Meadows Center relaunches popular wetlands boardwalk guided tours

The Meadows Center reopens the guided Wetlands Boardwalk tours.
The Meadows Center reopens the guided Wetlands Boardwalk tours.

Posted by Jayme Blaschke
Office of Media Relations
March 3, 2017

The Meadows Center for Water and the Environment at Texas State University will officially relaunch the wetlands guided tour on Saturday, March 11.

“Our Guided Wetlands Tour is an amazing opportunity that was once only offered to private groups,” Spring Lake Assistant Manager Miranda Wait said. “Normally a self-guided hike, it allows for visitors to have an environmental interpreter at hand to ask questions about the flora and fauna of Spring Lake and learn more about our wetlands and why they are important.”

The wetlands guided tour will take visitors through a one-tenth-mile floating boardwalk that explains the environmental importance of wetlands in providing water purification, flood protection, shoreline stabilization, groundwater recharge as well as providing habitat for diverse animals and plants.

“The Wetlands Boardwalk affords us a close-up view of an exceptionally diverse variety of plant and animal life, and what’s amazing is that it’s a natural system right in the middle of San Marcos,” Glass-bottom Boats Assistant Manager Sam Massey said.

During this tour, visitors can expect to see migrating song birds along with blue-, green-, tricolored- and yellow-crowned night herons, snowy egrets, kingfishers, flycatchers, nesting red-tailed hawks and four different species of turtles basking in the sun.

Tours will be available during Spring Break, March 11-19, from 10:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. and will be offered on the weekends from March 20 to Memorial Day Weekend. Beginning May 30, boardwalk tours will be offered daily during the summer.

Tickets are being sold for $3.50 for adults, $3 for seniors (62 and up) and $2 for children. Children 2 and under are free. Learn more about the Wetlands Boardwalk at www.ExploreSpringLake.org. For more information about the guided wetlands tours, call (512) 245-7590.

About The Meadows Center for Water and the Environment

The Meadows Center for Water and the Environment was named following a generous gift from The Meadows Foundation in August 2012. The Meadows Center for Water and the Environment is dedicated to environmental research, stewardship, education and service. It is led by Executive Director Andrew Sansom.