This East Texas native is needing a mudbug fix. Is there anywhere from Lubbock to Amarillo that sells crawfish? I found oriental market in Lubbock is there anywhere else? Thanks

As a fellow East Texas transplant, all I can tell you is HAHAHAHAHA it's not happening. I've been up here for 14 years now and have found none. There are a few restaurants that serve some decent ones, but your best bet is order online and cry when you see the prices.

I am making a trip back to SE Texas in a few weeks and I'm thinking of picking up a couple of sacks for a boil.

Best bet is to find someone traveling from SETX up that way. If you do I can set them up with the bugs

Plowboy. What kind of deal can you get me on a couple of sacks in a few weeks?

All depends on what the market is doing. Prices are starting to drop since the season had about a month head start

Looks like I'm I'll go the "get some one from etx" route. My folks are coming up Friday from Houston area and I'll have them grab a sack.

The Oriental Market in Lubbock said because I was buying so much (one sack is apparently a bunch) they would make me a deal at $4.75.

We did a catering boil for a company a few weeks ago and the owners were Vietnamese. They bagged up about 80lbs of cooked crawfish that they were going to freeze and bring with them to Vietnam the next day

What time do we show up? I mean, if your having a crawfish boil, you are going to need a lot of help with the cooking and eating.

Remember when they were $0.49/pound back home?

Having an East Texas transplant crawfish boil isn't a bad idea

I grew up about a half mile from a playa lake that was full of crawdads. It was off Callahan Draw in Hale County. We farmed that place for a couple of years, and the darn crawdads would "travel upstream" any chance they could. So when we irrigated, they would follow the furrow until they came to the siphon tube, and crawl through it into the ditch. They'd stop the tube from flowing, and often would break the ditch, the little suckers.

Said all that to say this, are the ones I saw on Callahan the same species as east Texas? Seems ours were smaller and brown, as opposed to the red you see from Louisiana.

I'd give you directions to the playa to catch your own, but the dry cycle of the last decades has killed them off. They could survive occasional times when the lake completely dried, but not the long-term dry we've had lately.

They were .49 a pound before everybody found out they were the "in" thing to eat. It was like fajitas before the "gringos" found out they were good and then they started breeding chickens and shrimp to have fajitas too.
I bought butt load at .17 a pound back in the day. We ate them all the time, now they are as high as rib eyes!!

A friend of mine would have a crawfish boil once a year here in Wichita falls area. He had some buddies from Louisiana that would fly in several hundred pounds. Other than that, you couldn't find any crawfish around.

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I grew up about a half mile from a playa lake that was full of crawdads. It was off Callahan Draw in Hale County. We farmed that place for a couple of years, and the darn crawdads would "travel upstream" any chance they could. So when we irrigated, they would follow the furrow until they came to the siphon tube, and crawl through it into the ditch. They'd stop the tube from flowing, and often would break the ditch, the little suckers.

Said all that to say this, are the ones I saw on Callahan the same species as east Texas? Seems ours were smaller and brown, as opposed to the red you see from Louisiana.

I'd give you directions to the playa to catch your own, but the dry cycle of the last decades has killed them off. They could survive occasional times when the lake completely dried, but not the long-term dry we've had lately.

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how did they get there in the first place, surely there have been similar droughts in the past?

Their instinct seems to be to move upstream. So before Europeans arrived, they would work their way upstream along the draws. When it got dry and the draw stopped flowing, they survived in the playas. When the playa dried up, they'd burrow down in the mud and hibernate.

Talking to old timers, the draw flowed in modern times maybe once every 10-30 years

Even more interesting are triops, a living fossil that survive even when through long droughts.

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Their instinct seems to be to move upstream. So before Europeans arrived, they would work their way upstream along the draws. When it got dry and the draw stopped flowing, they survived in the playas. When the playa dried up, they'd burrow down in the mud and hibernate.

Talking to old timers, the draw flowed in modern times maybe once every 10-30 years

Even more interesting are triops, a living fossil that survive even when through long droughts.

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My poorly expressed point was that there must have been some hellacious droughts in that part of the world before this last one.

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My poorly expressed point was that there must have been some hellacious droughts in that part of the world before this last one.

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Well, Dad always talked about 1957 as being his worse, and there was, of course, the dust bowl. But even when there wasn't enough runoff to keep the draw flowing (99% of the time) some of the playas were pretty darn big, and some pretty deep. Even when the surface water dried, the crawdads would dig deep enough to survive, and reemerge when it rained.

And of course, the further east you go, the more likely to have year-round water. And as soon as it rained enough to connect the playas, here they would come west again.

One other factor is that the huge irrigation boom really didn't kick in until post WWII. So there were probably year-round springs that lasted until the 1960s and 70s when the water table finally got pumped down.

I saw a few crawdads in a pond along Callahan draw as recently as 2009 or so. But none since.