I Found Why The Gateway Park Trails Are Closed

On Sunday I biked from Gateway Park to the Trinity Trail to take some pictures.

When I got back to Gateway Park I thought to myself I had not been a scofflaw for at least a week and felt the need to do some scofflawing.

Ever since Hurricane Hermine morphed in to Tropical Storm Hermine and drenched North Texas, causing the worst flooding I've seen since I've been in Texas, the paved trails in the eastern part of Gateway Park have been blocked with "Trail Closed" signs.

I wondered what the flood damage had been, so yesterday I decided to end my curiosity. Well, you can see in the picture what the problem is. The Trinity River removed a big chunk of real estate, right up the edge of the trail.

You can not really tell it from the picture, but it's a very steep drop off. Logs have been placed at either end of the drop off to stop anyone blissfully biking along from going over the edge.

I believe this is the location where the paved trail had already been relocated away from the river, where you could see the old trail ready to fall into the river. I think the flood cleaned that mess up. But that could have been at a different location. I did not pedal any further, but I did cover most of the blocked off trail.

This problem seems easy to fix. Just move the trail away from the riverbank 50 feet and put up a fence along the drop off. We'll see how long it takes to make this fix.

Another interesting thing I saw whilst pedaling on the forbidden trail was a lot of water remaining in ponds where water previously did not sit. Just like the new ponds in River Legacy Park, the Gateway Park ponds are a very swampy shade of green.