Onion Creek Greenbelt 3/5/16

Saturday, March 5, 2016

Onion Creek Greenbelt, Austin, TX

About 5 miles

This was a new hike for us in the Austin area.  We’ve hit most trails in and around Travis County at least once, but there are a few down south still waiting to be explored.  This park was heavily ravaged by the October floods in 2015 and is still recovering.  There is one section of the park where parts of plastic trash bags cling to the trees everywhere and look like huge black crows dotting the canopy.  It is somewhat depressing, but there was a volunteer group out this morning picking up trash.

We got to the trail head around 9am with Biff in tow.  The trail is pretty flat, but has a lot of different branches so you can loop around in different trail configurations for a variety of options.  We got to the Onion Creek crossing and opted to wade directly through the water, as opposed to the makeshift bridge made out of a couple of planks of wood.  I wanted to get my shoes completely submerged to test the breathe-ability and see how fast they dry, which was a success.  The water was only about 5 inches deep or so, but is running nicely.

At the other side of the creek, the trail climbed out of the creek drainage and became flatter and was a sparse forest with very green grass.  Most of the trees don’t have leaves yet, but they are on the verge.

We wound around a few loops and passed by a small pond that was really more of a marsh at this point.  This trail also has a lot of cactus.  You get used to cactus in Texas, but groves like this make you remember what an interesting plant it can be.

We made our way back down across the creek where Court made an attempt to cross on the 2×4’s that had been used as a footbridge, but quickly abandoned it.  We got back to the trail head and headed off to the UT baseball game for the rest of the afternoon.  This was a nice trail and good change of pace.  I have a couple of more new trails planned for this spring that I found in the area.  Looking forward to a good spring of hiking.