After an overnight stay in Jasper and a quick stop at the Post Office in Lumberton, we were off to our next state park of the trip, Village Creek State Park, which is in Lumberton. This seems to be a relatively new state park, at least it is not on my MapSource map from Garmin. However, it seems to have multiple areas. We were particularly taken aback by how very geocaching friendly the ranger was as we checked in. That is probably why there are more than 30 caches in this park. Unfortunately, due to flooding on Village Creek, several portions of the park were closed, including the cypress swamp and the beaver swamp. Actually the trails were not closed, but according to the ranger we would have had to make our way through waist deep water across several of the trails. Hmmm...not on this trip.
As we made our way along several of the trails in the drier part of the park, we were blown away by the diversity of the plants we saw within a small area. We later learned this was a characteristic of the Big Thicket. Although not part of the federal lands designated as part of the Big Thicket National Wildlife Preserve, this park would definitely have been within the original Big Thicket region. It was commercial lumbering and the creation of numerous company lumbering towns, Lumberton apparently being an example, which led to opening up the region.
We did check out the creek before leaving. By north Texas standards it was not a creek, but a raging river. All in all this was an interesting park, but we will need to return sometime when it is drier so we can see more of it.
No comments:
Post a Comment