Crews begin blazing trail along Spring Creek
Suzanne Simpson cannot help but laugh as she points through the trees at the remains of a tan couch, overgrown by plants and covered with mud, and then at a broken television set a few yards farther into the woods.
“You could furnish your entire apartment out here,” she said.
Simpson, a biologist at the Bayou Land Conservancy, surveys the northern section of the Spring Creek Greenway several times a week, marking the outline of a future 11-mile bike and hike trail that will soon be constructed through the wooded area. Simpson and her team — two college-aged interns — have been braving the heat and the bugs for several months, ensuring the area selected for the trail is ready for the construction team.
The Spring Creek Greenway is a 33-mile corridor that follows a northwesterly path from near the San Jacinto River in Harris County to Montgomery County. The earthen trail is being developed on Montgomery County’s side of Spring Creek and will stretch from the Montgomery County Preserve, north of the new Exxon Mobil campus, to the George Mitchell Nature Preserve in The Woodlands. Three miles of the trail have already been outlined and, according to Jennifer Lorenz, executive director of the conservancy, the remainder will be mapped out by the end of the summer. Harris County opened its own, 12-mile asphalt trail in 2014.
The current project got
underway in February, after the conservancy received a $100,000 grant from the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. Since then, The Woodlands Township, Montgomery County Precinct 3 and outdoor supplies retailer REI have chipped in a combined $70,000 for the trail. The conservancy is scheduled to complete the project in three years, but Lorenz said they will likely finish much earlier than 2018.
In addition to placing small pink flags in the woods to establish a tentative outline for the trail, the conservancy will have to refocus some of its attention on getting the garbage along the edge of the woods removed.
“Fencing, more mattresses, beheaded baby dolls — they’re always here,” Simpson said. “People are subject to a fine (for dumping), but catching people in the act of doing it is very uncommon.”
58 preserves
The nonprofit has conservation easements on 58 different properties along the greenway in both Harris and Montgomery County. The easements allow the counties to maintain ownership of the land while permitting the conservancy to manage the properties and ensure the natural features of the lands are protected. According to Simpson, the landowner, in this case Montgomery County, is responsible for removing the garbage.
“We are the security blanket for the preserve. We have the preserve’s best interests at heart,” Simpson said of the easement. “Montgomery County doesn’t have a parks department, so we sometimes have to act as their department with the monitoring. We have 58 preserves at this point, so our eyes can’t be everywhere.”
A spokesman for the Montgomery County Precinct 3 Commissioner did not respond to questions by press time Tuesday.
Planning for the greenway dates back to the 1980s, when a Harris County judge moved to preserve land along Spring Creek. The greenway now has 13 parks and preserves with their own interior trails, making it the longest urban forested greenway in the country. The bulk of it remains completely wild.
So far, the discarded television sets, fragments of abandoned toilets and broken vacuums have added another item to the conservancy’s to-do list, but they have not stalled the group’s efforts. Most of the debris sits on the very edges of the preserve — areas that are most easily accessible to people looking to dump their trash. Deeper into the words, signs of human carelessness are less evident. Natural causes, though, could put a damper on the trail’s progress, as several portions of the would-be trails are waterlogged.
Reducing impact
“This is a floodway, it will absolutely flood,” Simpson said as she gestured to an area on the greenway just south of The Woodlands where the flags marking the trail’s future path were completely submerged in floodwater, likely the result of the creek ooding and rainwater collecting. “What we’re trying to do is create a system that can be used most of the time. ... We don’t want to make a decision right now about whether this is an area that’s always going to be this flooded, or if it’s only flooded because we’re having this historic rain. Right now, we couldn’t move it if we wanted to because of the water.”
For the most part, the new trail will be built where the trees have already given way and created openings that some people already drive ATVs through. When natural pathways are unavailable, the construction team will have to make its own path through the woods. The construction will be completed by members of the Spring Creek Greeway Ambassador Program, volunteers who seek to complement the efforts of the conservancy’s small staff. Before construction can start, the land must undergo a formal archaeological survey because of the rich history of the greenway — once home to the indigenous Akokisa tribe.
“That’s one of our prerogatives, to use trails that are already existing just to reduce our impact,” Simpson said. “We’re trying to make lemonade out of lemons. People have trespassed and these trails have been here for a long time. We want to formalize them and make them into something everybody can use.”
According to John Stacy, a certified Texas Master Naturalist, creating a mechanism for the public to interact with nature is vital to educating people about their own backyards.
“I’d lived in Houston for 22 years and I had no clue all of this was here,” Stacy said. “To me, if you were in Houston and you wanted to be outdoors that meant you flew to Denver and went out in the mountains or you kayaked in Big Bend. …Once people know what’s out there, it stops being a scary green thing and starts being a cool thing.”