Autumn Trail
Mimi Cavender
As our Central Texas Hill Country suburbanizes at the nation’s highest rate, as ranchlands subdivide into housing tracts and shopping centers, the remaining islands of wildlife habitat are still Nature’s best hope to keep Texas Texas. And riparian areas become especially precious as the climate warms and dries. Our rivers and creeks, even when seasonally low, can all be nature preserves, whether officially declared so and protected—or not.
Hays County, just west of Austin, is rich in small, officially protected natural areas. Eleven of them are celebrated in the state-awarded Beautiful Hays County Activity and Coloring Book, published by the Hays County Chapter of Texas Master Naturalist™ for families to download free for nonprofit use.
One of these is a precious remnant of creekside wild habitat in Wimberley. Cypress Creek Nature Preserve is a 2.25–mile trail, with restrooms, an information kiosk, and a covered picnic area at the park’s official trailhead on Old Kyle Road just off the Square. From there, you can adventure along an unimproved but perfectly comfortable wooded trail all the way to the main lower parking area for nearby Blue Hole Regional Park—a 40-minute scenic hike or an hour’s more leisurely exploration. It’s a pleasant way to enjoy two destinations—two connected natural areas—in one visit.
You come away with a strong sense of how this interconnected landscape and its life-giving water must have drawn indigenous people and European settlers. Could some of these oldest cypresses have been saplings then? What luck that the land within the preserve has remained in its natural state even as the City of Wimberley grew up around it!
But wait! There’s a less official trailhead at the Blue Hole end, at the far back of the main parking area, past a row of private homes, at the end of a short path.
This is where we start our trail adventure now, letting Cypress Creek Nature Preserve reveal itself in the late afternoon glow of autumn, 2023. Ready?
A few strides along the trail, we marvel that Wimberley’s cafes and shops are only 2 miles upstream. There’s only bird song and a breeze in the tree canopy beginning to close above us.
Nature wraps around us. To avoid eroding the stream bank and to preserve pristine ecology on both sides of us, we’re to stay on the trail and never approach the creek.
After a rain, the trail will be muddy—this is marshy habitat. But on a dry November day, negotiating big cypress roots is part of the fun. We’re alert not to step on them and endanger the health of the tree.
Trailside branch piles remind savvy hikers to stay on the trail. Cypress Creek Nature Preserve partners, the City of Wimberley Parks Department and the Wimberley Valley Watershed Association, with Hays County Master Naturalist volunteers, have cleared the trail of catastrophic tree fall debris from the 2023 ice storm.
With the first November cold, cypress needles redden and fall to carpet the path, reduce erosion, and build creekside soil. Leaf and branch debris is a valuable stream bank stabilizer and a refuge for wildlife. Haven’t we wondered where the birds go during winter’s severe cold? Into shelter-rich wild places like this!
We spot a portion of old dry stack wall. This run of Cypress Creek is classified as a remnant property, land never recorded as ranched or farmed and so harboring a pristine natural environment. We wonder about the history of this stone fence, especially since it’s just across the creek from the 19th-century Wimberley mill race, where similar stone walls were abundant. There’s another possible explanation, offered by the Wimberley Valley Watershed Association in its 2021 Master Plan for Cypress Creek:
Directly adjacent to the preserve, a previous landowner cleared a swath of the riparian area to create what was likely a quite productive farm. The farmer also built a low stone wall, along the border of the probable historic flood zone, which today forms the northeastern border of the preserve. The wall is the only significant man-made structure within the preserve.
Non-native invasive species such as this nandina (and a single tall chinaberry we spotted farther down the trail) have escaped from private and public gardens. Mockingbirds gobble nandina berries…
But in this old forest, the diversity of native plants is impressive. How many tree species can you count in this one crowded little grove reaching out of the shallow canyon for the autumn sun?
The most abundant trees here are bald cypress, Ashe juniper (our “cedar”), pecan, black walnut, sycamore, cedar elm, American elm, and red oak---with their distinctive bark patterns and just enough fall color still tufting their tops for us to sort them out. What’s that smooth white limb arching over the trail?
Every hundred yards or so, there are reminders to conscientious visitors to stay on the trail to preserve the creek and its banks from species damage, soil compaction, and erosion. Yep, respecting the trail is a small price for the survival of all this natural beauty. It’s that simple.
Across the creek are private properties—closer to town, they’re mostly rentals, bed and breakfasts. Most have mown lawns, which erode and don’t attract wildlife beyond feral cats, tame deer, and masked bandit raccoons. But we know that these property owners—so vital to the City’s economy—value the beauty they see just across the creek and will join in the ecological interests guiding the City of Wimberley’s and the Wimberley Valley Watershed Association’s visionary initiative.
The trail narrows a little as a wealth of native vegetation surges in from both sides: inland sea oats, agarita, frostweed…
Roots of cypress writhe across the path. What’s ahead?
In thickets under the big cypresses, among thready pecan, red oak, and cedar elm saplings, a yaupon’s red berries glow in afternoon light. Yaupon, an American native holly (Ilex), thrives as well in damp riparian habitat as where we usually see them—in xeriscaped urban yards.
Let’s keep exploring toward town…About halfway there, we come into thickets of native mustang grape, climbing jungle-like all around us.
Grape vine trunks grow huge and sculptural in this moist microclimate…
…swirling up into the tallest pecans, oaks, and elms…
…high into the Hill Country blue sky above.
The creek canyon wall has been gradually rising on our left as we near downtown. Geologically ancient limestone was water-sculpted into deep overhangs and small karst caves when this creek was a raging river. Central Texas was once alive with flowing water.
The modern creek bank retains its moist rich soil deposits that support the diversity of native trees here and plants such as inland sea oats.
On our left, the canyon wall grows taller where ancient floods spalled off limestone slabs as big as barns. Up at street level are signs of humanity now—their trucks, pizzas, beer, burgers, and beds…and faint voices of children still just out of view above the cliff face.
And the first houses break the illusion here of wilderness.
The trail widens a bit…
…and curves up and out of the dream.
We’ve reached the point where the Nature Preserve’s downtown trailhead skirts the broad back lawns of shops and restaurants on Wimberley Square. Rather than climb the steps up to street level here, we continue into commercial space beyond the Preserve.
Looking back, we realize our mistake! Visitors are encouraged to enter and leave the Preserve by the designated trail routes. These are sensitive ecologies, we’re warned.
These park-like public back yards have for a century drawn visitors to little Wimberley’s romance of water and ancient cypress. The lawns are hard packed dirt sparsely grassed. The hope is to restore them to the adjacent Preserve’s natural diversity.
Five years of deepening drought and shallowing aquifers have slowed the water’s flow. This fall the creek is a flat blue mirror crusted with cypress needles.
Again looking back along the big trees, we can see the protected natural world we’ve left behind. Wilderness so near, so precious.
Here, downtown, there are the old stone benches…
… and picnic tables at water’s edge. I was here with my dad in the 50s and again with my sons in the 80s. When I brought my visiting granddaughter here in 2014, the creek’s deep pools seemed eternal.
RR12’s downtown creek bridge crosses a shallow rapid that only those ten years ago still splashed and gurgled unmistakable Hill Country music.
From the original stone diving stairs, now above mirror-still water…
Photo: Tripadvisor contributor Inspire587709
…we rest and watch a perfect autumn afternoon fade to dusk.
Towns like Wimberley, counties, private landowners, and states can make more, many more, of these “homegrown national parks.” Wilderness islands like Cypress Creek Nature Preserve are time machines. Experiencing them, we’re rendered nostalgic for our past and mindful of what we want for ourselves and all living things in a future world we can plan for.
Refreshed from our trail walk, armed with past and future, we also have the present—in which to act.