Barton Creek Greenbelt in Austin, Texas

I walked the trails at Barton Creek Greenbelt yesterday. I took the Loop 1/360 entrance which brings you in about midway along the trails and headed West following the creek all the way  until I reached Sculpture Falls. Altogether, I covered about 12 miles in my hike according to my handy-dandy pedometer. I took a different approach this time and used the video camera instead of my Nikon as I wanted to include more documentation that the digital camera can provide.

With Texas in the middle of a major drought, it was no surprise in the complete absence of water in the creek until about midway through the walk when I came across a fairly large stretch of water which turned out to have no inlet or outlet. Just a very large oversize puddle in the creek bed. It must be spring fed in order to exist unless it was the remnants of some recent rains.

Pressing on, I could hear the sound of water in the distance, the sound that water makes as it goes over the rocks and waterfalls so I knew that I would come across the water eventually. As i was stuck to following the trail, when it wandered away from the creek, I lost sight of my objective of searching for the water in the creek. When eventually the creek became visible again, lo and behold it was full and flowing.

So, somewhere between where I re-connected with the creek and the dry creek bed, the water suddenly appeared. The question is, what happens to the water that it doesn’t flow all of the way? Does it just disappear and soak down into the Edwards Aquifer and the only time that there is water downstream is if there is sufficient rainfall to keep the creek full?

I plan on going back to try to find the end of the current stream to see what is happening. It’s a bit of a mystery.

Enjoy the video.

Barton Creek Greenbelt 10-09-2013 from Francis Allcorn on Vimeo.