Texas - Day 139 - in Lost Maples

Lost Maples State Natural Area, Vanderpool

Monday, 22 March 2021

Being a State Natural Area instead of a State Park means the Park Dept. is supposed to maintain and protect the natural area as its top priority.  To do that, the department can close recreational areas and restrict activities if they think those are infringing on the needs of the area.  In this case, the only facilities here are a campground with 30 sites, a large picnic area, and a number of trails through the arms of the canyon.  This is the Sabinal Canyon, remember?  And they have signs warning people they'll close trails if they need to.

picnic area

It's lucky I took this photo yesterday when I got in, because all today was overcast, with a fair amount of rain at times.  The pretty green tree in that photo is one of the maples, most of them still in various stages of leafing out.  I'm guessing this area is absolutely stunning in the fall, which is why people come here.

Not only was it rainy today, but there was also a lot of wind, which kept the temperature on the quite chilly side for most of the day.  The upside of that is that other campers weren't sitting outside with their dogs, making it easier for me to walk mine.

On our second walk of the day, Dext found an armadillo, which cut that walk short, and on the third walk we saw everybody else walking their dogs, which were all big.  So we really didn't get to move around much until mid-afternoon, when we walked the half-mile (each way) down to the picnic area.  We all really enjoyed that.

I didn't have an internet or a phone signal, so I used the computer's word processing program to draft several blog posts and got at least a start on the backlog I ran up due to driving every day with no breaks.

As far as I was concerned, the only real drawback to our campsite was that it was on a serious slope, and I don't have the means to level myself.  But there were other vacant sites that were perfectly flat - they were just buried in the middle of the campground and I'd never have been able to get the dogs out for a walk.  Mine was the end site, so we could slip out to the road and avoid the 2 big barking dogs next door.