Through the gates on the west side of the parkway, past the visitor’s centers,
picnic areas, and comfort stations, and across the stream-etched lava flows and
old ocean floor, a pair of food-focused little blue herons splash past a logy
turtle hanging on to a steeply sloping rock face. His head, which rotates
mechanically at precise 45-second intervals, is pointed downward, into the
swimming hole that catches Onion Creek as it cascades over Lower McKinney
Falls.
A new bird hits the miniature beach, flaps his wings in a grand
I’m-outta-here
gesture and gets no response from his avian brethren. So he does it again, and
again, until the other herons look up from their lunch, and only then does he
soar over the lower falls, the river willows, the moss and lichen, the
butterflies and damselflies, the winter-white Chronicle writer and the
billion-year-old leftovers from Pilot Knob’s wild years, before thudding into
the shallows. The turtle dozes. A snake swims across the hole, bouncing and
tail-wagging like a happy little dog.
This episode of Wild Kingdom is brought to you by… well, by the
generosity of the Smith family (as in the nearby Smith School), who in 1971
gave this swatch of land between the Southeast Austin gravel pits to the state,
and by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD), which turned it into
McKinney Falls State Park – the only TPWD facility among Travis County’s vast
array of green space. Superintendent Ned Ochs plays the role of Marlon Perkins.
“It’s totally different out here from the [Austin] urban area – with the
diversity of wildlife and plant life in the park, It doesn’t seem you’re in the
city, even though you are,” he says. “Even I have trouble comprehending that I
actually live in Austin.” (As at most state parks, the superintendent at
McKinney lives on site.)
For a visitor, who drove here past the factories, body shops, Sonics, and
other scenic wonders of Southeast Austin, the hard part is not believing that
McKinney Falls is in the city, but that it was created by Nature At Work.
Unless you’re sitting right next to the falls, which roar much louder than
their high school-point guard height should justify, you can well hear the
Reddi-Mix trucks and Lockhart-bound exurbanites on the highways around the
park, not to mention the aerial traffic headed to both the once and future
airports. It looks, but does not really feel, like a wilderness. Rather, it
recalls a botanical garden, or perhaps a theme park, created for Austinites’
enjoyment on the site of some industrial shipwreck, with the birds and trees
and turtles brought in by truck from beyond the urban fringe.
Of course, McKinney Falls is very real and quite natural, proof that “the
environment” exists on both sides of MoPac. At the confluence of Onion and
Williamson Creeks, which flow parallel to, and faster than, the traffic on Ben
White Boulevard, the falls themselves – upper and lower, a few hundred yards
apart – bathed turtles and Tonkawa Indians for a couple millennia before being
pressed into service to drive a grist mill on the homestead of Thomas McKinney,
one of Stephen F. Austin’s Old Three Hundred. The well-heeled McKinney
spent his time in gentlemanly pursuits, including milling, banking, lumbering,
war profiteering, and horse breeding, before being paupered by the Civil War
and losing the property to the Smiths. Among the park’s attractions are the
ruins of the McKinney house, and the trainer’s cabin and mill located above the
lower falls.
These historical features, along with Tonkawa rockshelters and artifacts,
well-developed trails, and a couple hundred different kinds of birds, make
McKinney Falls a popular place to take the kids on field trips, and often
school groups will have the park to themselves. On a late-spring Friday
afternoon, you could well be the owner of the only set of opposable thumbs
around the falls, watching the hawks match aerobatic skills with the leftover
Bergstrom jets. The visitor’s center, empty and locked until the start of the
summer season, has cheese and crackers for sale to non-existent customers, next
to tables scattered with fossils and antlers under mounted photos of the same
wildflowers that grow rampant outside. The center’s deck overlooks the upper
falls, which are prettier though shorter than the lower. On this day, three
middle schoolers ditch their bikes and take a swim, one of them with hair much
longer than we were allowed at his age, still wearing his gimme cap turned
backwards. The only other human around is a cyclist from Bergstrom, circling
the park on the four miles of paved hike-and-bike, the longest such trail at
any state park.
While Superintendent Ochs feels the park is neither over- nor underused, it
seems pretty certain that, compared to Austin’s other natural attractions,
McKinney Falls lacks a certain star quality. Most Austinites know their natural
history the way New Yorkers know the subway stops, and can tell you which birds
eat which bugs, which trees flourish in which watershed, which sewer plant
dumps fecal coliform into which swimming hole. Over the years, this has led
them to give a wide berth to McKinney, which for most of its history as a park
was too polluted to swim in, collecting all the runoff and chemical debris from
the recent sprawl of New South Austin. The creeks were reopened to swimmers in
1993 in a ceremony that featured, among other things, poet Raul Salinas
anointing local politicians with an eagle feather dipped in the falls’ waters.
Unfortunately, none in attendance on that 100-degree day could actually swim,
due to heavy rains the previous week – as with Barton Springs, the water
quality at McKinney is variable, and downpours make the holes off-limits. (In
fact, the falls are fed in part from the Barton Creek Watershed, in case you
believed that East Austin was truly unaffected by West Austin’s water
quality.)
On hot summer weekends, when most of us would gladly take a dip in an
irrigation ditch, McKinney Falls is duly packed, as is attested by the dusting
of cigarette butts and Flea-Mart cups filled with beer-drowned butterflies. The
rest of the time, Ochs notes, many park visitors are overnight campers from out
of the area, or even out of the country. “A lot of these people are looking for
the state parks,” he says. “It’s a really good stopping-off point for people
who want to visit Austin and the surrounding towns, and we tell them about
things to do, places to go, attractions to see.”
Several of those attractions are other parks, which makes Ochs’ role
double-edged. “We’re obviously in competition, even with other state parks, for
people spending time and money, but we’ll recommend folks to other areas as
well,” he says. “We’re part of the tourism industry, and we’ll cooperate to get
people to other attractions.”
Ochs adds that while the lakes, greenbelts, and swimming holes in the city
and
county park systems pose a challenge to McKinney Falls, those parks don’t offer
the same educational and interpretive programs that we expect from the large
and well-funded TPWD; these programs in turn help protect and defend all the
county’s parks. “We can provide the education to visitors that the water is
everyone’s responsibility to keep clean – telling them how to understand and
follow good land practices, watch out for litter, and help maintain water
quality,” he says. “We get that message out to school kids, since they’re going
to be the caretakers of our future.”
That message will likely get out to more people than ever over the next few
years; TPWD’s headquarters complex, which actually lies within the park
boundaries, is slated for a long-term expansion into a tourist attraction in
its own right. The new features, including a lake and a permanent version of
the hugely popular Texas Wildlife Expo, would probably make McKinney one of the
busiest of Texas’ state parks. By that time, it’ll also be within walking
distance of Austin’s international airport, which might be a little
uncomfortable for the park’s animal tenants. “It’s hard to visualize what will
happen, since we didn’t always notice the base that much,” says Ochs. “I don’t
think the noise we’ve had so far has affected our bird populations as much as,
say, the loss of their habitat. But it’ll definitely mean more traffic, which
probably means more visitors, which wouldn’t be a bad thing at all.”
This article appears in May 19 • 1995 and May 19 • 1995 (Cover).