El Rancho Cima

El Rancho Cima was a Boy Scout camp on the Blanco River for about sixty years, owned by the Sam Houston Area Council, the scouting council for the Houston region. Its 2,382 acres took in more than a mile of the river and part of the Devil's Backbone, the narrow ridge that Ranch Road 32 follows between Wimberley and Blanco. Scouts from across Texas came each year to hike, swim and camp, and for decades the land was closed to the public. The Memorial Day flood of 2015 swept away at least one of the camp's buildings, and in 2016 the council put the whole property on the market for more than $25 million. An effort by Hays County commissioner Lon Shell to raise the money for a conservation purchase fell short, and in 2019 the council sold the whole ranch to a private investor group, which divided it into tracts of a few hundred acres. That made a public purchase possible. Later in 2019 The Nature Conservancy bought the 535 acres that held all of the camp's river frontage, a mile along both banks of the Blanco, for nearly $13 million. Hays County contributed $7 million it had set aside to protect habitat for the golden-cheeked warbler, a songbird that nests only in Central Texas. In 2020 county voters approved a $75 million parks bond, with about seventy percent in favour, that included the money to buy the land from the Conservancy. The land passed to Hays County in 2022 under a permanent conservation easement and was renamed Sentinel Peak Preserve. The county's plan for it called for a warbler preserve with a riverfront park along the Blanco, swimming, hiking and a nature center, open by reservation only.