page_title: East Texas
section_title: Geography and climate
hierarchical_section_title: East Texas / Geography and climate
caption_attribution_description: Caddo Lake with Bald Cypress trees — Caddo Lake State Park, Piney Woods region, Texas.
context_page_description: East Texas is a distinct cultural, geographic, and ecological area in the U.S. state of Texas.
  According to the Handbook of Texas, the East Texas area "may be separated from the rest of Texas roughly by a line extending from the Red River in north-central Lamar County southwestward to east-central Limestone County and then southeastward towards eastern Galveston Bay", though most sources separate the Gulf Coast area into a separate region.
  Another popular, somewhat simpler, definition defines East Texas as the region between the Trinity River, north and east of Houston, as the western border, the Louisiana border as the eastern border, the Gulf of Mexico as the southern border, the Oklahoma border as the northern border, Arkansas as the northeastern border, and extending as far south as Orange, Texas. The East Texas regions includes Tyler, Longview, Lufkin, Marshall, Palestine, Henderson, Jacksonville, Mount Pleasant, and Nacogdoches
  Most of the region consists of the Piney Woods ecoregion, and East Texas can sometimes be reduced to include only the Piney Woods. At the fringes, towards Central Texas, the forests expand outward toward sparser trees and eventually into open plains.
context_section_description: Climate is the unifying factor in the region's geography; all of East Texas has the humid subtropical climate typical of the Southeast, occasionally interrupted by intrusions of cold air from the north. East Texas receives more rainfall, 35 to 60 inches (890 to 1,520 mm), than the rest of Texas. In Houston, the average January temperature is 50.4 °F (10.2 °C) and the average July temperature is 82.6 °F (28.1 °C), but Houston has slightly warmer winters than most of East Texas due to its lower latitude and proximity to the coast.
  All of East Texas also lies within the Gulf Coastal Plain, but with less uniformity than the climate with rolling hills in the north and flat coastal plains in the south. Local vegetation also varies from north to south with the lower third consisting of the temperate grassland extending from South Texas to South Louisiana. The northern two-thirds of the region is dominated by temperate forest known as the Piney Woods, which extends over 23,500 square miles (61,000 km²). The Piney Woods are part of a much larger region of pine-hardwood forest that extends into Louisiana, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. The Piney Woods area thins out as it nears the Gulf of Mexico. West of the Piney Woods are the ranchlands and remnant oak forests of the East Central Texas forests ecoregion.
  The Sabine, Trinity, Neches, Angelina and Sulphur Rivers are the major rivers in East Texas, but the Brazos River and Red River also flow through the region. The Brazos cuts through the southwest portion of the region, while the Red River forms its northern border with Oklahoma and a portion of Arkansas. In East Texas and the rest of the South, small rivers and creeks collect into swamps called "bayous" and merge with the surrounding forest. Bald cypress and Spanish moss are the dominant plants in bayous. The most famous of these bayous are Cypress Bayou and Buffalo Bayou. Cypress Bayou surrounds the Big, Little, and Black Cypress Rivers around Jefferson. They flow east into Caddo Lake, and the adjoining wetlands cover the rim and islands of the lake.
caption: Caddo Lake
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