Texas State Parks – Page 4 – State of Wilderness

All The Things We Didn’t Do

It was one of those moments that is so typical of us, and yet so frustrating. He was on his tiptoes, and I was leaning over from a picnic bench, trying to make sure I didn’t fall down. We were peering into the windows of an empty cabin. A curtain fluttered from the breeze of the fan, a breeze that could have come from our sighs. These were sighs of regret over the choices not taken.

This should have been our weekend. This should have been our spot.

We imagined the kind of fun we would have had, walking out from the cabin in an early morning to see if we would get a bite on a line from the stocked lake. Pictured the kind of peace we would have had, chilling on the porch. Thought about all the dollars we would have saved, if we had just done the things we wanted to do.

We made our reservations for Buescher State Park back in December. I should have called it in, but I was confused about the difference between the cabins and premium screened shelters, and how each one is reserved in the system. We had known since two years ago, when we came up here to hike one day, that we wanted to come back and reserve Cabin #3, but instead I had reserved us a premium screened shelter, which looks like this below:

This weekend, the weekend of the Texas Challenge in Bastrop, we came up to the park, claimed our campsite, got our keys, and then never came back, until this minute, the minute of regret, as we were leaving town two days later. We had coughed up our $62 (after coupons) that we ended up spending on the reservation as a “donation” to the state parks. We had also managed to spend another $225 we didn’t intend to on two nights at a hotel.

Why, you ask? Because, this is what we do. Most of the time, we are really great for each other, but sometimes we do these things; I overplan, he procrastinates, we forget to communicate, we let timelines slide, we go with the flow so much that we end up missing out on things we meant to do. We ended up doing so many things this weekend that we never did the things we meant to do, like set up our campsite, relax in nature, look at the birds, drop a line in the lake, take a hike on the trail. We would have loved to take a bike ride from Fishermans to Ferry Park in downtown Bastrop. All weekend we drove back and forth in front of The Roadhouse cafe near Bastrop State Park, and never once did we sit down in there and have some hot sandwiches, fried pickles, and iced tea. I would have liked to get some pictures of those gorgeous wildflowers blooming all along HIghway 71, maybe stick the kids in there and be like a real Texan.

What we did instead is spend an ungodly amount of hours sitting at MayFair Park in Bastrop, in between going to geocaching event after geocaching event. Four events in twenty four hours. We spent hours planning, scheming and texting our team. We talked to lots of friends and teammates, exchanged travel bugs, spent too much money at Buccees, too much time at La Hacienda. We (or rather he) gave a water-bottle bath in the parking lot to one dirty little boy, who spent most of an afternoon rolling around in a dirtpile. We drove around to seven different locations to grab codes off doors to log the Lab Caches specifically put out for this event. We bought some more rocks for son and I’s rock collection, spent too much money again buying pecan treats and gifts at the Berdoll Pecan Company, checked out some bronze statues at a foundry, took a tour of a facility that bottles rain water and turns it into drinking water (and then tasted it – quite good!). We spit off a bridge and got a certificate for being an official SOB (member of the Society of Bridge Spitters). He taught the boys how to play shuffleboard. We bought a couple more bottles of mead and one bottle of a sweet table wine being offered as a sample at Cripple Creek wines.

Through all of this, we were just too tired each night to set up camp in the dark. If we had the cabin, it would have been all right – we could have just thrown our sleeping bags over the bunk bed style cots that are already set up in there.

We had no idea what the screened shelter we had rented even looked like until Sunday afternoon, when we stopped by to return the keys to it. The rangers had already called us, wondering what the heck ever happened. We peeked inside it, then inside the cabins. It turns out the floor was so neat and spotless that we probably could have just thrown the sleeping bags down on it and been all right, saved ourselves a few hundred bucks. It would only have taken us mere minutes to set up, yet we were too busy to ever even stop to look.

It reminded me of other times, like when we arrived midday at the campsite we had rented for the night before and never claimed in the Redwood Forest, only to discover it was the best campsite ever, and really not that much farther down the road than the place we ended up sleeping at. So much for all my planning and dreaming.

For now, all we can do is sigh, shrug, and commit ourselves to coming back another day; another day to do all the things we didn’t do.

I am going to make it April, before those wildflowers have all hidden their heads for the summer. This time, I am calling the reservation line, and nailing down that Cabin #3. I hope you are reading a completely different blog entry this time next month.

Brazos Bend, Again

Sunday afternoon was drizzly and a bit cold, but here we were, in the truck headed south to Brazos Bend State Park anyway. We were on a mission to retrieve J’s lost binoculars lens cover, and he agreed to indulge my desire to get a few caches and look for a few birds.

We settled on the Old and New Horseshoe Lake part, because that was a trail in which we could accomplish both missions. Last time we were here, we were not near the water, so I wanted to see what the water birds were doing.

Old Horseshoe Lake is pretty much dried up right now, but there was a lot of action going on at New, as well as the larger Elm Lake to the left of the trail. We meant to be moving right along, but got distracted by a hawk flying over and then parking himself on a branch across New Horseshoe. We watched as a gator trailed an American Coot across the water. It seemed like the gator was serious, but at one point he slowed down, and the coot stopped and moved back towards him, like, “whatcha doing now?” It makes me wonder if the gators eat the coots or not, although it seems like it would be a good food source for them. There were a LOT of coots in this lake.

There were also White Ibises feeding across the lake, as well as an egret here and there. Common Moorhen also cruised the water. Our new find of the day was a pair of Blue-winged Teals who moved in and around the coots, feeding at the edge of the lake. We watched the hawk for a while, identified as a Red-shouldered, and then moved off to get those caches.

The caches were great – ammo cans just a bit off the trail, not too hard to get to or find but enough of a challenge to keep us interested. The rangers or volunteers of some sort were driving around the trail on a golf cart, stopping now and then to pick things up, and it was the only thing that interfered with the song and sound of birds. I could hear them, but I couldn’t always see them. If I am going to take this bird thing serious, I really need to learn their songs and calls to be able to identify what is out there on hearing alone.

Our best bird find along the walk was finding a pair of Yellow-bellied Sapsuckers. That was fun. Later, we saw a red-bellied woodpecker. We also saw and probably heard cardinals and the yellow rumped warbler. We saw another hawk, or maybe the same hawk, calling and then perching on a dead tree out on the field to the right as we made our way back. It was a red-shouldered as well, so might have been the same one.

As we passed the New Horseshoe Lake one last time, we found another bird in the lake that got us in a heated discussion trying to identify. It was a goofy looking bird – big and tall, with mostly grey-ish feathers with black markings and a white head. His feathers on his chest stuck out on all kinds of directions, and he looked like an old retired bird, long past the point of caring about what he looked like. After much discussion, combing the bird book, and looking at pictures online, we finally decided he was a Great Blue Heron, although his blue was now a bit faded.

I think we have 87 active caches left in this park that we haven’t found yet, so I am sure we will be back to find them, and more birds, soon.

Species total for year: 44

Brazos Bend Part II: It’s For the Birds

After staying up until midnight talking, drinking, and eating with our friends on New Year’s Eve, we headed off to our tent. Despite the predictions of cold temperatures, it actually was not a bad night in our sleeping bags, and we felt quite rested in the morning. I flipped us some oatmeal-banana-chocolate chip pancakes that I had found a recipe for on Pinterest while J broke down camp. After all this, we had to drive back up to the headquarters to deal with some unresolved check in issues, and then finally we were ready for our actual goals for the day: work on finding some of the caches in the park we had not found, and record a list of bird species observed for the day.

I had decided that this year we were going to actually keep a species count of the birds we saw. I would say that it was our Big Year, except that we have really never had a “Year” at all. I would actually say that in fact, this is our “Baseline Year”. From the moment we got up, I had been keeping a watch out with the binoculars, bird book in hand, checking off the ones that flitting about the campsite in my Brazos Bend birding checklist that I had downloaded and printed out before we left the house.

When we pulled up at Diane’s campsite to see if anyone else wanted to go caching with us, I still had those items in my hands. We found Rod, and set off down the trail. We spent two hours hiking about along the Bluestem and Bayou trails, attempting to make cache finds. We ended up finding two out of the three we looked for, and I was able to drop off a travel bug I had been carrying for much too long. I was interested to see how my ankle held up, since we want to do some distance hiking this year. I was carrying a little bit of weight in my pack, but not a lot, and my ankle was a bit sore by the time we got back. I hope this will not slow me down from hiking this year. I probably should wear hiking boots and not sneakers when I go – it might help the stability of my ankle, although it is pain in my right heel after long walks that keeps me reaching for the sneakers and avoiding all other shoes.

Our total bird species count for the day was 14. We could have gotten a lot more if we had made it over to the lakes, since we only claimed one water bird species today. There are 4, 987 acres in this park – there was a lot of land we did not cover. We mostly saw birds at the campsites, and just a few different kinds along the trail. My favorite species of the day was the Eastern Bluebird that I saw on our way to the last cache. It was also during this sighting that I somehow lost the cover to the viewing glass of the binoculars, which J found understandably annoying.

These are the birds we saw today: Black-bellied Whistling Duck, Snowy Egret, Black and Turkey Vultures, Killdeer, Red-bellied Woodpecker, Eastern Phoebe, Northern Cardinal, Yellow-Rumped Warbler, Eastern Bluebird, Blue-gray Gnatcatcher, Tufted Titmouse, Carolina Chickadee, and American Crow. There were probably dozens more, but we are still novices at this birding thing.

These were, of course, the most common species seen today. Go figure. This only confirms my theory that we are making the world a very good place for vultures (or, if you read my previous post – maybe we can blame this on the coyotes).

Brazos Bend State Park: Tales of the Wilderness

It is our annual tradition to spend New Year’s Eve on a camping trip with a certain core group of geocachers, give or take a few. For me, this is only the third year I have been involved in this tradition, but for J, this goes back about ten years. (It would be the fourth for me, but last year we had to cancel it due to weather and my leg injury). I knew about it back in the day, but I had trouble convincing my family to go, until my family dynamic changed. This is the second time since I have been involved that we had it at Brazos Bend. The first year, there was a whole group of us there. This year, it was down to a handful.

When we got to the park, we had about an hour until the sun went down, and it was immediately apparent that J and I had different agendas. He was in a race to get the campsite set up, and I wanted to get those last two geocache finds to help me end the year by logging the event as my #3300 geocache find. He encouraged me to take the dogs and make the finds while he situated camp.

In retrospect, we realized that what he meant for me to do is to swing by the other campsite and pick up our friend Diane and maybe her friend, and have them come with me. I didn’t get that part, and plus they had their own thing going on, so I went off by myself at dusk to try to score some finds. I think if I had a friend or a flashlight, it would have been a little different experience for me.

The picture up above is a scene from the trail I took, the Hale Lake Loop. Also, below, a shot of the water from the bridge I crossed to get there. I was really brazosbend 1 enjoying the quiet serenity of having the park to myself – I saw a person when I first set out, but once I got on the trail, not a single soul.

However, the thing about being in the woods is – you are never really alone, even if you think you are. I realized this as I reached ground zero for the first cache I was after, which was about 250 ft off into the woods. I saw a big, black animal moving in the woods about 80 ft in front of me. I thought it was a bear for a moment before I remembered I was in Texas, so it was certainly not that – but in fact, a feral hog. They are a huge pest species in our state, and generally speaking will leave you alone – unless they are in a group, or feel threatened for some reason. I was worried this one would in fact be threatened if my silly dogs decided to start barking and lunging at it, and considered going back for a moment – but I really wanted that cache find, so I stood still, and that is when I realized that pig was not alone. One, two, three, FOUR pigs in a line passed within about 50-80 feet of us. I was amazed that when I told my dogs, “quiet,” they actually listened, and stood stock still, even stopped panting, to watch the pigs pass quietly. We made the cache find, and then got the heck out of dodge.

The sun was going down, but I wanted that next find, so I set off for the next one along a side trail that was the closest one to me. I started reading the cache description, and started getting a little spooked. The cache was called “Cat Tracks”, and it turns out the reason why that name was chosen is because the cache owner said they saw the biggest bobcat they had ever seen at the cache site when going for the hide. As I got closer, I began to get the paranoid feeling that I was being stalked. I had to go about 180 ft into the brush, which by now was kind of dark inside, and when the dogs and I were about halfway in the thicket, we heard a branch snap nearby. We all froze…and then beat a hasty retreat outta there.

About twenty feet back down the trail, I started second guessing myself, and started to go back in…only to see or sense something jump down off a nearby branch, which then bounced up and down from the relieved weight. Nevermind!

As I was headed out of the woods and towards the bridge that would lead me back to the campsite, I started hearing cracking and snapping of branches in the woods to my right. Several times the dogs and I stopped to listen, and I became convinced there was a whole herd of feral hogs in those woods, about to bust out and chase us down. As the sun was finally setting, I came to two realizations. One: those sounds, and the faint hissing sounds I was also hearing, where in fact only vultures settling in to roost, fighting over the best spots, and knocking down dead branches as they went. Two: that at dark, Brazos Bend State Park belongs to the creatures. That, although a frightening thing, is also how it should be, and I am glad the creatures have a place to call their own.

That night as we sat around the campfire sipping our adult beverages and telling life stories, I heard a sound. It increased in intensity, and J noticed it, too, and agreed with my consensus: coyotes howling. It sounded like a lot of them.

The next day, when we were hiking with Rod (from the caching team “uptrain”), he told us that earlier that day, he had come across the carcasses of four feral hogs that had been tore up. He had told the ranger about it, and the ranger explained that was the work of the coyotes. The coyotes lurk around the edges of the pig trails, working together to take down the weak and the young. I am not sure if it was the four pigs I had seen the day before – Jerry didn’t think so, because they were on the far end of Hale Lake, not the side I had been on – and I am not sure whose side I am on in this nature’s scheme, but I did find it interesting to think about what kind of dramas played out in those woods once the sun goes down.