St. Edwards Park 3/25/15

Posted on March 26, 2015 by Ian

Wednesday, March 25th, 2015

Hike: St. Edwards Park – Austin, TX

Weather: low 80s, sunny, clear

Hikers: Ian, Court, Biff

Length: 3.27 miles

We discovered a great new trail today. St. Edwards Park is located off of 360 on Old Spicewood Springs Road. I knew there was a greenbelt of sorts in this area, but had never been. I am off on Wednesdays for the next few months at least, which could work out well for hiking and avoiding some crowds. We did still see several hikers despite it being the middle of the week, along with some weirdness. Lots of pics on this one. It was such a beautiful trail. Very happy we found it.

After starting at the trail head we got down to a small dam that was built in the early 70s by a family in the area and created a pretty nice swimming hole if we were properly attired. Maybe next time.

We headed down the trail a little further, crossed the creek (Bull Creek) and headed up the rocky trail, gaining about 300 feet of elevation.

Court putting shoes back on after crossing barefoot

When we got to the top we skirted the edge of the park for a while, which ran along the border of part of the Balcones Canyonlands Preserve.

We headed back down to the creek again where we had to actually ford the creek instead of simply rock hopping. Court full on forded in her hiking shoes, but I was able to stay somewhat dry, carrying Biff across too. Her shoes dried out pretty quick afterwards and luckily my Merrells actually lived up to their water proof claims. The water was clear and beautiful.

We walked along the creek for a while and then came to a cove on the creek with beautiful waterfall coming down into a clear pool with fish. It was very peaceful and we lingered there for a while before heading on.

Now the weird part of the hike. We came back up from the creek through an open clearing with a lot of cactus and then headed north back up the creek in the opposite direction. When we came down there were a couple of people swimming and laying out about 50 yards off. We quickly saw that the girl was topless and they definitely saw us, but didn’t seem to care. We went to the end of the trail and turned back to give them time to put on clothes, but that wasn’t the case. Not only that, but when we approached the water we saw another girl with them (top on this time, but a pink thong) and there was a lot of picture taking with their phones of some very intimate situations and locations. Did we just walk onto an amateur porno shoot? Not sure what was exactly going on, but it was…odd, to say the least.

porno shoot was behind us when I took this. trying to act like everything was normal.

Anyway, we walked back the way we came and explored a couple more side trails before getting back to the trail head. We didn’t really go too far overall and it was a gorgeous day, so we stopped at Central Market on the way back and sat on the deck and had some beets, cheese, beer, and some treats for Biff. Court got a Topo Chico. Great day. Great trail.