Saturday, October 16, 2021

Balcones District Park (Austin, TX) – August 2020

 In the final days of the Georgetown Running Club’s 2020 Summer Tour, I was able to find a place I hadn’t been before to explore.  Extra points!  Hoody hoo!  I’ve lived in Austin for years, and this was a place which I drove by a lot, and I thought it was only a playground area.  Thanks to looking on Google Maps I saw there were some trails to explore.  This place is at the corner of Duval Road and Amherst Drive, and initially appeared to be an open grassy area.  But the trail actually took you along a stream (dried up) which had a lot of tree cover.

 This was mostly pavement, and I did see some bicyclists here and there.  After a short time, there’s a Y-intersection.  One branch will take you up an incline which eventually circles you back around to the park near Amherst.  The other direction brings you right to Mopac.  The trail becomes part of the sidewalk so you can cross a narrow pedestrian bridge, which will loop you underneath the Mopac, and out to the other side.  The trail resumes following Walnut Creek, and eventually will lead you to the Gracywoods Neighborhood Park (and the Walnut Creek Metropolitan Park a bit beyond that).  I obviously didn’t go that far on this trip, but I knew I’d have something new to check out on a later trip.

 I did have to point out that near the “under-Mopac loop” there were was another side trail which paralleled the train tracks going north.  There were also other areas where it appeared the trail went off in the woods (heading in the westerly direction, back towards the district park).  There were some No Trespassing signs at most of these sections, so I didn’t explore them.  Even looking on Google Maps it showed that area to be just woods, so I don’t know who owned it to put the signs up.  One of the trails had an archway with some pretty flowers on it.















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