Colorado Bend State Park
I took a friend from work down to Colorado Bend State Park for a day hike this week. As with most of the day hikes I take, this meant getting up around 4:30 AM, picking up whoever is hiking with me, and trying to be on the road by 5:45-6:00AM. Most of the really decent public day hiking is at least a two hour drive from here.
Colorado Bend State Park is about 100 miles north of Austin, and just under a three hour drive from here. It is also a fairly new State Park, first opened in 1987 along the banks of the Colorado River. As that it is upstream from the highland lakes, the Colorado still looks like a river.
Pliml and I started at the campground and walked the River Trail towards Gorman Falls, Sadly, we did not see the actual falls, but we did learn that the map of the park is far from accurate.
As with all of the photos on my blog they are clickable to see a decent sized version. (Opening them into a new tab of your brower will keep the reader from having to hit the back button.)
While we only hiked nine miles, it took us a bit longer than usual, as that we both are photography nerds.
...And if Pliml will hurry up, there will be some photos of me here.
The River Trail is fairly flat and mostly follows along the Colorado River, and is hemmed in on the other side by massive cliffs, with some of the only granite in the area. In years that the area is not in a drought, the trail crosses before several waterfalls, and quite a few of the 150 known caves in the park.
Here we crossed a dry waterfall, and right above one of the larger caves.
A couple of the caves are open for guided tours and self tours with the proper permit.
We stopped for a long lunch just short of the falls in a really interesting area. Trees splitting rocks in half, calcium deposit cliffs, lichen and moss covered boulders, huge trees.
There was very little litter on the trail. Well, there was very little new litter on the trail. I picked up some bits of plastic, but left the pile of ancient beer and soda cans. Some of the cans were at least fifty years old, and the newer ones were the older tin can style.
I should have snagged a better photo, but this is a canvas basketball shoe:
I found this bad boy stuffed up in nook in a cave wall. I did pack this one out before the acid starts to leak.
Of course there are no big trees in Texas.
After lunch we backtracked to a cross trail to climb out of the river canyon, up through the Cedar Chopper Loop trails, and bushwhack a little to hook up with another trail that would allow us to loop back to the car. While it was a great climb up out of the canyon, the trails on the ground did not match the map at all, and we wasted a little too much time getting out of the Cedar Chopper area. After finding that part of the map was not accurate we were a little bit hesitant to cut off trail to try to find another trail that we could not be sure was really there or not. So, we cut over to the road and looped back to the car that way.
Just over nine miles for this trip, and the mickey bottle now has 44 miles.
Colorado Bend State Park is about 100 miles north of Austin, and just under a three hour drive from here. It is also a fairly new State Park, first opened in 1987 along the banks of the Colorado River. As that it is upstream from the highland lakes, the Colorado still looks like a river.
Pliml and I started at the campground and walked the River Trail towards Gorman Falls, Sadly, we did not see the actual falls, but we did learn that the map of the park is far from accurate.
As with all of the photos on my blog they are clickable to see a decent sized version. (Opening them into a new tab of your brower will keep the reader from having to hit the back button.)
While we only hiked nine miles, it took us a bit longer than usual, as that we both are photography nerds.
...And if Pliml will hurry up, there will be some photos of me here.
The River Trail is fairly flat and mostly follows along the Colorado River, and is hemmed in on the other side by massive cliffs, with some of the only granite in the area. In years that the area is not in a drought, the trail crosses before several waterfalls, and quite a few of the 150 known caves in the park.
Here we crossed a dry waterfall, and right above one of the larger caves.
A couple of the caves are open for guided tours and self tours with the proper permit.
We stopped for a long lunch just short of the falls in a really interesting area. Trees splitting rocks in half, calcium deposit cliffs, lichen and moss covered boulders, huge trees.
There was very little litter on the trail. Well, there was very little new litter on the trail. I picked up some bits of plastic, but left the pile of ancient beer and soda cans. Some of the cans were at least fifty years old, and the newer ones were the older tin can style.
I should have snagged a better photo, but this is a canvas basketball shoe:
I found this bad boy stuffed up in nook in a cave wall. I did pack this one out before the acid starts to leak.
Of course there are no big trees in Texas.
After lunch we backtracked to a cross trail to climb out of the river canyon, up through the Cedar Chopper Loop trails, and bushwhack a little to hook up with another trail that would allow us to loop back to the car. While it was a great climb up out of the canyon, the trails on the ground did not match the map at all, and we wasted a little too much time getting out of the Cedar Chopper area. After finding that part of the map was not accurate we were a little bit hesitant to cut off trail to try to find another trail that we could not be sure was really there or not. So, we cut over to the road and looped back to the car that way.
Just over nine miles for this trip, and the mickey bottle now has 44 miles.
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