State of Wilderness

Weekend At Foxfire Cabins: Garner and Lost Maples State Parks

It’s early morning, and already baby is experimenting with natural elements. He is checking out the properties of rock, wood and leaves. Each new treasure he finds is tested for weight and depth, and sometimes, if he can manage it before mama catches him, taste and edibility. The morning light is fine and crisp, and the sound of birds fills the air around us, including the cooing of the doves enclosed in the aviary.

There are other sounds, too. Above us, the older kids are playing on the new playscape. They have some complicated game going on involving light sabers and nerf guns. A kitty or two stops to sit on the picnic bench nearby and watch the children play. This is how morning begins on a relaxing weekend at Foxfire Cabins.

Jason and I had stumbled upon this collection of cabins right near the entrance of Lost Maples State Park a few years back, and had spent a night or two there when we didn’t feel like dealing with tent camping but wanted to enjoy the hill country. Since then, we have tried to go back a couple of times (most recently to celebrate my 40th birthday), but had to cancel our reservations. This time, we finally managed to get there, with a best friend’s family in tandem.

This first morning’s adventures took us to Leakey first, a town about thirty minutes to the west via Hwy 337, referred to by motorcyclists as part of the “Twisted Sisters” or “Three Sisters” route. “Oh great,” my friend’s husband said (sarcasm unclear), “Keely’s bringing us out to dig in the dirt for an hour”. And, we paid to do that, ha! I had given in to my middle son’s latest obsession and looked online for a place for us to go arrowhead hunting, finding an affordable option at Sam’s Digs at the Frio River Landing. For $5 a hour, we had all the dirt we could dig through, and could keep whatever we could find. One of my friend’s son found an arrowhead, and I found a huge “Frio” that Sam and his cronies there at the park made a big fuss over. Despite my son’s interest in this, in typical fashion he didn’t stick with the hard labor needed to find anything (like our trip to Crater of the Diamonds) and wandered about instead trying for a lucky surface find. For the money, though, it was a good deal and something we would try our hand at again.

After this, we caravaned south to Garner State Park, a popular park in the summer because of the historic dance, but a lovely place to visit no matter what time of year. We had a picnic lunch at the edge of the Frio River, then made a decision about a hiking trail to pursue. Jason had his heart set on the challenging Mt Baldy Trail, so we agreed to try it. I had tried this one back when Kaleb was a baby and AJ was about six, but had to turn back around because it got too tough with the baby in hand. This time, even with the Osprey baby carrier, there was a time coming down that the only safe way to approach the trail with a baby was to do a hand off, person to person, down the slippery and steep incline. It wasn’t a long trail, but it was steep, and all had a sense of victory after reaching the summit and then making it back to the parking lot safely.

After this, we completed the Hill Country Square that we had started this morning: Vanderpool west to Leakey, Leakey south to Concan, Concan east to Utopia, Utopia north to Vanderpool. We ended the night with a fajita feast courtesy of our friends, and like the night before during our burger fest, we wandered freely between the two cabins.

At some point, my best friend and I were sitting between the cabins with my oldest son, looking at awe at the multitude of stars we could see from this location. It felt like we could see the whole Milky Way, and we identified which constellations we could and watched for shooting stars as we talked.

In the morning, we got up and baby resumed his experiments, trying to touch and throw all the leaves, rocks and sticks he could find. My friend’s family played a little round of basketball and the kids continued their complicated Star Wars themed game. After we were all packed up and fed, we went next door to Lost Maples and hiked a few miles round trip to “Monkey Rock” and back. On the way home, we all met up one last time at the Old Spanish Trail Cafe in Bandera, a place where one could eat a down home country lunch buffet, where pancakes were served all day, and where, if you were interested, you could sit in a bar stool saddle.

It was a perfect weekend with friends, and I am already dreaming of the next time we can do this. I don’t know if it will happen again this year, but perhaps next year we can come out in the fall when the leaves turn, or in the summer when Sebastian is old enough to come with us tubing on the Frio and Medina Rivers. When we come, we will most likely return to Foxfire, a place that will always be dear to us, a place where I hope we come back to time and time again.

January: Winter Snippets

Well, winter is slowly heading into spring, and it feels like we haven’t done much of anything around here. No camping weekends, no fun little trips, playing it close to home for the most part, and my itch to get out there and see the world is still needing to be scratched. However, looking at my birding journal, I see that the month of January was busier than it felt.

I don’t have any huge stories for you, my friend, but I have little snippets of what it was like over in our world over the past four weeks since the last big trip into the “wilderness” (aka camping trip).

20160123_160530 — Caching in Cullinan Park

Late afternoon on a Saturday a couple of weeks ago, my middle son and I were briefly exploring Cullinan Park as we bid our time before a party started. Because I am nosy, I sidled up to a couple that appeared to have something interesting in their sights on the pier. “Do you see the Ahinga?” the man asked me. Not yet, but he had me intrigued, because I hadn’t seen one since I started counting my bird sightings in earnest. “Over there by the Least Grebe”. Sure enough, it poked its head up out of the water. “They sometimes call them water turkeys,” he said as it swam underwater, a brown bulb with a thin graceful neck speeding through the water. I asked him about the Grebe, since I had assumed that this one before us was also a Pied-Billed like the one I had spotted near the observation deck, and he explained the differences to me. I walked away happy about learning something new in the short time we had been at the park. Plus, we had added another “smiley” to our list by finding a geocache in the park before entering the pier area.

20160131_150208 — Big brother helps a baby learn to walk at Paul Rushing Park

A small flock of Eastern Meadowlarks light down on a field of lavender flowers somewhere out on the Katy Prairie. Hawks check over their range from power pole vantage spots. We stop to watch about a dozen Sandhill Cranes lower their huge bodies like parachutists, slowing landing with long legs into a field where they join about a hundred others of their kind. Their rattling calls rumble across the field, clearly audible to us standing on the dirt gravel road outside the field. A pond in the middle of a cow field has me scrambling through the bird guide to ID the big variety of ducks I see out there, some possibly still a mystery to me. I think about asking the birders we pass looking out at the same pond as we drive past them on the way back, but we are not wanting to wake the baby up.
The next weekend, I come back out this way to spend some time at Paul Rushing Park with the kids. I point out a Lesser Yellow Legs doing a funny little walk through the marsh grass on the side of the trail, and of course the nine year old has to stalk and then give chase, a bit like our kitty cat. We are shocked at the size of the Nutria on the islands out in the middle of the park. The baby falls asleep in the stroller as we walk around the ponds, I marveling at the variety of birds out here as the nine year old alternates between whining about how long we have been gone, helping me find geocaches, and telling me about Minecraft.

20160111_140715 — Cold smiles at Fiorenza Park

The baby and I have an afternoon at Fiorenza Park on a day he was still recovering from a two week GI illness. He smiles a timid smile at me and tries to wrestle the binoculars out of my hand. No birds, mama, just me, he is saying, so I stop and settle instead to write down what I managed to see in fifteen minutes of so of walking by the back pond, and marvel at the list for the Ebird report filed by the local Audubon member sent out (and her picture that she attached of a Bald Eagle photobombing the typical pod of White Pelicans and swim of Cormorants that usually can be seen at this park in the winter. On her report, she lists 767 Cormorants seen on one day!)

20160124_145757 — The “little duck pond”

The dogs walk, sometimes with the kids and often next to the stroller, with me as I make the circuit around our duck ponds in the neighborhood, sometimes venturing a couple of neighborhoods over to Cross Creek Ranch to visit Polishing Pond and count what is living there lately. Winter ducks usually include coots, shovelers, and occasionally Gadwall. We’ve put in many miles of walking this month around the neighborhood, local bayous, and ponds (and local school tracks, but don’t tell the dogs, because they aren’t allowed).

Our whole family walking along the seawall in Galveston a couple of weeks back with Hike It Baby, and my eye catches the flash of Ruddy Turnstones flying above the rocks along the shore and Sanderlings at the waters edge. With all the birds recorded along our ventures to all the above places, the monthly total is at 55 species, six more than at this time last year, and some new to the list. Other than Galveston, all the places above are less than a half hours drive from the house. I am hoping the next few months are a lot more exciting, as we might be able to venture out further.

Buescher State Park: Patterns of Place and People

It was the first Saturday morning of the year, and I was sitting on a small mound of dirt, just to the right of a tree root. I was watching the water slowly lap at the edge of the lake, and contemplating what it really meant to know a place. I wondered if the park rangers or perhaps regulars to the campgrounds get to know the patterns of place so well that they can recognize subtle changes. We explorers thrill on the novelty of finding new places, buzzing about like bees, taking the best parts of places and spreading it around to our friends. There are those who get to know a place intimately, though, and through repetitive experiences, like long term live in relationships, they get to know the nuances of a place, which may in some degrees be sweeter and more meaningful than only catching the highlights.

This morning, I had gotten a little taste of the patterns of this place just sitting and watching for an hour or two before anyone else woke up. I arose when I first started hearing the soft little whistles of the cardinals. The cardinals are the ones who usually first greet the day in the state parks in our area of the world, the first ones most campers hear.

On the way to the restrooms, I noticed a flock of Cedar Waxwings, my first of the season, taking over an entire tree. I heard some loud wuk calls that I later determined to be coming from about four or five Pileated Woodpeckers who flew from tree to tree along this edge of the lake, then sometimes crossing the lake and flying from tree to tree over there. Oddly, the bird checklist for this area lists this species as “uncommon”, with an asterik noting “nesting”, but I wonder if the recent fire in the area has impacted their range. They prefer dead, dying, and downed trees, and there are plenty more in this park now than previously. The damage from Hidden Pines fire of a couple of months ago has closed most of the trails in this park, and they are not expected to reopen for another several months.

I made a morning coffee and sat at the picnic bench with my binoculars. Crows competed with the woodpeckers in a cry-off contest, making so much noise that I wondered how the others were sleeping through it. Then the warblers showed up, with their little tweets and feeding frenzy: Yellow Rumped, Pine, what I think was a Northern Parula although the list doesn’t show them as winter birds here. A couple of different woodpeckers showed up: the Red Bellied and Ladder Backed. Then after that, nonbreeding plumage American Goldfinches came, feasting on little thistles, and then the area was completely taken over by the Cedar Waxwings. Once the waxwings left, chickadees and kinglets came in. It was like as if somewhere out of sight an usher pointed to each group like tables at a banquet, gesturing that it was their turn to step up to the buffet. I wondered how they established which groups came at each time: if it related to light, timing, temperature, etc. The next morning, I expected to see the same pattern, but didn’t. I didn’t even see the same kinds of birds the next morning, seeing instead hawks, herons, sparrows, a Northern Flicker, Eastern Pheobes, and Tufted Titmouse.

This time to contemplate and record observations would probably not have been possible if I had my baby with me. Jason ended up having to stay back with the baby and the dogs for this camping trip due to one of the dogs having gotten injured at the last minute before leaving Friday morning, too late to back out of the reservation. It would have been pretty cold to have been camping with a baby in these screened shelters we reserved, with little insulation from the heat. These are pictures of the one we stayed in:

Next time we come to this park to camp as a family, especially in winter, I think we will reserve either one of the the premium shelters or one of the mini-cabins. The mini-cabins are heated and have bunk beds, as well as little porches that look out over the lake. They are $75 a night, compared to $45 for the premium and $25 for the regular screened shelters. Below is a picture of premium shelter #1, which would be the best one to rent:

Despite most of the trails in this park being closed, we still found plenty to do, even though we didn’t do it all. Someday I want to come back here and go canoeing in the lake. We found some geocaches along the Winding Woodland Trail in the park until we reached the closed section. The girls hiked in Bastrop SP, and the first day of the New Year, so did my oldest son and I. The boys tried their hand at fishing and just ended up cold and frustrated with it, but I think they had fun anyways. We had two good fires both nights, the second night being the most surprising since it rained pretty good for about two hours before we got our fire going. My son impressed me with his fire skills, as well as his storytelling abilities. I am so proud of the young man he has turned into, and I love it that we had this experience where I got to see this side of him. All in all, we had a great camping trip, despite the weather.

We’ll be back sometime soon, Buescher, we’re not through with you yet.

2015: To Sum, and What’s to Come

Last Christmas, my mom gave me this journal in the above photo, and it turned out to be my favorite item of the entire year. I carried that with me during all my outdoor adventures and checked off all the birds I saw during the year on the master list in the back, as well as taking notes month to month. Comparing that list to last year’s, I see that I observed roughly the same amount of species this year as I did the year before: 132 in 2015, 134 in 2014. This is intriguing to me because we did a lot less traveling this year than the previous year, but I also had gotten a lot better at identifying birds in my own area. My mind is just still preoccupied with this subject.

There are a lot of blank pages still left in this journal, and hopefully I will be filling some more up this year. My goal for 2016 is to find over two hundred, and plan some trips specifically for the purpose of birding. However, even if we don’t travel much beyond Houston, there is so much to see within just a two hour radius of our town that I think I could still find that many. I feel like I am already off to a good start on this goal, having identified 22 species over the past couple of days that I spent camping at Buescher State Park.

In this past year, the National Park’s “Every Kid in a Park” campaign resulted in all fourth graders in America being granted an annual parks pass that is good until August 2016. We printed ours out (since we have a fourth grader this year) and would love to be able to utilize it this year to experience some more parks. However, the cost of raising a baby has been eating into our travel funds, so it remains to be seen whether a big road trip will be in our budget this year. I am hoping we can at least get to Big Bend or Fort Davis this year, or perhaps to Oklahoma or North Carolina to visit family, but we’ll have to see how things unfold.

My best friend Jen, who I just went camping with over the past two days, has an idea that she wants to go camping or at least hiking together like once a month over the next year, so that will provide some impetus for outdoor exploring, as well as my continued interest in being involved with Hike It Baby. Jen and I both have this dream that we will be backpackers and complete a thru hike one day, so we want to increase our hiking stamina and try an overnight hike this year to see how we like it. I also basically want to increase my physical fitness and overall health this year.

Another goal I have for 2016 is finally getting to 4000 geocache finds. I’ve been saying this for a couple of years now, but I am very close (162 finds away) now. However, we have really slowed down on geocaching. I used to average about 500 finds a year, and last year I only found 171. We did find three this weekend, and they were the kind I like (ammo cans in the woods) and so that did make me feel excited about finding more. I have gotten burned out on urban hides, especially some in my area, and that kind of killed the urge for me. If we are camping, hiking, and exploring parks, though, then I hope to combine geocaching with all that.

This year, Sebastian is going to learn how to swim (as much as a baby can learn), and Kaleb thinks he wants to try new sports, so there are some new frontiers there worth exploring as well. Now that Sebastian is a little more mobile, I am looking forward to discovering new parks with him, the way I used to with my older boys. We already discovered that a new one by our house is much more interesting than I anticipated, and I am excited by the idea of hosting his birthday party there. If there are Hike It Baby hikes scheduled on the weekends in new parks, that will be even more reason to explore a new park. Besides parks, there are other indoor areas around town that I haven’t shown my kids, or perhaps just not in such a long time that they might have forgotten them, so some exploring of Houston landmarks in general is still on our radar.

Basically, we’re not going to stop discovering the world in 2016, so stay tuned for more adventures!