Could a Massachusetts girl love Austin?

[Dwayne Lassiter]

Originally Posted by Don in Austin

Really? There are dozens of hiking trails in the area. Barton Creek greenbelt for an obvious one. Austin 55+ Hiking Meetup (Austin, TX) - Meetup

Oh yeah, the greenbelt trail that goes under the freeway. I'm talking about out-of-town trails where the sound you hear isn't traffic. If you want to bop around in an urban park, yes, there are plenty of options. If you want to go for a real hike, you're outta luck. If you go out of town, you can find slightly larger parks, but you'll be hard pressed to put on more than a mile or two without walking in circles.

[Austin97]

Originally Posted by Dwayne Lassiter

Oh yeah, the greenbelt trail that goes under the freeway. I'm talking about out-of-town trails where the sound you hear isn't traffic. If you want to bop around in an urban park, yes, there are plenty of options. If you want to go for a real hike, you're outta luck. If you go out of town, you can find slightly larger parks, but you'll be hard pressed to put on more than a mile or two without walking in circles.

this is simply wrong.

forest ridge 7 miles
pace bend 8 miles
reimers ranch 7 miles

even walnut creek is 10 miles with no repeats but you have to know what you are doing
balcones canyonlands wildlife refuge is a series of .5-2 mile trails for about 7 miles

[Dwayne Lassiter]

Pace Bend Park is two miles, end to end.
Forest Ridge is vastly smaller.
Reimers is tiny, even with the attached preserve areas.
Walnut Creek Park is about 2/3 of a miles across. 10 miles if you know what you're doing? Ha. Yeah, you walk and touch every single tree. If you measure a hike by the number of steps on your Fitbit, that might do it for you. That's not a hike. That's trying to avoid making overlapping footprints.

Don't get me wrong. These are really nice places. But these are places that you go for a picnic and a stroll, not a hike. I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, and a hiking area there is tens of thousands of acres, where you can walk ten miles in a straight line without seeing a car, a speedboat, or even a fence. There are parks inside city limits there that are on this scale.

[Return2Paradise]

Originally Posted by Dwayne Lassiter

Don't get me wrong. These are really nice places. But these are places that you go for a picnic and a stroll, not a hike. I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, and a hiking area there is tens of thousands of acres, where you can walk ten miles in a straight line without seeing a car, a speedboat, or even a fence. There are parks inside city limits there that are on this scale.

^ I couldn't agree more. While Austin has a few nice little jaunts for an urban area, to say that it has real hiking and biking trails is laughable.