I love hiking. Fresh air, trees, creeks, dirt… you name it. Hiking is my favorite form of exercise by far. Don’t get me wrong, gyms are great, but they’re not my style. The clanging of weights, Top 40 blaring over the tinny speaker system, that weird smell of sweat mixed with oxidized iron… meh. I prefer stompin’ around the great outdoors.
Like most metroplexes, there aren’t a ton of places to hike around Dallas-Fort Worth. Plenty of places to walk, sure, but not hike. Regardless, I’m making it a point to visit as many DFW hiking spots as I can this year. Up first is this truly remarkable place:
Trinity River Audubon Center
This preserve used to be a dump… literally. This 130-acre bird refuge used to be a straight-up dumping ground—an illegal one at that. There’s even a documentary about it.
This reformed piece of Dallas has a checkered past. The documentary above interviews many residents past and present of the neighborhood just down the road from the Trinity River Audubon Center and illustrates just how God-awful the dumping problem actually was. I’ll let the documentary speak for itself. It’s eye-opening, to say the least.
Overall, I had a great time. The trails were super short and easy but I got to see a side of Dallas I didn’t think existed. The Trinity River Audubon Center is a diamond in the rough and a testament to nature’s resilience. Even after being buried by thousands of tons of garbage including tires, medical waste, and actual jugs of acid, this wildland did not die. Here it stands today, 20 years later, as beautiful as it ever was.
To learn more about the Trinity River Audubon Center, visit http://trinityriver.audubon.org/
To learn more about me, click here
mjorigin.com 
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