rocky trails | Life and Day to Day things by a Pond Lover

A view of the swimming hole. In the summertime, this area is packed with people.

My friend BJ called me to set up a hike with the possibility of her going to Reimers Ranch for the first time. However, the best laid plans and all of that were changed at the last minute due to a hairdresser’s appointment that somehow, she had forgotten about. So instead of Reimers, we opted to go to the State Park at McKinney Falls as it was closer and about midway between Bastrop where she lives and South West Austin, where I live.

The only real green thing in the park. Such a beautifully shaped tree.

Instead of walking the long blacktopped trail that goes around the park as we usually do, we decided to explore the trails on the other side of the Upper Falls as the water in the creeks was running low making it easy to get across without getting our feet wet. The Upper Falls are at the confluence of Onion Creek and Williamson Creek and after any heavy rains, the creeks normally run full of water. We haven’t had much rain for the past several months except for the odd shower here and there.

We kinda wandered around following what we thought was a major trail but in the end it petered out forcing us to retrace our steps. We toyed with the idea of jumping across the crevasses in the rock base just as a young guy had done just before us but neither of us had enough confidence in our ability to do that. We even looked to do some rock jumping in the creek as the water was only about 6-8 inches deep but the thought of having wet feet for the rest of the hike kinda put us off.

So we retraced our steps back to the starting point and then chose an alternate trail to hike. This one was blacktopped part of the way and would have led us to the Lower Falls if we had continued but we turned off onto a parallel trail and made our way back this time following Onion creek. We got as far as the giant cypress tree and even though, the bridge across had been rebuilt, the trail was closed on the other side. We had no choice but to backtrack and rejoin our original trail back to the parking lot. There were a lot of people about enjoying the beautiful mild day with the temperature hovering around the 75 degree mark. Not bad for wintertime but not unusual here in Texas. Next time we come here and if the water level is still low, we plan on visiting the Lower Falls and walking the trails on the other side. A lot of today’s hike was walking on the rocky surface which I found to be uncomfortable to walk on. Altogether, we covered almost 3.5 miles.