A Hike Along Big Sandy Creek

Our hike in the Big Thicket National Preserve, Big Sandy Creek Unit.

The Woodlands Trail begins at a pine plantation and skirts around

Collins pond before winding its way towards Big Sandy Creek.

Looking forward to being back on the road and our upcoming summer adventures, David and I took a short trip a few weeks ago to the Big Thicket.  Back in January during our Christmas travels, we spent a day hiking in the Big Thicket.  We decided then that we should return as soon as possible and explore a little more.

David signs us in at the trailhead.

The Woodlands trail is 5.4 miles long, much of it following along Big Sandy Creek.

We got up early on a Friday morning with Maya, packs and lunches in the car and drove about two hours south from Nacogdoches to the Woodlands Trail trailhead in the Big Sandy Creek Unit of the Big Thicket.  We had a fine day for hiking and thoroughly enjoyed our 4-hour hike into the deep, dark thickets of East Texas.  

Much of this part of the Big Thicket was logged and then replanted

around 1963  before the preserve was established.

The Big Thicket is considered a National Preserve, so it is designated by the United States Congress and protected just like a National Park.  The biggest difference is that a National Preserve permits the extraction of natural resources so activities such as hunting, fishing, mining and oil/gas extraction could be allowed depending on the designating legislation for the particular preserve.

Fishing is allowed in the Big Thicket along Big Sandy Creek.

We did not know that the Big Thicket was the very first national preserve in the United States.  How cool is that?  It is not difficult to see why this area was designated as a preserve rather than a park.  Once upon a time much of East Texas was thickly forested.  But once people began to settle here most of the forest was cut.  Sawmills, railroads, farming and oil strikes brought more people and as they say, the rest is history.  No ‘big chunk’ of forest without human settlement or industry was left.  So 12 ‘little chunks’ or units surrounded by private lands and towns have been protected to preserve some of the remaining forests, bogs and 'thickets' and also the complex biological diversity of this area. 

David and I weren't sure what these strange structures were at first

as we didn't have these guys in West Texas where we grew up.

It's a crayfish burrow or home!

We never found the 'crawdads' but we sure saw a lot of 'adobe' homes along the trail.

And what an amazing diversity of plants and animals live here!  The reason is that the Big Thicket is at the ‘crossroads’ of many ecosystems – southeastern swamps, eastern forests, central plains and southwest deserts all kind of bump together here.  It is the variety of species that are found rather than the rarity or abundance of them that is so extraordinary.  Eighty-five different tree species, nearly 1,000 flowering plants and 186 kinds of birds can be found in the Big Thicket to name only a few of the plants and animals in this rather small region of Texas (at least compared to the rest of the great state).

Violets are one of the 1,000 flowering plants found in the Big Thicket.

As I am sure many of you know, this year marks the 100^th anniversary of the National Park Service.  David and I have been considering our travels this summer and we are thinking that with so many people looking to visit a park this year, well, it might be a good time to avoid the National Parks at least the popular ones.  But having just visited the Big Thicket and finding out that it was the very first national preserve established, we thought of making our goal this summer, "to seek out the lesser known and least visited of the National Park Service administered sites."  (Sounds similar to the ‘Star Trek’ mission, doesn’t it?  Although we won’t be going where no man has gone before, just where not so many of them are going.)

Maya checks out Big Sandy Creek

That still leaves a lot of territory to cover and we only have about 3 months for our ‘mission’ so it makes sense to limit our travels a bit.  The thought process at this point is that we will leave Nacogdoches next weekend and head to Odessa to spend a little time with my parents.  Our hope is that they will be well enough for us to take them to Ruidoso to spend a little family time at their cabin.  Then it will be time for our real journey to begin.  Since we will already be in New Mexico, we will most likely head to Santa Fe for our first ‘stop.’  That will be fitting as Santa Fe was our first stop ‘On the Road with Maya’ when we began our travels in Silver a mere four years ago.  I can’t believe how many places we’ve been and how fast those four years went by.  Though our full-time traveling days are temporarily on hold, we are so excited to be heading back out this summer.  There is still so much out there to see.

Our first visit to a 'Lesser known National Park Service site' 

Maya inspecting a very thorny plant.

There were no leaves yet making it hard to be sure what this plant is

but swamp locust or all-thorn could be considerations?