The Trailist: Walker Ranch park has mix of trails near a confluence of Northside creeks

For years, I only saw Walker Ranch Historic Landmark Park, off West Avenue on the North Side, as a stopping point along the Salado Creek Greenway.

Only recently did I learn this park has its own small trail network crossing through attractive woods, meadows and creek beds. The park features a little under 2½ miles of trails, a mix of concrete, asphalt, crushed granite and natural surface singletrack. Salado Creek Greenway cuts a half-mile stretch of concrete path through the park, joining McAllister Park to the east and heading west toward the Voelcker Homestead trailhead next to Phil Hardberger Park. Aside from the trails, the park offers a playground near the entrance and a large pavilion available for reservations. 

Walker Ranch is one of the older large parks in this area, first opening in May 1999. The cobbling together of public lands began in 1997, when Bexar County donated 30 acres to the city adjacent to 10 acres of city-owned land, with the San Antonio River Authority kicking in another 4 acres. Oil company Ultramar Diamond Shamrock, later bought by Valero, donated money to buy a little more than 33 acres to connect the park to what would become the Salado Creek Greenway. The park is just downstream from Walker Dam, a 47-foot-tall earthen structure built in 1985 to hold back the floodwaters of Panther Springs Creek and forming a large pond at Silverhorn Golf Club north of Wurzbach Parkway. 

Downstream of the dam, Panther Springs Creek flows through the northern half of Walker Ranch, though the creek was dry when I visited last week, even after several late October rains. The southern bank of the creek includes some interesting crumbly limestone, shaded by tall trees lining the banks of the creek.

For thousands of years before European settlement, this land near the confluence of Salado and Panther Springs creeks was a stopping point for Indigenous people. According to the city’s website and interpretive signs at the park, 1970s-era archaeological digs found evidence of stations where people knapped flint to create arrowheads, repaired tools, butchered animals from hunts and processed plants. After Spanish colonization, the area was part of the vast 1.2 million-acre Monte Galvan ranch that stretched from Cibolo Creek south to Salado and Martinez creeks. The ranch provided livestock used by the Mission San Antonio de Valero, then later shared with Mission Concepcion and Mission San Juan. 

Following Texas independence, the land was carved up into smaller ranches, with the land that would become the park eventually passing to one Charles Ganahl Walker, who moved there in 1899. The land would stay in the family for two more generations, with Walker’s grandchildren selling the final parcel in 1994.

On my map, I’ve included the Salado Trail as part of the Meadow Loop, though in reality it’s mostly made up of a bridge that crosses over Salado Creek and connects to the parking lot of the Walker Ranch Senior Center off West Rhapsody Drive. The bridge takes visitors through the lower tree canopy as it crosses a creek that becomes swollen during floods but was also dry during my visit. I appreciated seeing a new rain garden installed along this parking lot, using native plants to passively treat stormwater flowing off the lot before it makes its way to the creek.

On the southwest edge of Meadow Loop is a small trail of crushed granite that leads to an amphitheater. I’ve taken many wrong turns here riding southward on the Salado Creek Greenway, making a right instead of a left to stay on the greenway trail. 

To me, the most interesting trails at Walker Ranch are the singletrack trails to the north of Panther Springs Creek, the Monte Galvan Trail, Panther Springs Trail and Mesquite Trail. Visitors can access them on the western side of the park, where a natural surface footpath crosses a low bridge with culverts that allow Panther Creek to flow through it. Take a right to follow the Mesquite Trail or a left to follow the two parallel tracks of Panther Springs Trail. Both cut through forest with branches low enough that I often had to stoop to avoid clotheslining myself. Of the two, I like the Panther Springs Trail more because it has more shade and a beautiful understory in some sections made up mostly of Turk’s cap, an edible plant beloved by hummingbirds.

The Monte Galvan Trail lies on the park’s northwestern side, branching off Salado Creek Greenway at a point that’s obscured by brush and fairly easy to miss for visitors who don’t know to look for it. I followed it across the dry creek and up a hill, where it makes a loop through some peaceful, shady woods that would be quiet if not for the passing cars along nearby Wurzbach Parkway. An unofficial trail continues along Wurzbach past the park’s northwestern boundary, where I stopped mapping it and turned right to complete the Monte Galvan loop. 

From there, I took Mesquite Trail back to the western side of the park, nearly running into a whitetail buck along the way. As with most Northside parks, the deer at Walker Ranch are abundant and practically fearless. I saw several bucks chasing does around the park, so I assume the deer are in their rutting season, which seems to track with this Texas Parks and Wildlife article on the subject.

For a park of its size, Walker Ranch offers a scenic location with decent variety in its landscapes and enough trail to make for a long walk or trail run, though not enough for mountain biking. The only negative I noticed was the litter along the Monte Galvan and Mesquite trails, though not nearly as bad as the trash piles at some of our local parks. Fortunately, a dedicated group of volunteers has been cleaning up trash there for years during San Antonio’s annual Basura Bash event each February, so I suspect the litter I saw on my visit won’t be there for too long.