After five years of work by the city and volunteer trail-builders, San Antonio’s newest park is open. It brings about three miles of brand-new trails to the North Side, with about two miles built by and for mountain bikers.
The 204-acre Classen-Steubing Ranch Park in the Stone Oak area is the most recent of San Antonio’s natural areas to open to the public. The park, which opened in May, lies over sensitive areas that recharge the Edwards Aquifer and includes an earthen flood control dam nearly 2,000 feet long.
Unlike many parks where hikers, runners and mountain bikers share the same trails, Classen-Steubing has separate areas for each activity. The city’s parks department built a separate trailhead and parking area near the park’s entrance for mountain bikers, with the hiking-only trails off the main parking lot near sports fields and a future playground.
The mountain bike trails, finished only last week, include about 2 miles of singletrack paths that extend across the northeastern edge of the property. My map here is mostly correct, but check Trailforks for a much more detailed map.
Navigating the interwoven paths is still a bit challenging because of some of the existing ranch roads and game trails. Follow the paths where volunteers have cut through the brush using weed-eaters.
The mountain bike trails roughly parallel an existing powerline road that skirts the northern edge of the property. After a short access trail from the parking lot, the new trails form a roughly quarter-mile loop named Caracara Circuit, along with a series of parallel downhill tracks that are a bit rockier and more technical, with one significant rock feature that makes the downhill segment a bit more interesting. At the bottom of the hill, there’s another roughly quarter-mile circle called Karst Loop that’s smooth enough in some places to gather a little speed.
These trails wouldn’t exist without South Texas Off-Road Mountain Bikers (STORM), an all-volunteer nonprofit that has a formal trail-building agreement with the city. The trails at Classen-Steubing are STORM’s most significant new trail project since finishing the Devil’s Den network on the Leon Creek Greenway in 2020. They’ve been working at Classen-Steubing for the past two years.
“We’ve cut the same trails in multiple times, just because of the time it’s taken — the pandemic, right-of-entry and things like that,” Jordan said. “We’ve been putting a lot of work in out there since April.”
As with Devil’s Den, the work at Classen-Steubing was the result of a small group of dedicated volunteers, Jordan said. He attributed most of the trail design and layout to local mountain biker John Rodriguez, with others pitching in to help with the physical labor.
“We usually have about four or five people,” Jordan said of the group’s volunteer workdays. “If we get eight to 10, that’s a good day.”
STORM is constantly in need of volunteers to maintain the trail network it’s been steadily expanding. Check the calendar on the group’s website for upcoming workdays and other ways to get involved.
Jordan said STORM plans to continue working on the trails, adding jumps, berms and other features to make them more progressively challenging depending on which line riders take. They’ll also add signs to make it easier to navigate the new trails.
After descending to the frequently dry bed of Mud Creek, the trails continue through a gap in the fence to the southern section of Stone Oak Park, where a paved path extends 2.2 miles northward crossing under Evans Road and Stone Oak Parkway.
At Classen-Steubing, no bikes are allowed on the two trails off the main paved path, closer to the San Antonio River Authority dam. Both hiking-only trails are well-marked and easy to navigate. They make for a pleasant walk, but it won’t take visitors long to fully explore them.
Ranch Loop is a 0.73-mile trail off the southeastern part of the main paved path. The trail is the most scenic in the park, passing first across a savannah with stands of huge oak trees interrupted by fields of grasses, forbs and prickly pear.
About a quarter mile in, the trail enters a more thickly forested area, where it forms a loop. The trees there provide some much-needed shade during these sweltering summer months. In this patch of woods, traffic noise seems distant and it feels like you’re much farther into the Texas Hill Country than you really are.
Prickly Pear Loop, accessible on the north side of the paved path, offers a similar experience, though much shorter at 0.32 miles. This rocky trail also forms a loop through a patch of more dense woods than the Ranch Loop, with a few open prairie patches and tons of prickly pear.
Much has changed at Classen-Steubing since my first visit to the future park in 2017, shortly after the city had bought the first 165 acres using $6.3 million in aquifer protection funds. It purchased the remaining 39 for $3.8 million after a voters approved it as part of the city’s 2017 bond package.
The land is originally part of the roughly 40,000 acres of northern Bexar County originally aquifer by German immigrant Johann Hubert Classen and his children, according to this history of the family. Bit by bit, the land was carved up, sold and developed over the years to become what are now San Antonio’s suburbs north of Loop 1604.
None of the new trails offer access to the dam, built in 1982 to protect downstream properties from flooding on Mud Creek. Water that backs up behind the dam is able to infiltrate into the ground via cracks and crevices in the rock and recharge the Edwards Aquifer.
I was among the reporters who got a rare chance visit that underground world in 2019, when the San Antonio Water System offered a tour of a 4,700-foot tunnel, 8 feet in diameter, to make room for a pipe that would integrate carrying water from the Vista Ridge pipeline into SAWS’ system. Visitors to Classen-Steubing can actually look across Hardy Oak Boulevard to see the two massive water tanks at SAWS’ Agua Vista Station. Those tanks mark the endpoint of Vista Ridge, a more than 140-mile pipeline that draws water from rural counties northeast of Austin.
Like many things in San Antonio, water is underlying reason behind Classen-Steubing’s existence as park space. From the flood control dam on the property to the aquifer protection funding used for the purchase, water is a constant current that flows beneath the story on the surface.
