The other big spring weekend trip that we took in Tourtoise was to Lost Maples State Natural Area. Yeah, yeah, it’s not specifically a state park, but close enough. And holy moly wow… this place is fabulous and worth talking about. This place is GORGEOUS.
The weekend started off with a fabulous drive through Fredericksburg, Kerrville, and Hunt, Texas. They really play up the hunt part, which I’m not huge on, but still… it is just breathtakingly beautiful to drive through there.
We stopped in Kerrville for a charge, and had an easy charge at the Kerrville visitor’s bureau. Walked to Lowe’s for something, wandered over to Sonic because why not, before heading back to the charging center.
We got to Lost Maples and almost immediately realized we wouldn’t have cell service and internet for the trip. That was a bit of a bummer because we’d hoped to test out some new equipment… but it makes sense for the landscape, which is essentially a canyon in between hills. The area is famous for the Uvalde bigtooth maples but has good birds, lotsa armadillos, the endangered golden-cheeked warbler and black-capped vireos (both endemic to the park), and also the super pretty Texas madrone tree.
The campground is so-so. It’s right at the front just after the entrance, and the sites are right next to each other, without much privacy from each other. But, it’s small and you have a great view of the hills on both sides. It’s worth it to stay in this spectacular area.
Camping Tip: The best areas are right at the end of the curve: # 15, 16, 17, 18. They offer more privacy and back up the best wooded area.
We had ravens every day in our campground, and great birding just from our campground (painted buntings, blue grosbeaks, chipping sparrows, summer tanagers, Inca doves, ash-throated flycatchers, eastern phoebes, and literally dozens of black-chinned hummingbirds thanks to some campground hummingbird feeders.
The park has about 12 miles of hiking, and two of the hikes are decently long and challenging—about 5 miles and some steeper areas. It was a great amount of hiking for a three-day weekend. And honestly, those hikes were so beautiful, I could have done them a couple of times each. We did have a few really great sightings of the golden-cheeked warblers, but sadly never saw the black-capped vireos. We did catch a few red-eyed vireos, woodhouse’s scrub jay, tropical parula, yellow-throated warbler, yellow-breasted chat, black-throated green warbler, ladder-backed woodpecker and a louisiana waterthrush. Ugh – so many great birds.
We did get caught in fairly constant rain in one of our hikes… and it turns out that after 3+ hours of constant light rain… it gets very uncomfortable. I was soaked from head to toe (waterproof rainboots aren’t very helpful if the rain just runs down your legs INTO your boots). We got so wet, our electronics actually still are showing some damage. That’ll teach us to be a little more attentive when it’s raining.
Running low on beer, we did take a quick trip right outside of the park to the Lost Maples general store. It was about 4 miles away and pretty limited in supplies, but good enough for us!
Camping Test: The other big note of the trip is that we spent one night sleeping in the Hare to test how that went. Unfortunately, I had a sore muscle from a few days before and it just got worse every day of the trip.. so that was a big bummer. But other than that, it was easy sleeping in the Rivian. We pulled the mattress cushions from the Tourtoise and they fit pretty well into the back of the Hare (with the two back rows of seats lowered). We technically set it to camping power on, but I had to turn the AC on a couple of times because it wasn’t staying on and Aneel’s phone didn’t charge. So something kinda went wrong there. But the TL/DR was it’s super easy and roomy enough to sleep in the Hare.
We will DEFINITELY be going back to Lost Maples, and hopefully multiple times. That place is just… a highlight of Texas landscape.
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