Woodway Park (Waco, TX)

2013.08.24 - Woodway Park Nature Trail

After a day of geocaching near Walburg in Central Texas, we cached our way to Lake Waco and Woodway Park. On the Google Maps, Woodway dubs as Midway Park and is just inside the Waco city limits. As a matter of fact, it appears the whole Lake Waco is within the Waco city limits.

There is trail head parking on the Park loop to the east of Estates Drive overlooking the lake. As we learned from our walk, this nature trails has many entry points. Some are obvious and with others, after a few trips, they maybe obvious as well.

The trail head also is the start of a night cache, but it is too bright to do it as intended. Right off, we like the dirt path and it is wide enough to not be rubbing brush, yet intimate. Within a hundred feet, we are united with nature. It feels great leaving civilization for a couple of hours. Nothing could be better.

At the first cross path, we turn to go west. I thought I had a idea of how the trail went, but not far we come across a trail map that shows me how off base I am. Woodway is divided into four sections, yellow, red, green, and blue. Yellow follows the park loop road to the lake and comes back. We entered the trail almost at the southern end of Yellow before it met Red. The Red is the largest section and the most confusing. We found ourselves making a wrong turn thinking we were still on the outer section of the trail only to realize we got on the cutoff. The cutoff is the White trail and runs north and south from the southern border of the park to the northern loop park road. In this section we heard the faint sounds of frisbee golfers and stepped aside for one biker. Thinking back, getting lost on Red with many exits was an adventure.

On the Green southern section, there are exits to a playground. Green is meant to be pass through from Red to Blue and back to Red. There are places to cut between the northern and southern park and bypass Blue, but that wouldn't be much fun. Green is also where we found our first cache, A Tree with Roots - Park 1. In the Blue section, we picked up a couple more caches, An Uphill Battle and On Olden Pond. On Olden Pond was after we made the loop back and on a blocked paved road nature is retaking. We tried for a couple higher difficulty caches but came up empty.

As we were spending time looking, the sun was quickly setting. I looked toward the lake and snapped a photo of the Texas Loop 340 bridge. Beautiful. I admired it for a moment and then we started our sprint back to the car.

We realized we got through the Northern Green section fast. I enjoyed the elevation changes of this trail. It is not flat and there are some small switchbacks. There are many dips for biker enjoyment and a couple of places where ducking is required. This may not be a long day's hike, but it is far from boring.

To our amusement, we find ourselves at the creek crossing where we made the wrong turn earlier. How did that happen? We reexamined the trail map and then decided on which way to proceed. By now, the trees were blocking the remaining sun rays. There was still enough light for us to see and when we made it to where the Red Loop completes, we could almost smell the sandwiches we were about to order at Subway. I wish we had come by earlier so we could walk the Yellow to it's end and back, but maybe another cooler day.

We walked 3.77 miles over 1 hour : 38 minutes averaging 26 minutes : 12 seconds per mile.

Total Blogged miles: 228.93 miles.