Spring Lake Preserve Natural Area

Lime Kiln Entrace Review
This park promotes Hiking and Biking and has no river access. It is not wheelchair accessible. There is a port-​a-​potty and mutt mitt station at this entrance. No water fountains at all.
Somebody: Are there things you think San Marcos doesn’t do well?
Me: Yeah, promote it’s other parks well. Like, zero percent brown signs pointing to trails. There’s blatant intention to keep long and short-​term residents from parks away from the river.
Today after exploring the city’s parks and rec website, I ventured out to this Natural Area aka a PARK. I’m a short term resident (student-​ish) here and I was just wondering if there was somewhere else to take my dog to other than the perpetually muddy, ambiguously routed, and mosquito ridden Purgatory Creek at the Prospect Entrance or bland dog park. So I’ve wondered what San Marcos does with that park and rec money, since the parks near the river are kinda meh, and now I know. They put into these natural areas.
It rained this morning so we encountered mud and more mud, going up the right Encorya (sp?) trail and coming back down on the left Heroin trail. It’s kind of a insult having all that mulch piled up at the entrance after encountering the mud. However reaching Tonkawa Trail was awesome, there was actually a sun dial and calender slab at the top of the hill and the paths became paved and pebble covered. The Tonkawa trail runs for 2 miles to the Meadows center, which by the look of things is pretty inaccessible and easily missed. There was no definitive signage I could see from the road telling anyone they were near a park trail.
Walking from the entrance, Meadows, and back it was 4 miles so it was a good leisure hike. However back at the top of the hill where the sun dial was you could actually go down another trail that took you all the way to North LBJ! So when I find the time I will go to that entrance and see what the area is like.
Can’t wait for the weather to dry up so me and the pup, can have another opportunity out there.
Edit: 6:18:15: North LBJ entrance is closed and in the worst location possible. It’s immediately behind those colorful townhouse apartments they squeezed onto LBJ before it becomes a residential area. I barely noticed it until I saw some of those prism boulders the city uses at all the parks down the road. This entrance is so narrow, I mistook it as an entrance to the apartment complex or a place for a dumpster to go in and haul trash. It looks like there’s barely any parking there, just a few spots. I already know they have problems with students parking there and going to school. Definitely not using that or the Meadows entrance.