Knob Hills, Lake Grapevine

Lake Grapevine Herd

There is a lake called Grapevine in the northwest zone of the D/FW Metroplex. On the land surrounding this lake the Army Corps of Engineers has built some very nice parks with some very good mountain bike trails. The trail you will see here, the Knob Hills trail, is the least used of the Lake Grapevine trails. Due to high water this trail is cut off in places creating a natural fence which, as you will see, has brought about some unexpected visitors not normally seen on this trail. The photos here were taken on Mother's Day. During wildflower season.

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The bike trail sign is dwarfed by wildflowers.

This trail is about 8 miles long. It goes through a rugged wooded zone, then a long riverbottom zone, then a hilly zone and then another wooded zone. Due to the high water the only zone available this Mother's Day was the hilly zone and about a mile of the riverbottom.

You can really see in these photos why Texas is often called the Evergreen State....

We have been informed Texas is known as the Lone Star State, not the Evergreen State, we have been further informed that the Evergreen State is Washington.

This was a stormy day with a constant threat of lightning and possible cloudburst.

Even though the wildflowers you see here seem quite colorful, this is not yet the height of the season. Many blooms are yet to be exposed.

With the main entries cut off due to high water there are no other bikers on the trail this day. This allowed high speed pedaling without worry of meeting other high speed pedalers. But it turned out there were other life forms that presented a possible problem, as you will see in the next photos.

Coming around the bend at the top of yet one more hill, this creature came into view.

Even though he/she was the intruder it didn't seem he/she shared that point of view. This herd of Longhorns has now been captured in the February 2002 issue of Backpacker magazine.

Apparently this Longhorn herd decided they wanted to replicate the days of the open range and somehow escaped confinement to take up residence in this fence-free zone.

Getting close seemed to put them on guard.

But after awhile they seemed to accept the intruder as one of their own and started posing more cooperatively.

Finally the Leader of the Longhorns relaxed enough to let two baby Longhorns appear.

With the bike's handlebars looking somewhat like their long horns, perhaps they thought this was some sort of colorful relation and no threat.

That's it for your Mother's Day bike ride.

We'll have to go ride the other Lake Grapevine bike trails, Horseshoe and Northshore another day.

Let's go to the Stockyards and see some Cowboys and Longhorns...

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