Big Clean-up & Disc Golf Course work underway

We took a short field trip with Gene and Mike of PARD today to visit the huge clean-up of the future disc golf course area at Guerrero-Colorado River Park.  This is in the area immediately east of the Country Club Creek Trail and Krieg Fields.

There is a lot of old construction debris – mostly concrete, but a lot of good rock and stones that will be used as part of the design.  There’s a lot of dead limb pruning on the many trees out there, most of which are hackberries.

The exception is a huge Pecan – at least 50 inches in diameter on the edge of the park land that will become a beautiful admired feature.

Boathouse foundation pour

The new boathousefoundation pour is underway!

Thank you, Austin City Limits Music Festival

We’d like to take a few minutes and just thank all of the attendees of the Austin City Limits Music Festival since 2006, when we entered into an agreement with C3 Presents, Inc. and the City of Austin Parks and Recreation Department.  Each year, we receive a percentage of ticket sales that can only be spent on City of Austin park improvements.  While we have invested (and continue to re-pay) the big improvements to the Zilker Great Lawn, we have been able fund hundreds of smaller projects in parks across Austin.

To put it simply, we could not have done what we’ve done since early 2007, when we received our first check from the festival.  And it’s not just the funds from the festival, for every dollar we can spend on a project, we get a matching dollar from another donor or in-kind donations from professionals in the landscape, design or building trade.  It’s pretty amazing.

As a result, we now have nearly 100 community volunteer groups who have adopted parks and work regularly to improve and care for their parks.  We’ve also have been working on a big effort along the Barton Creek Greenbelt this year, with a crew of five from another great non-profit, American Youthworks Environmental Corps, working out in the cold and heat (but mostly the heat this summer!)  Half of the funding for this project came from Impact Austin, a really cool giving circle, with the rest from ACL funding, funding from another non-profit, Hill Country Conservancy and contributions from Bicycle Sport Shop and REI.

And so, the staff and board of directors of the Austin Parks Foundation thank all of the attendees of the Austin City Limits Music Festival.  We’re happy you’re here and we hope that you stay hydrated, smoke-free (please don’t smoke in our parks and trails, we’re VERY nervous about our extreme fire danger situation) and that you thoroughly enjoy the festival over the next three days.

Meet Republic Square’s newest residents…

Meet the founding fathers of Mexico – Miguel Hidalgo and Jose Morelos, these busts have moved from Waterloo Park to just north of the deck at Republic Square in part due to the construction of the Waller Creek Tunnel, which rendered them homeless.

Republic Square is a great spot for them.  The square was the center of Hispanic Life from the late 1870s through the mid 1910s and was the site of the annual Diez Y Sies celebration, drawing 5,000 to 10,000 people in the early 1900s.  There is now a renewed Diez Y Sies celebration is at Republic Square, Thursday, Sept 15, 2011, from 11 am to 1 pm.

Below are another few pictures of Republic Square, we’re setting up for our 2nd annual Cocktails in the Park event tonight  - 7 to 10 pm, music by the Orbans – Tickets are $75 and some are still available.

Barton Creek Greenbelt Update – 9/12/11

As we’ve mentioned in previous posts on our year-long project on the Barton Creek Greenbelt Trail, the drought has enabled us to do a lot of stone and rock work.  It’s been very hot, but our Barton Creek Trail Corps have muscled through the hot weather and have completed some amazing projects.  One of the last rock work projects is an drainage crossing on the main trail just several hundred yards down from Spyglass Access.  The corps has hauled out very large stone pavers and armored a 30 feet wide by 40 foot long crossing and they are finishing it up tomorrow.  Here’s a picture of it in the shadows of the trees today.

We also did a few volunteer workdays in the past week, working on continuing cleaning up brush piles (breaking them down and compacting them as well as pulling out any re-sprouted invasives (mostly chinaberry)

One of the areas that we did a huge invasive removal effort at the Zilker Access Trailhead last September as part of the 2010 National Public Lands Day. (This year’s event is Sept 24 and we’re looking for volunteers.)  The area, between the trail and the creek bed, was completely shaded by Ligustrum and chinaberry trees and no grass or other plants were growing underneath. Here are two photos showing the same area as of Sunday.

Despite the drought, we did have a good amount of grasses coming up and with a little more rain, this area will be continuing to look better.  Still, it’s impressive to see all of this improvement in just a year and a very dry at that. Finally, look for these signs appearing at various portions of the Barton Creek Greenbelt where we’ll be doing more invasive species removal and restoration work in the near future.

Let’s Be Careful Out There…

Fires are still burning all around Austin and despite the cooler overnight lows in the 60s, we’re still very dry and the days are getting back into the upper 90s.  As the events and activities around Austin increase with another UT game this weekend and ACL Music Festival next weekend, we’ll have more visitors to our city and to our parks and trails.  We ask for everyone’s help in letting everyone know that a no smoking ban remains in effect for all parks, including Zilker.

While the Great Lawn and other portions of our parks are irrigated, the great majority is not, including the Trail around Lady Bird Lake, the rest of Zilker, and the Barton Creek Greenbelt.  It is very dry and very warm and we ask for your help.

Below is a graphic showing in purple the extent of the Bastrop Fire, including much of one of our favorite Texas State Parks – Bastrop State Park.  This fire has jumped the Colorado River twice.  Over 1400 homes so far have been lost.  And we’re not even counting the fires in Spicewood, at Steiner Ranch and elsewhere across central Texas.

Please, let’s be careful out there and don’t smoke in our parks and along our trails. Thank you!

Memories of Parks Past in San Jose, CA

For a few years in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I lived in the Bay Area of California and we bought our first house (1088 sq ft, built in 1923) in San Jose CA on Atlanta Ave.  Our main street was Bird Ave and it had a number of vacant city owned lots along Bird as well as big empty median in the middle.  At one point, we met good friends Ken and Debbie and helped build some of the first fences around parks, plant trees and paint out graffiti.  We recently returned to visit Ken and Debbie and check out the actual official parks (2) and the six 15 gallon trees I planted back in 1992 in that big empty median on Bird Avenue with help from the city arborist.