Austin's Barton Creek Greenbelt - The Drought is Over

[LoneStarMike]

Even though the apartment complex I live in overlooks the Barton Creek Greenbelt, I haven't been down there in about 2 years because there has been so little water in the creek. With our recent rains, that's all changed now. So I took an 8-mile hike on April 3, 2010.


01. Trail from the parking lot at the Loop 360 Access Point down to the creek



02. Rock Climbers along the creek



03. Boy with dog along Barton Creek



04. Barton Creek



05. Wildflowers



06. More wildflowers along the creek



07. Swimming area with rope swing



08. Trail and Cliffs along the greenbelt



09. Twin Falls



10. More Wildflowers



11. Twin Falls



12. Twin Falls



13. More rock climbers



14. Another swimming spot. (There are many along the creek - some crowded, others less so.)



15. Some more wildflowers



16. Sculpture Falls



17. Banks of the creek near Sculpture Fallas



18. Sculpture falls



19. Kayakers at Sculpture Falls



20. More Wildflowers



21. Kayakers at Sculpture Falls



22. Kayakers at Sculpture Falls



23. Girl kayaker (right before she tipped over)



24. Guy kayaker (he made it without tipping over)



25. Sculpture Falls



26. Sculpture falls



27. More swimmers along the greenbelt



28. Another waterfall along the greenbelt. I don't know if it has a name or not.



29. Same waterfall


This waterfall is where I turned around and started heading back.


30. Trail along the greenbelt



31. Bicyclist



32. More bicyclists



33. Along the creek



34. Sculpture Falls again



35. Bicyclist on the trail



36. View from the trail



37. Cliffs along the trail



38. Trail near the swimming area that had the rope swing.



39. Barton Creek reflections



40. Barton Creek



41. Mural under Loop 360 along the trail



42. A different mural



43. Jogger along the trail near the Loop 360 Access Point



44. This is the street I have to take to get from the Loop 360 Access Point back up to my apartment complex. I call it "The Hill of Death," because I was dying by the time I reached the top.



45. View from the top of the hill



46. View from the top of the hill



47. View of the greenbelt from behind Brodie Oaks Shopping Center.



This little hike made me realize just how out of shape I really am. Thank God for Vicodin.

Thanks for looking.

[TXLove]

Nice nature shots! Good to see the water back!

[KevinFromTexas]

Nice. I've been wanting to go do that. I was thinking of checking out Gus Fruh Park.

Ah yes, the Toys R Us hill.

[tgbAustinite]

that was glooooorious! thanks for sharing, and for taking photos while hiking the trails.

[Dan Denson]

These are beautiful shots! Hard to believe such nature exists right in the city.

Shouldn't these be posted in the city photos section? The photos would get a much larger audience, and it would great for people to see this Austin gem.

[HomeInMyShoes]

Bah, hill of death. That looks like the hills in downtown here.

The view from behind Brodie Oaks Shopping Center is spectactular. A great asset to the city. Thanks for posting these LoneStarMike.

[KevinFromTexas]

This area is just 4 miles from downtown by the way.

[Robert Pence]

Beautiful place, beautiful photos. Thanks for sharing them.

[LoneStarMike]

Thanks everyone.

Originally Posted by Dan Denson

Shouldn't these be posted in the city photos section? The photos would get a much larger audience, and it would great for people to see this Austin gem.

I actually considered posting them there but since these were mostly nature-type photos with very few views of buildings, I went ahead and posted them here.

BTW, I failed to mention my good (?) luck on this hike. While I was at Sculpture Falls, I had crossed to one side to get some photos and when I was making my way back to the other side in knee-high water I slipped on a moss-covered rock and fell in the water. The canvas bag I had my camera in was completely submerged. I grabbed it and got it out of the water as fast as I could and fortunately it hadn't been submerged long enough for water to get inside my camera. Whew.

Then about 45 minutes later, I'm walking down the trail and there's no one in front of (or behind) me and I looked down and there was a nice crisp folded $20 bill in the middle of the trail. I thought it might have belonged to a guy on a bike I had been talking to a few minutes earlier, but I saw him later and asked if he had lost any money and he hadn't, so I came home $20 richer.

[subterranean]

No gators in this stretch of texas I presume?

Looks like a wonderful place to kick back and have a good time!

[KevinFromTexas]

Originally Posted by subterranean

No gators in this stretch of texas I presume?

Looks like a wonderful place to kick back and have a good time!

Not naturally, no. Especially not west of Austin and San Antonio. The area pictured above is generally on the western side of Austin. Now, east of Austin and San Antonio there have been some reported. There was even an incident about 3 weeks ago where a woman who was hiking along a lake in East Austin and spotted something swimming in the lake. It appeared to be a 6 foot alligator. She called the police and they've been out there trying to determine if it was an alligator or not. They showed something swimming in the lake on the news and it sure did look like a small gator just below the water. The thing is though, that lake isn't fed by a river or even a creek, so it likely isn't a wild alligator. There's a chance it was someone's pet and they released it there.

Alligators do inhabit some of the rivers and creeks just south of San Antonio, and occasionally they are reported within the city limits.

The big thing you'd have to look out for while hiking are snakes. There are 4 poisonous snakes that are indigenous to Texas, and all four of them can be found in Central Texas. Rattlesnakes, copperheads, coral snakes and cotton mouths (or water moccasins).

Other than that, we don't really have any really dangerous wildlife. There are wild pigs east of Austin, but these are really just feral pigs. They can be aggressive, though I've never seen one. And I would imagine in the extreme western Hill Country, the area west of Austin and San Antonio, that you could probably find mountain lions, though I think that would be extremely rare. There was one reported in Southwest Austin about 4 years ago, but I don't think they ever actually found/confirmed it. This area also used to have bobcats, but they haven't been seen for a long time. The only other menacing wildlife would be coyotes. They typically aren't dangerous to humans, but some of the neighborhoods on the west side of Austin that back up to greenbelts and creeks, have had problems with them attacking and eating their pets.

You really don't have to worry much about dangerous wildlife on the greenbelt though, because it's close enough in that the city noise scares it away. You'll be lucky if you get to see a deer there. All the times I've gone hiking, I've only ever seen one deer, and that was at Wild Basin, a few miles west of where LoneStarMike took these.

[subterranean]

Thanks for the thorough response. The greenbelts seem to offer a lot for outdoor enthusiasts. While exercising fantasies of a move to that area, I've always wondered what type of dangerous critters exist in this neck of the woods. I'm sure Central Texas isn't short on spiders, either. Snakes give me the willies.

[KevinFromTexas]

If you live in the city, you'll pretty much never see any dangerous wildlife.

I've never seen a live rattlesnake up close. I did see one crossing the highway in West Austin about 20 years ago. The only wild one I've ever seen up close was dead. It was at a family friend's ranch about 30 miles south of Austin. His farm dog actually killed it. I did see a water snake in a downtown creek once. I'm not really sure what kind of snake it was, but my friend and I weren't going to stick around to find out.

We also used to have some wooded property about 30 miles east of Austin, and my dad killed a few copperhead snakes there. Whenever we would go out there he'd actively look for them in all the usual hiding spots and then shoot them. He always brought a shotgun just for the purpose of shooting a snake if we saw one. I guess it might sound cruel, but my brother and sister and I were little at the time and would roam the place. I was maybe 12 years old.

There's also scorpions in Central Texas, though they're pretty much unheard of in the city. I did see one in our house in South Austin in the middle of the night in the hall. It was the first one we'd seen here in about 25 years at least. They aren't deadly, but they will make you feel sick if they sting you. We used to see them pretty frequently at our property east of Austin. As far as spiders, there are brown recluse here, but they aren't deadly. And they tend to have different effects on different people. I'm not totally sure that I've ever seen a brown recluse. People on the internet say they're about as big as a quarter, but I've always heard they're much smaller, no bigger than a pea. There are also black widow spiders in Central Texas, but again, just like the others, they are extremely rare in the city. I've never seen a black widow in the city, but I did see a few at our property. They typically are not deadly, except in some cases with the elderly and children or people with other health issues. Even then that's pretty rare. I'm no fan of spiders either, or snakes, and thankfully I've never encountered either in the city.

[Centropolis]

Nice!

[Dan Denson]

Originally Posted by KevinFromTexas

Not naturally, no. Especially not west of Austin and San Antonio. The area pictured above is generally on the western side of Austin. Now, east of Austin and San Antonio there have been some reported. There was even an incident about 3 weeks ago where a woman who was hiking along a lake in East Austin and spotted something swimming in the lake. It appeared to be a 6 foot alligator. She called the police and they've been out there trying to determine if it was an alligator or not. They showed something swimming in the lake on the news and it sure did look like a small gator just below the water. The thing is though, that lake isn't fed by a river or even a creek, so it likely isn't a wild alligator. There's a chance it was someone's pet and they released it there.

Alligators do inhabit some of the rivers and creeks just south of San Antonio, and occasionally they are reported within the city limits.

The big thing you'd have to look out for while hiking are snakes. There are 4 poisonous snakes that are indigenous to Texas, and all four of them can be found in Central Texas. Rattlesnakes, copperheads, coral snakes and cotton mouths (or water moccasins).

Other than that, we don't really have any really dangerous wildlife. There are wild pigs east of Austin, but these are really just feral pigs. They can be aggressive, though I've never seen one. And I would imagine in the extreme western Hill Country, the area west of Austin and San Antonio, that you could probably find mountain lions, though I think that would be extremely rare. There was one reported in Southwest Austin about 4 years ago, but I don't think they ever actually found/confirmed it. This area also used to have bobcats, but they haven't been seen for a long time. The only other menacing wildlife would be coyotes. They typically aren't dangerous to humans, but some of the neighborhoods on the west side of Austin that back up to greenbelts and creeks, have had problems with them attacking and eating their pets.

You really don't have to worry much about dangerous wildlife on the greenbelt though, because it's close enough in that the city noise scares it away. You'll be lucky if you get to see a deer there. All the times I've gone hiking, I've only ever seen one deer, and that was at Wild Basin, a few miles west of where LoneStarMike took these.

However, deer have pretty much overwhelmed the neighborhoods in west Austin. Anywhere west of Mopac, e.g., Northwest Hills off of Mesa, you can see deer all over peoples yards. It's unreal. It's very difficult to have flowers in that area.

[KevinFromTexas]

I read in that article that was tied to Rick Perry shooting that coyote during a hike, that there are around 750 reports a year of coyotes around Austin.

We don't have any deer here. I've only ever seen one within my neighborhood, and it was obviously confused. I was riding bike back from the grocery store one night and saw something walking in a frontyard. I thought it was a German Shepard at first, but it started galloping across their yard. It ran in the opposite direction from me. I'm glad it didn't charge me. It was just a female, but still.