Page focused on providing some general introductions to our lakes – The (Texas) Highland Lakes – and the operation thereof by Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA).

Contents

The (Texas) Highland Lakes

Six (6) lakes, officially, plus one honorary (Lady Bird Lake downtown Austin – more below).

Lake Buchanan, Buchanan Dam
Inks Lake, Inks Dam
Lake LBJ, Wirtz Dam
Lake Marble Falls, Max Starcke Dam,
Lake Travis, Mansfield Dam – way more at jandp.biz/aqua/travis/
Lake Austin, Tom Miller
(Lady Bird Lake, Longhorn Dam)

(Graphic from lcra.org/water/floods/)

Basis from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Highland_Lakes:

	reservoir or pass-thru	Lake	Dam	Year completed	Managing Authority	Lake area (acres)	Lake length (mi)	Max lake width (ft)	Lake volume (acre-ft)	Dam length (ft)	Dam height (ft)
‘1’	Reservoir	Lake Buchanan	Buchanan Dam	1938	Lower Colorado River Authority	22,452	30.65	26,000 (4.92 mi)	880,356	10,988	145.5
‘2’	Pass-thru	Inks Lake	Inks Dam	1938	Lower Colorado River Authority	777	4.2	3,000	13,668	1,547.5	96.5
‘3’	Pass-thru	Lake LBJ	Wirtz Dam	1951	Lower Colorado River Authority	6,432	21.15	10,800	131,618	5,491.4	118.3
‘4’	Pass-thru	Lake Marble Falls	Max Starcke Dam	1951	Lower Colorado River Authority	613	5.75	1,080	7,597	859.5	98.8
‘5’	Reservoir	Lake Travis Travis by J&P	Mansfield Dam	1942	Lower Colorado River Authority	19,044	64/61^*1	###???	1,115,076	7,089	278
‘6’	Pass-thru	Lake Austin	Tom Miller Dam	1940	Lower Colorado River Authority	1,830	20.25	1,300	24,644	1,590	100.5
(‘7’)	Pass-thru	Lady Bird Lake	Longhorn Dam	1960	City of Austin	416	6	2,500	7,151	760	36

^*1) (No Lake length in table in Wikipedia article, nor any Max lake width.) Length of 64 miles (103 km) is per last mile marker in LCRA maps where last miles are indicated shallow in their map. 61 mile marker (98 km) is still showing some depth for boating. (When lake is full (100% capacity) at 681 ft [above] msl (mean sea level).

(‘7’) as Lady Bird Lake downtown Austin isn’t really seen as official Texas Highland Lakes lake (as all managed by LCRA) but a ‘honorary’ Highland lake managed by the City of Austin.

Watersheds, Many Rivers, (Texas) Colorado River

One saying is ‘1 inch of rain in Hill Country can mean 1 foot of water in Lake Travis’.

See also en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_River_(Texas), which is completely different from the “real”, [Colorado] Colorado River en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_River

Extract from Here’s why the Highland Lakes are so important (and why they aren’t really lakes at all), Oct 20, 2018, kut.org/austin/2018-10-20/heres-why-the-highland-lakes-are-so-important-and-why-they-arent-really-lakes-at-all:

“Over the past few days we’ve been hearing a lot about the Highland Lakes and the system of dams in the area. As all of that water makes its way down the Colorado River, we thought this would be a good time to get an explanation of exactly how that system works.

So we asked KUT’s Mose Buchele.

When a lot of rain falls upriver in the Hill Country, what happens to all of that water? Does it literally just all come down the river?

Yeah, I mean, ultimately it does. We have a bunch of different rivers that then feed into the Colorado River. Each of these rivers – and I’m talking like the Pedernales, the Llano, the San Saba – they have their own river basins. It floods in those basins and those rivers collect water. That goes to the Colorado, and it can kind of, you know, gain steam as it moves along and create the kind of situation we had this week, which is a river flood essentially.

So those rivers all feed into the Colorado River, which goes through Austin?

I want to make a point right now: A lot of what we talk about is lakes in Central Texas, and I think a lot of people don’t quite understand this maybe – especially people who have recently moved here. These things we call lakes are really part of the Colorado River. So Lady Bird Lake, Lake Austin. You might go to the shore of the lake and think of it as a lake, but actually when you get a big rain event like this, you realize – no, this is a river and it can go really fast.

So talk about this system of dams along the Colorado River that helped have helped create this system of lakes.

That’s why we think of them as lakes, because they are dammed off, the rivers dammed off from Austin on upwards into the Highland Lakes. And that system is created for a few purposes. It was created for agricultural storage, and people use it now, of course, also as a kind of recreation.”

… more in original article

And more recent (July 2025) – How dams upriver saved downtown Austin from catastrophic flooding, July 16, 2025, kut.org/energy-environment/2025-07-16/austin-tx-highland-lakes-dam-system-reservoirs-flooding-water-lcra

Graphical illustration on how water can be collected, from rains, and flowing downstream.

Graphic from The Highland Lakes Are Rising Again! Here’s What That Means for Austin, July 30, 2024, austinmonthly.com/how-highland-lakes-work/