memorable dynasties, with five of his sons serving as the stars. The eldest of the group, Kevin Adkisson, aka World Wrestling Entertainment Hall of Famer Kevin Von Erich, spent week after week tossing people around the ring alongside his brothers. Kevin is the only Von Erich to outlive his father.

This interview was edited for brevity and clarity. In 2015, Zach Chance and Jonathan Clay, aka Americana-folk duo Jamestown Revival, were seeing their hard work pay off. They released their debut LP, Utah, and were performing at music festivals all over the country, including Coachella, Bumbershoot, Lollapalooza, and ACL Fest in Austin, their homebase. Then their manager threw them a curveball: Some people he knew were making a musical adaptation of S.E. Hinton’s coming-of-age novel The Outsiders, and they were looking for songwriters outside the usual Broadway-composer realm to pen the songs for it.

With so many people there—grandparents, great-grandmother, aunt, cousin, and three uncles—there was always something going on. Always someone yelling. Always an uncle to wrestle with. Always another uncle who’d jam dirty socks in my mouth when I tried to sleep. That always made them laugh. “A DORMIR!”...

Eli Halpern wandered the congested avenues of Bangkok with a growing hunger in his gut and a willingness to try anything. It was a humid night in 2012, and the visiting American martial artist traipsed between the mobile food peddlers and street stalls venting billowing clouds of wok smoke. Free from his lessons in Muay Thai, Halpern sidled up to one vendor and encountered his first edible creepy crawly. Served on a skewer, barbecued scorpion was mainly sold to gawking tourists as a gimmick-on-a-stick. Nonetheless, Halpern found the offering both delicious—he describes it as “a combination of fried chicken and a poached egg”—and full of promise.

When Beyoncé announced in a commercial during this year’s Super Bowl that a new album was dropping March 29, the Beyhive buzzed with excitement. Excitement peaked at the end of the ad, when suddenly the scene showed what looked like a West Texas desert landscape. As an old yellow taxi pulled away, its wheels kicking up dust, a country-tinged tune started playing. Then a billboard appeared with the words “Texas! Hold ‘Em” emblazoned in black letters above a reclining, bikini-clad, cowboy hat and boots-wearing cartoon Beyoncé. “This ain’t Texas. Ain’t no hold ‘em,” she sang. “Lay your cards down, down, down, down.” Fans in one collective gasp asked: Is Queen Bey putting out a country album?

Growing up in Mesquite, Jennie Blackwood Turnell remembers the city’s annual Rodeo Parade as being “a big deal.” Schools would cancel classes for the parade and students would receive free tickets to the rodeo. “When we were kids, we were either going to the parade or we were in it,” she says, adding she marched as a member of Mesquite High School’s band.

When in Houston, do as the astronauts do. That means investigate moon rocks, attend mission briefings, and see how you fill out a space suit. All that’s possible at the Johnson Space Center, which opened in November 1961 as the Manned Spacecraft Center and laid the groundwork for American space exploration. The campus in Clear Lake, built on 1,620 acres donated by Rice University, is a planet unto itself—its gravity pulls in more than 1.25 million visitors each year. While the astronauts are hard at work at this sprawling campus, visitors are invited to play: Trams run to the astronaut training facilities and Mission Control Center, where the launches for the Apollo mission and the International Space Station were coordinated. Space films are shown on one of the largest screens in Texas, and a new exhibit on Mars explores the next frontier. This previously unpublished photo by Texas Highways photographer Jack Lewis shows an awestruck youth getting an astronaut’s-eye view of the world. It’s a sight to behold—even from down here on planet Earth.

In the early 1990s, Nancy Wrenn drove her minivan around Tyler with the back seats pulled out to accommodate a 3D mock-up on a large plywood platform of what would eventually become the Discovery Science Place. The model demonstrated a vision for a place where children in the East Texas city could gain hands-on experience in the areas of science and math. This was more than 15 years before the Perot Museum of Nature and Science became a North Texas institution and nearly a decade before the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) curriculum was introduced on a national level. Wrenn took the prototype and her sales pitch to business owners and community leaders to secure funding for the building.

Photographer Kenny Braun was focused on shooting a different scene at The Nature Conservancy’s Independence Creek Preserve in May 2023 when he turned around and saw thousands of fireflies and stars over the creek. “It looked like some mystical scene out of a fairy tale,” he says. Located in Sheffield, the preserve is home to Independence Creek, which flows for 8 miles through the protected area and is typically open to visitors only one or two weekends a year. It likely won’t be open at all this summer due to a staff shortage, according to Dan Snodgrass, associate director of land conservation at The Nature Conservancy. But Texans should consider putting a visit to this preserve on their bucket list. As Snodgrass says, “The property boasts some of the most important cultural sites and aquatic and terrestrial habitat in West Texas.”

Along with a cover story heralding “the beauty of autumn with colorful late bloomers across the state,” the issue featured stories on the wildlife of the Woodland Trails of East Texas, a how-to on collecting and preparing Gulf oysters, and the magazine’s first feature about dinosaur fossil sites. The latter covered notable finds by amateur collectors and advice on where and how to search for fossils.