DFW Urban Wildlife

DATELINE: Autumn 2024 – Spring 2025

Learning about and exploring the unique aspects of Texana is one of my favorite things to do. Sharing my favorite discoveries has become a staple of this website. Our state is full to the brim with little gems of natural beauty and historical significance. I’m easy to please–even the most marginally intriguing places will be of interest to me. I enjoy them all, and will seek them out wherever they may be found in Texas–but I am always most pleased to find new points of interest right here in our part of the state. Those that are located in North Central Texas are the ones I am most eager to describe on these pages.

The best time for exploring new places in Texas is usually during the halcyon days of spring or autumn. Cool, comfortable temperatures combine with plenty of sunshine, blue skies, an economy of vegetation, and dormant insect life to create optimal conditions for outdoor adventures. It’s all upside, and no downside–making the choice to spend time in the field a no brainer!

This past season we made our way out to several different spots in North Texas–two of which were particularly noteworthy and deserving of being related here. We visited one in the fall and stopped by the other in late spring–just before the really hot weather began to set in. Read along as I describe for you these two Texas trips!

Trip One: The Piney Woods of the LBJ National Grasslands

We have been visiting the LBJ National Grasslands in Wise County on the regular for decades now. On many of these occasions I have made note of the unique stands of Loblolly Pine trees that can be found in certain areas around the park, but until this past autumn I had never made the time to explore one.

We got an early start on this cool late autumn morning. The drive to the trail head is a long one, at nearly an hour and a half. We brought the dogs along with us for this outing, so they would need a break or two along the way as well. We arrived just a little before 10:00 am, quickly unloaded, and headed off down the trail. The Yellow Trail (called the Audubon Trail in this part of the park) was our chosen path, and we began our trek surrounded by towering pines.

Loblolly Pine trees are not uncommon in Texas. In the eastern part of the state–in the area known as the Big Thicket–there are pine trees aplenty, but here in North Central Texas, a stand of pine trees like the one we were hiking through is quite unique. My understanding is that most of these pine trees were planted here by the Forest Service some time after the park was established, but even if true, it does not detract from the cathedral like qualities of the forest.

As we made our way down the trail, we passed through a nice pine thicket, complete with a system of small shaded ponds. Soon enough, the terrain began to morph into something a little more familiar. We had a near six mile hike ahead of us, the biggest portion of which would be through more typical North Texas landscapes than the piney woods we found at the trailhead.

The Audubon Trail eventually led us out of the pine forest and into a beautiful, but more typical, North Texas upland woods. The loamy path meandered south through a broad prairie before slowly dropping into the riparian forest following the route of Cottonwood Creek. It was along this stretch where we first heard, and then saw, a quartet of Whooping Cranes flying over at altitude on their way to the Texas Coast.

We crossed over the sandy-bottomed, clear-water stream on a narrow construct named One-Horse Bridge. From there, the trail rose quickly out of the bottomlands to an intersection where we picked up a shortcut trail leading to the east. This shortcut would allow us to bypass a portion of the nearly ten-mile-long Yellow Trail, in order to keep the total distance traveled down to a more manageable six miles.

The shortcut trail created a pathway across an area known as Gopher Valley, skirting the the woods following Royal Gorge along the way. We hopped across the rivulet of Coon Creek and made our way around a long bend in the trail, passing by a landmark known as the Old Well as we went. Wolf Creek–another small stream–was our next minor obstacle before we picked up the Yellow Trail once again. The trail here is named the Hallelujah Trail, and the Blue Trail and the Orange Trail also share its route through this part of the park. The map we referenced included the silhouette of a Mountain Lion at this juncture, so we stayed on the lookout for long-tailed shadows as we passed through. We did not see any.

The Royal Gorge footbridge to the north was the next waypoint on our route, and just as short distance after that we encountered a fork in the trail. The Turkey Trot Trail lead away to our left, continuing the Blue and Orange trails. The Yellow Trail–here named Six Flag Trail–ran to our right. Both routes led northward, following paths through similar upland terrain. We selected the Six Flag Trail for its slightly longer and more meandering course.

We hiked the long wooded trail past Crocodile Pond, before emerging into another grassy prairie. Here the trail turned west and paralleled County Road 2560 for a good distance. We continued on past the Outback Gate and followed the trail back into the Piney Woods where we began our trek. Two and a half hours after we started, we were back at the trailhead–and just in time for lunch!

No visit to the LBJ National Grasslands is ever complete without also making time to stop by the remote township of Greenwood, Texas to grab an iced tea and a meal. Greenwood is roughly a 20 minute drive from the trailhead, and we motored the intervening county roads with the urgency of a hearty appetite born of a long morning on the trail. Greenwood Grocery Cafe was our destination, and cheeseburgers and fries were on the menu–the perfect way to cap off a great hike across a beautiful and unique North Texas landscape!

Trip Two: The Old Zoo Nature Trail… and More!

I first learned about the Old Zoo Nature Trail in Eastland County via reels on my Facebook feed. There are a handful of influencers that ply their trade by visiting and documenting different points of interest around the great state of Texas. When one of their reels about the old Cisco Zoo popped up on my Facebook feed, I knew right away that it would be a place I’d like to visit!

The video I watched showed an old abandoned zoo nestled in a rocky hillside just below the dam at Lake Cisco. Pathways and dilapidated ruins of long abandoned animals enclosures still remained. It seems, that in 2021, what remained of the old zoological park was tidied up and developed into a short circuit of hiking trails. According to the video, the park was now open for public use.

Eastland County is a little further west than we usually cover on this website, but this zoo trail looked too good to pass up. And, as I began planning for a visit to Lake Cisco, I soon learned about several other notable points of interest in the general vicinity–our docket would be full! That cemented it. I would definitely be making the trip!

It was a warm, sunny spring morning when we left for the two hour drive out Interstate I-20 to Eastland County, Texas. The pups would be accompanying us again on this trip, so accommodating them would make up a significant part of the drive-time effort.

Cisco, Texas

The small town of Cisco was our immediate destination. We arrived just an hour or so before noon, and had a quick look around. We found a vibrant downtown area. In the early part of the 20th century, oil was discovered in this part of Texas, and the resulting economic boom led to the rapid growth of many of the region’s communities. The town of Cisco–along with Ranger, Eastland, and others–became boomtowns.

Today, Cisco is a quaint and typical Texas small town, with an interesting twist. Modern Cisco has a population of right around 4000 souls, but in its heyday that number grew to a high of nearly 15,000 people. So bustling was the area that adequate lodging was often difficult to secure. A man named Conrad Hilton came to Cisco and recognized this situation as a great opportunity. In 1919, Conrad purchased the old Mobley Hotel in downtown Cisco, and in doing so, took what would become the first step toward building the world famous Hilton Hotel empire.

Old Cisco Zoo

Lake Cisco was impounded in 1923 to provide water for the region’s growing population, and the zoo opened that same year. Both are located just a few mile north of Cisco on Highway 6, so that is where we headed next. Leaving town, we drove north out past the campus of Cisco College, and arrived at the Old Zoo Trail just a short time later.

Altogether, this trail system offers only around one mile of hiking. We expected that our visit would be abbreviated, in spite of there being plenty to see and explore. That was ok with us, as we still had a number of additional stops on our agenda.

From what I understand, the zoo was opened in 1923, and housed a collection of animals that included an ostrich, a giraffe, a hippopotamus, a cougar, an African Lion, flamingos, a black bear, a monkey, and more. The zoo reportedly closed in the 1930’s after the deaths of some of its animals under mysterious and suspicious circumstances.

Even though the trail is short, it is still challenging. The path begins by leading you uphill at a respectable incline. In other places the trail passes over rocky outcroppings–care is warranted along these stretches. The most interesting parts of the hike take you through what’s left of the old animal enclosures. Some still have the medallions that indicate the type of critter they once housed.

World’s Largest Swimming pool

Back at the trailhead we saw that we were within walking-distance from the next destination on our itinerary. Located just below the Lake Cisco dam, and constructed to make use of the lake’s outflow, is what was once billed as the World’s Largest Swimming Pool. These days the pool is just a shadow of its former self. Disused for decades, overgrown and silted up, the swimming pool only hints at what it may have been like during its heydays, when it was a popular regional attraction. In addition to swimming, the park once offered cabins for overnight stays, a sizeable roller-skating rink, a miniature golf course, and a carnival–not to mention its close proximity to the old Cisco Zoo.

From what I’ve been able to ascertain from comment and such on the internet, the swimming pool and park stayed in operation–to one degree or the other–well into the 1970s. A fire that consumed the old skating rink in 1977 seems to have been the final nail in the coffin.

Robert E. Howard Museum in Cross Plains, Texas

Next on the agenda was the small town of Cross Plains, Texas, about 23 miles to the southwest of Cisco. This destination was of interest because Cross Plains is the hometown of Robert E. Howard–a famous pulp writer who worked in the 1920s and 1930s. Howard produced stories in many different genres over the course of his career, but he is probably best known for his contributions to Sword and Sorcery, with Conan the Cimmerian being his most well known character creation.

Howard’s Conan stories, set in the fictional Hyborian Age, were usually published as serials in the Chicago-based magazine, Weird Tales. Periodicals of this type were popular at the time, and Weird Tales has remained in publication–off and on–into the present. Howard’s serials were collected into a series of mass-market paper backs in the 1960s and 1970s. I discovered Howard’s Conan stories as a young boy, and they really captured my imagination. Even now, I’ll go back and re-read some of them whenever the mood strikes me.

The home where Robert E. Howard lived and worked is located on the western edge of town, and has been converted into a museum dedicated to his legacy. I’ve often wondered about how Howard was able to produce stories about such a rich fantasy world while living his entire life in small town Texas, and I was hoping to gain some insight with this visit.

It has been suggested that Howard derived inspiration for many of the colorful characters he wrote about from the personalities of the hard-working roughnecks drawn to the area during the Texas oil boom. I can only imagine that the challenges of research a production must have been substantial in the early twentieth century, with only a manual typewriter, the local public library, and the US Postal Service as your go-to tools.

With the goal of gaining a better appreciation of Howard’s creative process, I have wanted to visit Cross Plains and the Robert E. Howard Museum since shortly after it opened in 1989–this sojourn has been a long time in the making! Tours of the museum are by appointment only, so we were not able to go inside, but I was more than satisfied just having a look at the house and surrounding area this time around. It leaves me with a built in excuse to return again at a later date!

We had hit a drive-thru for lunch on our way into town, and enjoyed the meal under a pavilion on the museum’s grounds. We slipped the dogs a tater tot or two before loading up and starting on the long drive back to Dallas\Fort Worth with another fine Texana adventure in the books!

There’s a little known movie–The Whole Wide World–about Robert E. Howard’s life as a writer in Cross Plains, Texas. Vincent D’Onofrio and Renée Zellweger star as Howard and Novalyne Price. Zellweger’s character, Novalyne, was a school teacher and aspiring writer who had an arduous relationship with Howard for a few years before his death in 1936.

I can’t help but to wonder about the hows and whys of this movie. The people who made this film did an inspired job, but what was their motivation?

It doesn’t seem likely that people who do not know at least a little bit about Robert E. Howard would get much from this movie. The story probably does not stand on its own well, and while Howard has a degree of fame among certain circles, he is not broadly known. I don’t remember hearing about The Whole Wide World when it came out in 1996, and from what I understand the movie cost around 13 millions dollars to make, but only brought in around $350,000 at the box office. It was not a hit. It was an outlier, and hardly–if at all–registered in the pop culture of the time.

Nonetheless, both Zellweger and D’Onofrio are quite good in this movie. D’Onofrio, in particular, develops his character in a manner that is easy to imagine as very like the way Robert E. Howard might have really been. The film is well made, and is a great period piece. For those who are interested, the movie is available on disc and streaming from Amazon.com. It’s worth a watch, if you are so inclined!