The Trailist: John James Park is a quiet nature spot near Fort Sam Houston 

Last week, I paid a visit to an often-forgotten park along Salado Creek northeast of downtown.

The parking lot of John James Park is rarely crowded and even though I had been there before, I didn’t realize until recently that it had a small trail network.

The park is a 90-acre piece of public land with approximately 2 miles of paved and natural surface trails. It also currently represents the southeastern end-point of the Salado-Leon greenway network. From the Holbrook Road trailhead across Salado Creek from the park, the trail extends an uninterrupted 38 miles in a counterclockwise loop around the city’s northern half, ending at the Dora Jordan Trailhead on the Leon Creek Greenway. 

John James Park, located adjacent to Joint Base San Antonio-Fort Sam Houston, got its start in 1973 as a 43-acre gift from the federal government. In 1974, the city renamed the park after a 19th-century land surveyor and rancher who moved to San Antonio from Nova Scotia in 1837.

James had fought in the Battle of Salado Creek in 1842, when roughly 200 Texas Rangers and local militia defeated 1,600 Mexican Army soldiers and Cherokee warriors, effectively halting a Mexican re-invasion of Texas. A historical marker commemorating the battle sits along Holbrook Road only about 1,000 feet north of the park.

The proximity of the Battle of the Salado might explain why officials renamed this park along its banks after John James rather than keeping the park’s original name, Fort Sam Houston Park. The truth is that many places in Texas could bear James’ name, as he was one of the most prominent land surveyors in the state’s history, serving as chief surveyor of Bexar County, according to the Texas State Historical Association.

He was paid in land and used his work to accumulate quite a lot of it. His surveys defined the original boundaries of San Antonio’s land grant from the king of Spain, and he platted the towns of Bandera, Boerne, Castroville, D’Hanis and Quihi.

I had only visited the park that bears his name a handful of times, first to park and access the Salado Creek Greenway across the bridge. The park has a network of unofficial dirt trails extending from the parking lot downhill toward the creek and then along the west bank of the creek for most of the park’s length. Countless side traces branch off this main network, which I have not mapped here. None are more than a few hundred feet long, and they all tend to connect the creekside path to the Nature Trail, one of the park’s two official trails.

In this area, Salado Creek is often full of trash dumped locally and washed down from upstream. That’s why most of my recent visits to John James Park were to pick up trash with River Aid San Antonio, a local volunteer group focused on caring for our rivers and creeks. We used the unofficial trails as hauling pathways to bring one loaded contractor bag after another up the hill to the parking lot area. 

One day, we got particularly ambitious when we found a giant plastic pipe that easily weighed 700 pounds. A group of us used what I call the ant method to haul it out — everyone grabbing a corner of the heavy pipe and using our collective strength to move it. While I still saw trash in the creek at John James on my visit last week, it wasn’t as bad as we used to see before these regular River Aid cleanups there.

After spending so much time slipping around on the muddy trails alongside Salado Creek, I was curious to walk the park’s two official trails. My wife, Jess, and I started out walking the 0.9-mile Nature Trail, an asphalt trail that heads south from the parking lot, past the playground area, and into the woods. 

The woods were a pleasant mix of mostly large mesquite trees and cedar elms. I only saw a few of the invasive trees such as Ligustrum and chinaberry that can so easily take over our local parks and leave them overly shaded and ecologically stunted. The open canopy of mesquite feels more authentic, with the brown and golden pods crunching underfoot.

However, the trail would be pretty sunny during summer months without much shade relief.

We were the only people there during the late afternoon on a weekday. If it wasn’t for the sound of cars along Rittiman Road, we would have felt like we were deeper in the forest. At 5 p.m., the whooshing of the cars was joined by the sound of a recorded bugle playing Retreat at Fort Sam, signaling the end of the day’s duty. We saw no animals on our walk except for snails perched at the ends of grass blades after a drizzle earlier that day.

The Nature Trail doubles back on itself with a loop at the end, and we noticed a heavily used single track trail branching off. We followed it a bit farther through the woods until we came to the fence line, where we could look out on a wide, low drainage area. This obviously seemed like the property line. Another, smaller single track trail looped left and followed the inside of the fence line, but it also eventually appeared to head off the park property. 

We turned around and headed back north, taking a roughly quarter-mile single track shortcut that put us back at the parking lot. We then circled the half-mile Ball Field Trail, which forms a wobbly frame of crushed gravel around an open, mowed area where people play soccer. The trail also features several exercise stations.

Overall, the park makes a good neighborhood nature getaway, one I’d probably visit to trail run if I lived nearby. I don’t know if I’ll revisit the Nature Trail or the Ball Field Loop in the near future, but I do know I’ll be slipping along those muddy singletrack trails carrying bags of trash again soon enough.