Four Landscapes Meet

This 1,140 acre park on the highway east of Austin sits directly on a seam in the map. Four distinct Texas ecosystems meet inside its boundaries: the Post Oak Savannah, the Blackland Prairie, an outlying finger of the East Texas piney woods, and the riparian corridor of the Colorado River itself. Walking the seventeen and a half miles of trail here means crossing from one into another within a few hundred yards, which almost nowhere else in the state allows you to do on foot in an afternoon. The terrain is the reason. These are steep eroded bluffs above the river, known locally as roughs, and the variation in soil, slope and which way a hillside faces is enough to support all four side by side. People worked this out a long time ago. Archaeological work has shown the roughs were used as a camping ground by hunter gatherers in the late Archaic period, around 2,100 years ago, and presumably for the same reason, which is that a place where four habitats touch is a place with a great deal to eat in it and several different ways to shelter. The Lower Colorado River Authority acquired the land and opened it as a nature park in 1998. The trails are shared between walkers, mountain bikers and riders on horseback, and the park runs an environmental learning centre on site.