Bend in the river

A ways west of Lampasas, upstream from Lake Buchanan, the first of its many reservoirs, the Colorado River (in Texas) makes a sweeping "S." On the west side (which is river right as you're making your way downstream) is the relatively young Colorado Bend State Park (opened in 1987).

As you might remember, we camped at the park for the third night of our recent Colorado River excursion.

It's a very interesting place. The car-campsites are located in a small section at the bottom of the "S," but they are really gorgeous and have basic amenities. (There are also a couple of back-packing sites.) 

Most of the roadways in the park are not paved (which, when traveled while damp, causes your car and trailer to be coated with a fine caliche mud—a cheap paint job if you were looking to lighten up the hue!) but are well-maintained. And the small area of the park is chock full of trails, as you can see from this detailed map.

We didn't take advantage of the trails, although a slight echo of our navigational challenges from the day before made us think we were. Before we actually crossed the park boundary (they don't have signs on the river like they do on the highway!) we followed a little creek upstream. 

It was quite scenic, but we decided after hiking around it a bit that it was on private property. Sorry! At least, we left no trace and don't think we scared any wildlife.

Back in the boats for a little more paddling, we shortly knew we were in the park when we came to Gorman Falls. How lucky we were to be seeing it just after some substantial rains!

This is how it looks from the river. No, that little fall in the foreground of the picture isn't the attraction. Look back a bit, through the screen of the trees...

Apparently in some moisture conditions, it's not much more than a trickle. But as you can see in this short video, that was not the case for our visit:

Wow! What an amazing place! Not surprisingly, I took a lot of photos there. Here are a few more:

After the falls, we still had a couple of miles to go to the campsites. An interesting aspect of Colorado Bend is that it just occupies one side of the river. On the other side are vacation homes! Some of these were pretty nice, others rather humdrum...an interesting mix of housing values. So there's swanky civilization on your left, and primitive "wilderness," at least apparent wilderness, on your right. Kind of strange.

Fortunately for the camping experience, when you get down to the campsites there's only some nice bluffs across the river from you. And as I showed you in my previous post, the campsites are quite lovely. Here's the view looking up into those fabulous trees where we had our Jambalaya...

I'm glad we discovered Colorado Bend State Park! 

Next up, a banner Texas wildflower season.