A Trip to Lost Maples State Natural Area, TX

Thursday morning was still pretty cool but with definite promises of warming up significantly.  Several of the women at the GTG expressed an interest in visiting Lost Maples State Natural Area to view the fall foliage. It is definitely a mistake to think you must in the frozen far north to see beautiful fall color.  Lost Maples is a small park which does have a campground.  Weekends are fully booked well in advance for October and November.  Even day visits on the weekend can be iffy because they only let so many people in at a time so there can be a lineup of cars waiting for someone to leave so they can get in.  So we decided that Thursday would be the best day to go.  Not everyone wanted to go since we had to make it clear that there would be a lot of walking (you can't see much just driving around) and we would be gone for a while.  In other words, it would take nearly an hour to get there so we would not be leaving the park 15 minutes after we got there.  Some ladies opted out when they had all the facts so we each packed a lunch and we headed out with two full vehicles.

It's a very nice drive to the park over some significant hills but, unfortunately, I didn't get any pictures on the drive.  Once at the park, we checked in.  Fortunately, one lady in each vehicle had a state park pass so no one had to pay extra.

We headed to the main parking lot in the day use area and set out to walk.  Several of the ladies have walking poles which come in handy in some of the rockier areas.

Our goal was to walk the main path.  There are also paths which require some significant climbing, not rappelling or anything like that, but challenging.  Diana is that kind of a hiker but the rest of us are not.

The park has a foliage report that they publish weekly in October and November but our visit was limited to our availability during our GTG.  Although there was more color to come in about a week, we were not disappointed during our visit.

We did see this "colorful" poison ivy but we gave it a wide berth.

It was still rather cool at this point but it continued to warm all day.

After we completed the walk, we found a picnic table in the day use area and had our lunch.  There were lots of visitors but not enough to impact our visit.

On the way home, we pulled off and made a quick stop to take some photos of a small group of buildings along the road that looked like they were set up for rentals.  They look very rustic but we noticed electric lines as well as satellite dishes to provide the conveniences.

We had a lovely day.  We did make a short stop at the Apple Store in Medina.  Several of the ladies that did not want to hike definitely wanted to go to Medina so we made another trip but you will have to read my Sunday post to hear about that.

If you want to see more of the color at Lost Maples, check out my 2011 trip to the campground.
Lost Maples Day 1
Lost Maples
Lost Maples Day 2