Travel - Day Hikes in Central Texas - Mother Neff

Mother Neff State Park is a small-to-medium park located between Waco and Gatesville in central Texas.  Like much of the modern Texas State Park system, it owes its existence to Civilian Conservation Corps labor in the 1930s, and many of the CCC structures are still on site, including as a rental cabin which we did not use but could be useful as a getaway.

We went there as part of our continuing program to acclimate the kids to hiking.  The hiking trails at Mother Neff range from extremely easy mowed trails across level grassland to short periods of moderate-difficulty trails across rocky ground.  The overall difficulty, and trail length, for taking the largest and most-difficult currently open trail loop, is easy, about four miles, with plenty of opportunities to stop and look around, so it is an excellent entry-level hike for children, dogs, et cetera, and in March-April it is generally temperate and cool enough not to become a grueling exercise in self-flagellation.  There are two well-maintained flush restrooms within park boundaries, separated by about a mile and a half of trail and three-quarters of a mile of road, so even with small children or slow progress there is little risk of trailside emergency.

So, having established that it's an easy, family-friendly hike, why would you want to visit Mother Neff? Why here, and not walking in a circle in your front yard? There are, so far as I am concerned, three useful things to learn about at Mother Neff.  First, there is the ecology of the region, including the grassland-forest transition; second, there's the prehistory and history of the region, including both Tonkawa activity and the CCC construction of the mid-30s; third, there's the ease of the simple act of getting out and doing stuff.

Stock (pond) photo.  Sorry, I'm a sucker for bad puns.

Mother Neff boasts two basic habitats, one level grassland partly reforested and the other forest that remains largely untouched, along Wash Basin Creek.  The grassland area features a decent-size year-round stock pond, which TPWD has constructed a shelter for observing year-round to watch birds, butterflies, and other wildlife; the day we visited, the temperature had dropped like a rock and it rained intermittently all day, and we got there about noon during peak visitation hours, so we were way out of position to see anything.  However, the fact that the blind is perhaps ten minutes' walk from the nearest parking, over well-maintained, level trails, means that it's a great entry-level spot for birding or observation.  The other habitat, the mostly untouched forest on the south side of the park, features another blind, with similar caveats associated with it for our observation.  The canopy there is thirty to forty feet up, though, far enough that birds are less cagey about human exposure, so even during peak hours, there are plenty of birds to listen to, if few to see.  The forested section is also typically very densely forested, with ground-level growth that obscures the view past ten feet or so off the trail, and a strong old-growth oak presence that gives an idea what the region must have looked like before large-scale agriculture became the primary industry of the region.

CCC Dinner Bell at Mother Neff

Another reason that Mother Neff is worth visiting is that many - probably most, based on my experience at half a dozen of them - of the state parks preserve work performed by the Civilian Conservation Corps as part of an effort to combat the Great Depression.  The CCC was part of the New Deal response to the Depression, and involved organizing laborers along military lines, in military camps, to perform large-scale public works duties in locations not generally worth developing to private developers, with the express purpose of developing park facilities (thus the "conservation" part of the name).  It employed otherwise-unemployed men, provided them with job skills in construction and basic exposure to military discipline, and gave an entire generation of officers hamstrung by the size and scope of the peacetime army command and staff experience prior to World War 2.  It also represented a radically different approach to government intervention in the economy, where government itself became the employer, the contractor, and the construction agency.  Given modern views of the government as executor of large-scale projects, and given the number of men who had no prior construction experience and the austere conditions under which they frequently worked, it is astonishing how well-constructed so many CCC buildings are.  I've visited half a dozen parks with CCC-built facilities, and they are frequently better-constructed than military facilities built post-Vietnam.  Some of that is because they have been conserved, repaired, and maintained, but many of them have gone through long periods of funding neglect and were still serviceable after those.  Mother Neff features several excellent examples of the CCC style, including its only indoor lodging facility, a stone-and-mortar watchtower-cistern, and the dinner bell above, which was once joined by a flagpole and forty barracks buildings, of which the lodge is the last survivor.

Rock shelter off Wash Basin Creek, featuring the rarely seen Texas Sasquatch, walking a dog.

It would, of course, be unfair to claim that the first people to live in the area were the CCC or local farmers.  The region was inhabited before the first Europeans ever arrived, and there are artifacts and fossils throughout the region dating as far back as immediately post-Clovis, though Mother Neff's contribution to that is mostly fairly modern (if 300-plus-year-old artifacts can be called modern).  Most of those finds are concentrated in a rock shelter near the farthest accessible trailhead, about two miles by foot, less than one by road, from the visitors' center.  The rock shelter, and the sign at the shelter, provide excellent context to the finds stored at the visitor's center, demonstrating how the site, located above  the headwaters of Wash Basin Creek, provided a clean, dry, and safe environment for food preparation, sleeping, and community activities.

The decision to split the exhibit between the rock shelter and the visitor's center creates a small problem in that no artifact is displayed in context, but it is unavoidable in the decision between context and conservation, and it speaks to an ongoing conservation problem where visitors, not just at Mother Neff, but in general, decide that there is no harm in, for instance, picking up an arrowhead found here, or a Minie ball on a Civil War battlefield.  True, the odds are that such finds are unlikely to add to our knowledge of the site, especially for minor use-lose finds of that type, and there is a value in visitors establishing a link with their past that makes them feel personally involved in its preservation, but there's a difference between feeling personally involved, and being personally involved.  Each artifact removed is the removal of a piece of context, a cutting of a thread in the tapestry of the past.  Removing it after thoroughly documenting it means that some of that context is preserved, and the conservation of an artifact means that it will be preserved longer than the attention span of the person who picked it up.  Especially in a context for which no written support exists, such as prehistoric sites, this is vitally important to the preservation of the site, not merely for a single generation, but for posterity.

Now, having gotten out my soapbox, I'll put it away and return to Mother Neff.

View from the top of CCC tower, Mother Neff State Park

Mother Neff State Park is located close enough to enough towns, and in forgiving enough country, that it's a great starter park or entry level hike.  We did the four miles or so of trails, with two seven-year-olds and a dog, in about two and a half hours.  That was a very leisurely pace, with lots of stops and lots of photo opportunities.  We could have done it in half that time with only moderate exertion.  The trails are for the most part easy, and the more difficult portions of the trail are almost always immediately followed by payoffs in the form of exhibits, interpretive signs, or scenic vistas.  It isn't Yellowstone or even Davis Mountains, but it is accessible, it is forgiving, and it is an excellent representative of what the state park system does at the local level, and why parks are worth the effort even if they are not Big Parks.

Mother Neff State Park is open year-round, with gate hours from 8 AM to 8 PM Central.  Admission is $2 per adult, plus camping, RV, pavilion, or lodging fees.  It is less than an hour from downtown Waco or downtown Killeen.