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[hipshot]

Those of you with Google Earth look at the area about five miles north of Smithville and ten miles east of Bastrop. If you don't have GE, you can use Google Maps or Mapquest to do the same thing; position the lower margin of the screen splitting Smithville (about centered or slightly to the right of center) and Bastrop just outside the left margin. Then click over to satellite photo. That's a rancher with too much time on his hands.....

[Gumbo]

How in the heck did you ever find this  We know who has too much time on thier hands 

[Luckys Lover]

I saw that a while back when I was planning a ride with Connie. Neat, huh? Can't see it from the ground where he was working. Had to do that with a GPS trip all planned out.

[Snake Doc]

Very unexpected. And big. There is an airstrip a few miles south of the landmark. If that landing strip is around 3000 or so feet long then this "feature" is many miles across. If the runway is around 5000 ft then it's really big. Great post; thanks. 

[hipshot]

The letters are over 1,000 yards tall and the entire name is just a hair under 2 1/2 miles long.

[hipshot]

Snake Doc, if you're referring to the airstrip just northwest of Smithville the runway is 1,335 yards (4005 feet) long.

[hipshot]

Larry, I saw it on the TKF forums. I thought it was really neat. Supposedly it's been there for several years.

[hipshot]

Here's a couple of interesting quotes from that thread on TKF:



 by Yaklash » Thu Dec 16, 2010 3:13 pm
I used to hunt on a place you had to drive through the State Park to get to - it backed up to that land owner's property. I don't remember this being like that back then, but the owner of the land we hunted talked about "them folks over there own a ton of land." My best scale of just the cleared area in which the name sits is 2,500 acres and I would bet he owns a lot of the land around it too.

Looking at it, I can see how strategically placed deer stands could cover long tree lines. One would think the deer would move in and out of the woods.

Edit:The owner of this ranch comes from a long line of farmers. His great great uncle Carl LUECKE was a well known gin distiller in Schulenburg, Texas.

The earliest ancestor was a Wilhelm LUECKE or LÜCKE who immigrated to Texas circa 1846 with his wife, Johanna RAABE from Hannover, Germany. Wilhelm had 6 children, one of which was Friedrich (Fred) Will LUECKE, Jimmie's grandfather.

Following the family from the time of immigration to recent marriage records, you can connect this family to small towns and rural areas surrounding the current LUECKE ranch from Bastrop, Smithville, La Grange, Rabbs Prairie, Rutersville, Oldenburg, Nechanitz, and Giddings, Texas. The distances between these locations are within a 30-40 mile diameter.




 by Yaklash » Thu Dec 16, 2010 5:29 pm
Barnacle Bill wrote:That has been there for years and years. I believe he originally did it for the NASA. It had something to do with some kind of measurement calibration thingamajiggydoohicky regardin the space shuttle or some satellite or some such astrophysicallity dimension from space......


Multiple sources say that NASA uses it to calibrate the scale of a megapixel in their cameras from space, but he did not do it for them. That is his legacy.

[DavidJ]

I found this on one of the comments you can find in the many links you get if you do a Goggle search on Luecke.

"I work on that ranch, The ranch is 5000ac the name is 1500ac it is 3/4 of a mile tall and 4 miles long, it was all brush very little pine, we run cattle on it. He and another guy surveyed it and he was on a bulldozer from sun up to sun down clearing the brush on it...."

[hipshot]

I found this on one of the comments you can find in the many links you get if you do a Goggle search on Luecke.

"I work on that ranch, The ranch is 5000ac the name is 1500ac it is 3/4 of a mile tall and 4 miles long, it was all brush very little pine, we run cattle on it. He and another guy surveyed it and he was on a bulldozer from sun up to sun down clearing the brush on it...."

Actually, the name is 0.58 mile tall and 2.49 miles long. Oh, and it covers 927.3931818 acres.

[Snake Doc]

Snake Doc, if you're referring to the airstrip just northwest of Smithville the runway is 1,335 yards (4005 feet) long.

Thanks. Great thread.